BASEBALL 2005: The Book of Klimkiewicz

He was a shortstop, sure.

A three-sport standout at Buckingham, Brown & Nichols—a high school one errant cut-off throw away from Harvard Stadium—and won league MVP as a junior, hitting .478 to beat out teammate Zak Farkes.

But for the baseball player, the real story wouldn’t begin on the diamond.

It would start, in fact, right after his best season ended; right after scouts and schools tried pulling him in half.

It began with a football game, of all things. With a sport he wouldn’t play in college, and an innocent-looking kick-off he was fatefully asked to defend.

Why?

Blame chance. Blame luck and the odds, if you have to.

Up until this point, the baseball player had done everything but line up on special teams, playing middle linebacker, tight end, running back, and fullback, depending on the set.

But more than anything, this story starts there because today, nearly four years later, Josh Klimkiewicz can smile when he tells you what happened next.

THE PRESSURE OF PAIN

Talking to junior Josh Klimkiewicz about his baseball career is something like reading a textbook on the human anatomy.

Or, alternatively, Harvard baseball’s version of the Book of Job—albeit with a title somewhat harder to pronounce.

On Oct. 27, 2001, just two months into his senior year of high school, Klimkiewicz stepped into a hole—“a freak divot”—on the first kickoff he’d ever been asked to defend in his life.

In one motion, his cleats caught, and the momentum of attempting a simple cut shoved him sideways. Suddenly, he found the outside of his ankle touching his hip.

“My knee collapsed,” Klimkiewicz recalls, casually. “It hit the ground in the middle, between my hip and ankle, completely tearing my ACL, stretching out my LCL and MCL, partially tearing my MCL and LCL, tearing my cartilage.”

With Klimkiewicz, the speed with which he rattles off his injuries reflects the time he’s spent mulling over them.

For any high schooler, after all—especially one whose team won an Independent School League Championship the year before—the whole experience would be horrific.

But then consider the fact that Klimkiewicz was arguably the best player in the league at the time, and had already attracted pro scouts after hitting nearly .480 with 15 steals, eight homers, and just a shade under 50 RBI.

A shredded ACL, somehow, manages to get even worse.

“I was depressed for awhile, so I tried to look at it as positively as I could,” he says. “I thought I had a lot of time to get in shape for baseball, work on my swing.

But a lot of that didn’t happen. I couldn’t run for nine months, and couldn’t do any leg lifting except for light rehab. I couldn’t swing because of the pivoting of my knee.”

While it’s uncertain whether a previous football knee injury, an impact fracture, had anything to do with his damaged ACL (...and MCL, and LCL), it was clear that Klimkiewicz would need to be shelved for the entirety of his senior year.

Almost.

“I got in one at-bat in the final game of the season,” he clarifies. “They told me I couldn’t run down to first.”

HELP FROM ON HIGH

Predictably, Division I suitors began backing away, Klimkiewicz says, simply “moving down to the next number on their list.”

Neighboring and neighborly Harvard, however, only inched closer.

Crimson head coach Joe Walsh long had designs on transplanting the BB&N keystone combination of Klimkiewicz and Farkes, and was well aware of the immense “power potential” in the Lexington, Mass., native.

But while going to Harvard would entail all the accomodations a BB&N grad could ask for—from the education to a lighter travel load for his family, which impressively still hasn’t “missed a baseball game since tee-ball”—intensive rehab work would be necessary anywhere for a return to form.

“I was asking the doctors every week, ‘Can I swing,’ ‘Can I do this, do that,’” Klimkiewicz says. “But [at that time,] I couldn’t walk without feeling out of whack.”

Gradually, he recovered enough to finally take the field that year—a process which inauspiciously began with an opening-week ankle sprain—and Klimkiewicz settled into his starting role at third base.

By year’s end, he flourished.

Despite a swollen knee, and despite not playing at all for essentially a calendar year, Klimkiewicz hit .317, led the Crimson in RBI (33), and was top-three in home runs (7) and slugging percentage (.558). He solidified a slot in the heart of the order—where he will hit again in 2005—and flashed glimpses of the person Walsh wanted and the player BB&N coach Rick Forestiere dubbed “the best high school hitter I’ve ever seen.”

Klimkiewicz won Honorable Mention All-Ivy and, even more memorably, a few titanic at-bats.

Although the team later fell short in its Ivy title defense to Princeton, Klimkiewicz worked 35 of 43 games, at times carrying the offensive burden by himself when Trey Hendricks ’04 succumbed to knee surgery down the stretch.

