AMOR PERFECT UNION: When A Record Can Be Deceiving

10-30.

13-28.

The first set of numbers is the Harvard baseball team’s record from 2008. The second—the Crimson’s record in 2009.

Looking at those results, the logical conclusion to make is that Harvard had pretty similar—and pretty bad—seasons in those two years. Numbers don’t lie right?

Well no, they don’t. But sometimes they mislead.

2008 was a disaster for Harvard. The team was picked by Baseball America to win the Ivy League going into the season, but instead it finished dead last in the Rolfe Division while posting the third-worst record (8-12) in the Ancient Eight overall.

Injuries were a factor—then-junior slugger Tom Stack-Babich went down early in the year and the pitching staff took a couple of big blows when it lost then-sophomore Eric Eadington after two starts and highly-touted prospect Greg Malley never made it to the mound at all.

Still, with established senior starters Shawn Haviland ’08 and Brad Unger ’08 headlining the rotation, former captain Matt Vance ’08 leading an experienced lineup, and a number of talented freshmen plugging in whatever holes remained, the Crimson should have been able to put together a respectable season, or a mediocre one at the very least.

But Harvard seemed to lose its drive somewhere on its Spring Break to California—where it was toasted by some of the top teams in the nation—and let its struggles carry into the Ivy season. Pretty much everybody underperformed, starting at the top: Haviland and Vance each put up the worst numbers of their collegiate careers. Only after the Crimson hit rock bottom, skidding to a 1-7 start in league play a 2-22 record overall, did the team finally appear somewhat motivated, playing .500 ball the rest of the way.

A season in which Harvard finished so far from reaching its originally lofty goals has to be considered a failure.

At the onset of 2009, expectations for the Crimson were more tempered. Haviland and Unger were gone, leaving sophomore Max Perlman—coming back from a year off—as the closest thing to a sure bet on the pitching staff. The rotation would have to be pieced together with sophomores that had shown flashes of competence but not consistency and rookies that had not shown anything at all. Harvard was returning its fair share of veteran bats, but bringing back most of a lineup that combined to hit .255 the previous season was not exactly cause for unbridled optimism.

And yet, while a 13-28 season can hardly be called a success, there was one very important aspect of 2009 that had been missing from 2008: progress.

Like last year, the campaign started off with adversity. Perlman injured his elbow in his first start and saw his season erased by Tommy John surgery. The Crimson sputtered out of the gate again—this time in Louisiana—getting knocked around during Spring Break once more by teams that were simply out of its league. Then the team was swept by Columbia in the first doubleheader of the Ivy League season, and it looked like Harvard would be delivering a repeat performance of a show that should have been cancelled after the first act.

But this Crimson team would prove different than its predecessor. The next day Harvard swept Penn, and then proceeded to win six of its next eight Ivy League games, displaying a resilience that characterized the squad as much as shaky pitching and defense often did.

A testament to the Crimson’s refusal to give up: Harvard outscored its opponents 19-6 in the ninth inning this season and 11-4 in the 10th and beyond. The team played in three games that went to extra innings, and won each time.

The Crimson’s inherent aversion to defeat spread from its seniors to the rest of the team. Stack-Babich and Matt Rogers combined for 17 homers in their final seasons, while Taylor Meehan and captain Harry Douglas each hit well above .300 and provided some pop of their own.

The powerful senior bats eased the burden on an inexperienced pitching staff, allowing some promising rookies to develop their stuff—in particular starters Brent Suter and Conner Hulse. The two young hurlers had their struggles, but by the end of the season both looked prepared to be rotation mainstays in the future.

This is not to say that the Crimson played great baseball this year. Harvard had a penchant for digging its own grave—its defense committed too many untimely errors and its pitching staff threw too many balls outside the strike zone, as well as too far into it. Eventually the team’s bats returned to Earth and its flaws proved too numerous. The Crimson blew any chance it had at the Ivy League title by losing four-straight games to Brown two weekends ago.

But Harvard proved its resilient character this past weekend against the Rolfe Division’s best. The Crimson bounced back from Game 1 blowouts to beat Dartmouth in the nightcaps of each doubleheader. The Crimson capped off its season by coming back from a 7-0 deficit to beat Northeastern, 16-13, on Tuesday.

13-28 doesn’t exactly cleanse the palette of the bad taste left by 10-30. But there’s no doubt that Harvard is in a better place looking towards the future than it was at the end of last season.

Sure, the Crimson will have to take four steps back before it takes any steps forward as it loses its quartet of senior sluggers. But Douglas and Rogers didn’t do much with the bat until this year, which leaves room for hope that a new batch of heavy hitters will emerge.

Harvard’s rotation should have a whole new look next season. Suter has ace potential and Hulse is a workhorse. If Perlman and Eadington come back as expected, the Crimson might boast the best crop of starters in the Ivy League.

But the most important adjustment from this season that Harvard needs to carry over to 2010 is its change in attitude—a development that can be attributed to Douglas’ leadership. Whoever the next captain is would be wise to follow the current one’s example and keep his team fighting no matter the circumstances.

As concrete as numbers seem to be, they still leave room for interpretation. The seeds Harvard planted this season tell a story beyond the team’s record, and if they blossom next year, 13-28 will have a better connotation than one might expect.

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@fas.harvard.edu.