Pitch Perfect
The long-term trajectory of Harvard baseball can be defined by two facts.
First, the Crimson has not won an Ivy League championship since 2005 and has not finished above .500 overall since 2006.
Second, since head coach Bill Decker inherited a 12-30 team at the start of the 2013 season, Harvard has witnessed a slow and steady climb up to a 19-23 overall record in 2017.
Sum these two details together and here the team stands, on the cusp of the 2018 baseball season. It’s hard to say that the Crimson has sky-high expectations for this spring, but it’s also hard to say that the team doesn’t expect to build upon the upwards trajectory that has been years in the making. Will Harvard continue its slow, methodical momentum, finally passing .500 overall, or will it have a breakout year, perhaps smashing its way back into Ivy League relevance?
Taking precedence over answering that question, however, is the team’s focus on its daily operations—things it can control.
“Everybody’s goal, across the country, is to try to be in a position to compete in your conference tournament,” Decker said. “We just want to make sure that we continue to train and compete the right way, day in and day out—and if you do those things, then you can be in that position.”
Every team wants to jockey at the top of its conference each season, but it’s much easier said than done. Yale won the Ivy League last year with a 16-4 conference record, while Harvard finished sixth at 7-13. Here are some things that need to happen in order for the Crimson to surprise in 2018:
1. Success in the summer leagues of 2017 needs to carry over into the spring 2018 season. Of the 20 Harvard players participating in summer league play, four earned All-Star recognition—junior RHP Simon Rosenblum-Larson, senior 3B Matt Rothenberg, junior RHP Kevin Stone, and sophomore OF Jake Suddleson.
The stats back up the awards. Come summer’s end, Rosenblum-Larson had posted a 1.53 ERA over 52.2 innings, Rothenberg led the entire South Florida Collegiate League with a .434 batting average and a 1.140 OPS, Stone went 3-0 while holding opposing hitters to a .194 BAA, and Suddleson hit for .300+ and 1.000+ for much of the season before cooling off towards the end.
Notably, senior pitcher Noah Zavolas also dazzled for the Wareham Gatemen, posting a sparkling 0.64 ERA while pitching the fourth-most innings on the team.
The next step is to sustain the success through the spring.
“The bottom line is, when you’re wearing a Harvard uniform, we want to have that kind of success,” Decker said. “We need to take that to O’Donnell Field, then League play, and just play—have some fun, have some energy. The guys had some good summers, and that’s the way you grow as a ballplayer.”
2. Harvard needs to get off to a fast start in both regular season and Ivy League play. Last season, the Crimson began 7-3 in non-conference games, but when it came to Ancient Eight play, it tumbled into a 1-10 conference start.
The inauspicious start immediately cut off any hope to contend for the title. As it turned out, Yale, the eventual 2017 Ivy champion, was Harvard’s inverse by launching to a 10-1 conference record.
“Our expectations are to do a little bit of a better job, specifically, [of] getting off to a good start,” Decker said. “We’re going to have 18 games under our belt [by Ivy League play], as we usually do, still trying to figure some things out. There’ll be some competition within positions, which is great.”
That competition needs to yield energy and a focused squad when it visits Princeton for the team’s Ancient Eight opener on March 24. Last year, the Tigers finished tied with the Crimson for 6th-7th in the conference with a 7-13 Ivy record, so the Ivy-opener will be a chance for Harvard to get ahead in 2018.
3. The Crimson needs to get healthy and stay healthy for the duration of the spring. Not only that, but when players are absent due to injury, the next man should be able to step up.
Several key contributors won’t be in the lineup for at least some time due to injury. Trusty sophomore second baseman Quinn Hoffman, who led the team last year in plate appearances, is coming back from shoulder surgery. Senior captain and infielder John Fallon won’t play the first weekend. Senior RHP Ian Miller, who pitched the most innings as a starter last year, will miss extended time due to hip surgery.
“I wish we were a little bit healthier, but that’s just the way it is,” Decker said. “It’s next man up.”
The rest of the roster needs to find a way to step up and plug the holes left by injury. Which leads to point number four….
4. The core of upperclassmen who carried Harvard last season, and especially in its run of six wins in nine games to close out the season, needs to sustain that level of production.
Junior outfielder P.J. Robinson, the Crimson’s Male Breakout Athlete of the Year last season, led the team in nearly every offensive category, hitting for a .373 average and a 1.174 OPS. Junior first baseman Pat McColl also had a stellar year at the plate, hitting for .355 and drawing a team-best 18 walks, which added to his team-best .459 on-base percentage.
McColl and Robinson drove in 36 and 34 runs, respectively, to plate more than one-third of Harvard’s total runs scored last season. The ball club is in a good place if that kind of two-man RBI machine shows up again in 2018.
“We got back a week before school started in January, and we’ve been here ever since,” McColl said. “We’re pretty excited for this year…We’ve got a lot of talent coming in and a lot of returners.”
The outfield platoon of Austin Black, Trent Bryan, Suddleson, John MacLean, and Ben Skinner will also look to make the transition from valuable underclassmen to veritable impact players. The re-emergence of Rothenberg, who had a down year last season but blistered his summer league, will also mean good things for the squad.
The Crimson only graduated three seniors last year, so the squad has veteran experience on its side. That being said, the contributions made by the incoming class of 2021—nine freshmen, five of whom are righty hurlers—will always be welcome additions. Point number three concerning health is especially important—several rookies aren’t yet at 100 percent, which will hinder their playing time.
Which leaves it to the upperclassmen, and the second-year players who look to make performance jumps, to carry the weight.
5. Above Harvard in the 2017 season-end Ivy standings were five teams—Yale, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Cornell. Overtaking these teams, if only a few of them, will require more than just going through the motions.
Indeed, in the first ever Ivy League Preseason Poll, made up of votes by media members from each institution, sports information directors, and the national media, the Crimson was picked to finish fifth in this year’s conference, as was announced on Feb. 14. The Bulldogs held the top spot as expected.
As Decker preaches, energy, focus, consistency, and sustaining success will be key to any sort of long-term achievements for the program. These attitude-centered tenets will apply to both the diamond during games that count and during practice inside the bubble.
“Since the guys have been back in the middle of January, they’ve given a good effort,” Decker said. “The thing that we’ve talked is about is just sustaining that effort, day in and day out…the effort’s been there, the focus has been there. We can always try to be a little better with our consistency, but they’ve come to decide to train the right way.”
Even if the Crimson succeeds in achieving these things, factors beyond the team’s control could still derail its season. That’s not a focus of the team, however. While still being cognizant of the work ahead, Harvard can still look forward to having a fun, intensive season, and the results will follow.
“We’ve been doing a lot of scrimmages in the bubble,” McColl said. “A lot of our guys had positive summer experiences…. We’re pretty excited for this year.”
The Crimson starts its season on the road with a four-game weekend set at Samford starting on Friday, Feb. 23.