Untold Story of JV Baseball

“It’s not perfect.”

By now, the phrase has become ingrained in the consciousness of every member of the JV baseball team. The famous words of Coach Sullivan, the veteran leader of the second citizens of O’Donnell field, uttered in his classic Boston accent, has become the catchphrase for the annual attempt of 30-some odd ordinary Harvard students to join in the rich tradition of their school’s intercollegiate athletic program.

That attempt is one that to an outsider might seem to be bordering on the futile. JV baseball is certainly not perfect. Each year the members of the team, myself included, begin wondering around the end of March whether or not there will even be a season at all. For the past two years, however, the call has gone out and a squad has been hastily assembled.

To say the season usually begins at the eleventh hour would not be an accurate representation. The clock reads more like 11:59 when we first begin to toss around the cowhide after nearly a year’s worth of lazy inactivity. The team had practiced just a handful of times before heading to play a season-opening doubleheader versus Massasoit, the scourge of the junior circuit. We dropped both games, but the experience could be qualified as a success. No Massasoit hitter went deep, an improvement over last year, when the JuCo team’s cleanup batter christened our season with an impersonation of Carlos Baerga, launching home runs from both sides of the plate in the first inning.

Usually you’ll hear commentators note that pitchers are ahead of hitters in the early going, as it takes position players longer to bring their all-important batting eye into focus. The pitchers the JV baseball team faces aren’t just ahead of our hitters—they’ve already lapped them. Hitting skill can’t be recovered at will, and considering the team didn’t take its first session of batting practice until the season was already under way, it’s hardly surprising our offensive output resembled that of the 1909 Washington Senators. The extreme frost that accumulates on JV bats doesn’t begin to thaw until the last several games of the season. When you play less than 10 games total, however, the year is over before it even begins. As a JV baseball player, you learn to worship at the temple of small sample size, for a sluggish offensive start is deadly to any hopes of competitiveness.

There are plenty of things wrong with JV baseball. There’s just enough right about it, though, to make the experience worthwhile. It sounds clichéd, but JV baseball really teaches you crucial life lessons. Where else could one perfect the essential art of covering the infield? We may not have won a lot of games, but we sure got the best of that tarpaulin. Our grounds crew experience is perhaps the one edge we hold over the varsity in baseball-related activities. The speed with which we blanketed the dirt as the raindrops began to fall last Saturday marks, I’m sure, the all-time Harvard record. You may not find it in the books next to Zak Farkes’ 14 home run season, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a noteworthy accomplishment.

Most of the assortment of players that hurry across the river after class to take a few cuts and a few rounds of Sullivan’s multi-infield drill have long since given up any dreams of moving on to the varsity. In the absence of tryouts or the chance of stringing together enough at bats to showcase ability, the main motivator is simply the chance to play baseball, and have fun doing it. For while bat speed and command of the strike zone may have eroded, the ability to keep things light in the dugout can still be found in plentiful supply in every JV player.

Without that ability, it’d be easy to get discouraged by the paucity of fans that come to the weekend doubleheaders. Instead, we sharpen our bookmaking skills by setting the line on first pitch attendance. You’re usually safe taking the “under,” no matter how low the mark is placed. Long, slow afternoons also offer plenty of chances to bone up on obscure baseball knowledge, such as the identity of the lesser-known member of Cincinnati’s “Nasty Boys” bullpen trio of 1990 that stumped most of the team for hours (Norm Charlton, for those scoring from your dorm room).

JV baseball players learn to take the bad with the good—enduring the short season, ad hoc schedule and lack of practice time for the chance to play baseball with a group similarly passionate about the game—and have grown accustomed to the team’s uneven routine.

Actually, that’s the wrong word to use. After all, this is JV baseball—where nothing is routine.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.