BASEBALL 2005: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

The kid who would be captain loved the game.

He’s a man now; worldly good looks, superbly talented, strappingly self-assured, oxen-tough. But now is now and that was then. Then was his shy turn—nine years old, innocent, substantial (“well-fed,” he jokes), vaguely self-aware—the coincidental genesis of a baseball career. That, a foggy Los Angeles daydream, was when Schuyler Mann simply loved the game.

“You could steal bases, you could take leads,” says Mann, clearing the cobwebs from his memory bank, dimming his eyes fondly. “Pickoffs. They had bigger fences too. Like, not the short ones. And we could use those big-barreled bats.”

“And not,” he adds with sentimental emphasis, “those skinny ones.”

The kid who would be captain loved the game. He loved it a decade and three hometowns later, from sunny SoCal to Trumbull, Conn. to Corvallis, Mont. to Cambridge.

But now is now and that was then. And on one fateful day all those years ago, the game loved him right back.

“Third base was my chosen position,” he says of his first year playing baseball as a nine-year-old in Los Angeles. “Coach’s son was the catcher. I remember he got pissed at his son for being late. He told me to catch.”

Mann grins.

“He just threw me back there for the rest of the season,” he says.

* * *

Twelve years have passed. And Schuyler Mann, the 2005 captain of Harvard baseball, enters his senior season as one of the most accomplished catchers in Ivy League history.

Don’t believe it? Try this on for size: after a decorated career at Trumbull High School (Conn.), Mann hit the ground running his freshman year. Between spot catcher’s duties and designated hitting, he started nearly every game and finished second on the team in RBI, with 25.

In 2003, Mann earned a second-team All-Ivy designation—rare for a sophomore. With a .306 average, four home runs, and 29 RBI, he deserved it.

Last season, Mann caught all 40 games and accomplished one of the greatest single offensive seasons in Harvard history.

With 11 home runs—the school’s second-best ever, after trading bombs with school record-holder Zak Farkes in 2004—Mann slugged .559 on the way to a unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection at catcher, and played his best baseball in the season’s crucial final weeks.

“One of the things with him is that as the season gets going, he just gets hotter and hotter,” Harvard coach Joe Walsh says. “By the end of the season he’s one of the toughest outs.”

The bar, to put it plainly, has been set high.

“Well I’ve thought about that,” Mann says, “and [last year] just kind of came out of nowhere, really. It wasn’t something I was planning on. That wasn’t on my mind even most of last season. So it’s just something I’m not going to think about again this season.”

Pardon teammates and observers, but Mann’s 2004 production looked like the latest chapter in a sustained pattern of success.

“Sky didn’t get as much ink as I did for breaking that record,” Farkes says. “But we definitely push each other whether we admit it or not. I know we’re always watching each other’s [batting practice], and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got to pick it up a little bit. Sky’s hitting balls into the trees again.’”

“It’s really fun to watch him take BP,” Farkes says, adding one word for Mann’s power: “incredible.”

* * *

In reality, that’s akin to earning praise from future NFL passer Ryan Fitzpatrick for arm strength. But that’s what captain Sky does: reap the respect of his peers. During the offseason, Mann became the cinch choice for captain of Harvard baseball. Teammates raved about the senior’s preternatural diplomatic chops.

“He can feel that pulse of the team,” Farkes says, “just the whole attitude and what kids are feeling.”

To hear Mann tell it, earning the captainship was sort of like stepping in at catcher when Junior showed up late—in other words, a timely stroke of luck.

“Well I’m a senior, number one,” he says, bashful. “There’s only a few of us. I don’t really know. It just kind of worked out, I guess.”

Really, becoming captain, like developing into a young catcher, was less about felicity and more about Mann.

With devastating natural talent and a knack for leadership—“It helps when you have a guy that vocal in the locker room,” junior Josh Klimkiewicz says, “[who] also puts up those kinds of numbers”—Mann has already made a difference.

“The type of person he is,” Farkes says, “it’s just what you’d expect from him.”

* * *

On one spring weekend morning, long before freezing weather opens its clutches on Cambridge, the baseball team practices with wooden bats inside Lavietes Pavilion.

Before the crack-thwap of ash and leather ignites the day, captain Mann leads stretches and ticks off team objectives.

“I just feel like setting goals like that, they’re more wishes than anything,” Mann says. “Trying to take on more of the mental approach to the game.”

That’s not his only responsibility.

“Yeah I get to pick [where we eat],” he laughs. “Sometimes the rooming stuff—who gets to room together. Then I decide whether we’re going to get pizza delivered to the room. Coach usually gives me a couple of options and I just go ahead and give him the nod for the best one.”

Reports an amazed Klimkiewicz: “he always seems to know what’s happening beforehand.”

Appropriately, people skills aren’t just a bonus at the catcher position; they’re practically a prerequisite.

Mann has them in spades. Where catchers must act the caddie to a cohort of nerve-wrecked pitchers, Mann thrives. Four years of experience don’t hurt the cause.

“We [catchers] get to call our games here,” he says. “Coach has faith in us to do a good job.”

* * *

Perhaps it’s appropriate that Schuyler Mann carry the torch for Harvard catchers—launched by James Tyng, the Crimson backstop who wore the world’s first catcher’s mask in 1877.

Perhaps Mann has become the best-hitting Crimson catcher in the 128 years since.

But his real value shows where the captainship calls. Wes Cosgriff, a sophomore lefthander, has battled testicular cancer since a diagnosis this fall. It was the captain’s job to rally the team around the fallen teammate.

“I think he handled it very well,” Farkes says of Mann, “keeping the team informed and setting things up to make sure we keep Wes involved.”

It’s been awhile since captain Schuyler Mann’s days of little league bliss. Once a kid, now a man, he’s glued Harvard baseball together for a 2005 title run.

To hear him tell it, all it took was a little luck. The reality? He’ll exercise that combination of talent and diamond savvy long after the twilight of his Cambridge days.

Circumstances be damned.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.