Teammates all reference the Yale series, in which he went 7-for-11 with six RBI in three games, clobbering a grand slam off Bulldogs ace Josh Sowers to lift himself and Harvard out of a slump and atop the Red Rolfe division. And then, of course, there was the Ivy championship series against the Tigers, where—facing elimination—he drove in every Crimson run against flamethrower and eventual fourth-round draft pick Ross Ohlendorf, topping it off with a 400-foot home run into the trees in dead center.

“I just got my hands in,” Klimkiewicz says, pressured to describe the at-bat. He grins. “The best hits, it doesn’t even feel like you swung hard.”

THE NATURE OF GOD

Today, nearly three years divorced from its last Ivy championship, it is that power supply which Harvard will be looking to tap into once again.

Unfortunately for Klimkiewicz—a third-year player, let’s remember—the regrettable sequel to that freshman season makes things a tad more complicated than that.

In 2004, the then-sophomore was plagued by the injury bug again, pulling his right hamstring before the season started and then his left in just the second series of the year. He would proceed to re-pull the hamstring in that tortured left leg three more times while attempting a comeback, dooming himself to occasional pinch-hitting opportunities and few starts.

But for these injuries, noticeably, there aren’t accounts of impact fractures, sprained ankles, or “freak divots.”

Calmly and confidently, Klimkiewicz simply takes responsibility upon himself.

“I had a pretty good freshman year,” he says, “and then I went and played summer ball in Concord. My body was taking a pounding. I wasn’t in good shape, and sophomore year, it all caught up to me. It was just a bad season.”

Klimkiewicz’s hamstring problems, his doctors told him, were linked to residual muscle imbalances in his knees. He had rushed his recovery schedule by a month, and the patella tendon used to replace his ACL had not yet loosened up or strengthened enough to function as an effective proxy. His quadriceps and hamstrings began “pulling apart” on each other in turn.

“This past summer,” Klimkiewicz finally decided, “I had to change something.”

“Something” became a rigorous off-season workout program, consisting of a rehab regimen with a doctor, a commitment to a summer-long training and conditioning center in Winchester, and participation in an inner-city baseball league at night.

Klimkiewicz dropped about 20 pounds this year, Walsh estimates, and seems back to turning heads—pitchers’ and teammates’ alike.

Having started every game thus far, this time at first, third, and DH, he carries a .618 slugging percentage, a .463 on-base percentage, and leads the Crimson with eight doubles, hitting at an eye-opening, yet not unexpected, .368 clip.

“When we recruited Klim, we really thought he was going to be a middle-of-the-lineup guy for us,” Walsh says. “They’ll know how to pronounce his name before the season’s over, I can tell you that much.”

THE NEW BEGINNING

When asked to evaluate the benefit of returning Klimkiewicz to the Harvard lineup, captain Schuyler Mann doesn’t need to think for very long.

“He’s going to be important,” Mann says. “Just adding another powerful gap-hitter, another home run hitter, makes our lineup so much more difficult to pitch to. Hopefully, he’ll stay healthy.”

It is that last line, however, which sadly serves as the critical albatross Klimkiewicz may never shake.

No matter how much work he does or how well he plays, the thing with Klimkiewicz will always be that final qualifier—that frustratingly operative “if he stays healthy”—which threatens the talent that drew pro scouts to BB&N four years ago.

These days, however, if you ask Klimkiewicz about bitterness and his career, about that left ACL, and what he can maybe do for the team he calls “the best we’ve had since I’ve been here,” you’ll get only hunger in return.

“I want to get back to where I was in high school, where I was at the top echelon of players,” he says. “I haven’t yet been able to do that. Now I feel I’m back in shape and can make it through the game. I can finally let my natural ability take over.”

For the former prep MVP and three-sport standout, certainly, the thought is nice.

“I think you’re starting to see it right now,” says Farkes, his high school and college teammate. “Ask anyone, this is what we brought in Klim to do. He’s right in the middle of that lineup and hitting every single ball hard. It’s something he’s always done better than almost anyone I’ve played with since high school.”

But deep down, you figure, Josh Klimkiewicz knows he can never revert to the player he used to be.

Since that fateful, October kickoff on that fateful high school football field, simply too many years have passed. Too much has happened in the story between now and then.

Don’t blame chance, though.

Or luck. Or odds.

For him and the Crimson, ironically, that difference might be the biggest reason to smile of all.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.