Harvard Baseball '77: A Tale of What's Coming

I know this is late, and Commencement seems long ago, but not looking back and analyzing the Harvard baseball team's performance of this season would be doing a tremendous injustice to one of the school's most remarkable and successful teams in what was surely a lukewarm year for Harvard sports.

Where do you start? Do you compare this season's record (22-7) with last year's (17-18), say "Bravo, guys!", and leave it at that? Do you talk about All Those Freshmen and a rebuilding period that was less than a season long? Do you hysterically point out that a ballclub that wasn't even listed in the New England Top 15 at the end of 1976 found itself rated number 3 in the circuit 12 months later?

These points are impressive and cannot be left out, but they really do not keynote the season past. Comparisons suggest change, and although records, ratings and attitudes did just that, the axis around which they revolve did not. The machine called Harvard Baseball had different parts in 1977, but the same man operating it.

Loyal Park, head coach of Harvard baseball, did not begin his 1977 season with the proverbial clean slate, "Let's forget about last year" feeling that coaches are usually allowed after a sub-par season. Park, who had finished his first below-.500 campaign in eight years as head coach, went into his ninth closely watched by critics who deemed it necessary to malign the man when his team failed to garner any post-season honors for the first time since Park succeeded Norm Shepard in 1968.

The man whose charges had won an unprecedented four straight Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League titles (1971-1974), as well as four District One baseball championships (1968, 1971, 1973 and 1974), and who had brought those four district champion teams to Omaha, Nebraska for the College World Series, was now suddenly deemed unfit to run the same Harvard diamond show.

Stories and letters were printed, accusing Park of racism, immaturity, back-stabbing and favoritism. Insinuations that Park should be fired, if not resign, abounded. And all because of a 17-18 season. Park looked at it all very philosophically.

"If I had started thinking about what had been written all the time I would never have been able to do my job. My job is to coach Harvard baseball and do it in the best way I know how. As long as I am doing what I feel in my heart is right I can live with anything that is said or written about me," Park said.

And Park did deal with it, not with pen or mouth but with performance, and his silent, business-like approach to off-season criticism was rousingly successful. Park truly "did his job" as he had always done it at Harvard; emphasizing speed, pitching and defense, and seasoning it with his natural enthusiasm. In his wake he left many embarassed critics as Harvard baseball returned to its accustomed spot in the limelight from a one-year sabbatical. As Park himself summed up the past spring: "In just one year we came right back to where we were in 1975. It's gonna be a privilege again to play baseball for Harvard."

Not that it wasn't this year. The feeling that last season was indeed water under the bullpen became apparent early, as Park took an astonishingly young ballclub down to Sanford, Florida to train in early April. Ten of Harvard's traveling ballplayers were freshmen, and the talented youths had forced Park to cut loose several members of the 1976 squad and carry only eight lettermen down to the sunshine.

Florida was "a time of development," according to Park, and the limited competition did not serve to test his babes. They romped in eight straight games down South, but moreover showed an intensity to perfect fundamentals and an attitude that was genuinely optimistic, a refreshing change from the cocky 1976 squad which had won 11 of 14 contests while in Florida. "I knew right after the Southern trip that these were the right kids," Park said.

The Greater Boston League opener on April 11 at Boston College came next, Park started six freshmen among them pitcher Ron Stewart, and bombarded the Chestnut Hillers, 12-2 for his team's ninth straight win. Stewart fanned 11 in the encounter as the young Harvard team proved itself very disrespectful to its elders.

Dominance by youth prevailed in the next three GBL tilts. One by one MIT (15-1). Tufts (13-4) and Northeastern (19-2) were soundly thwarted. All of a sudden, baseball was fun again.

The Crimson arrived for its home opener with a 12-0 record and met up with an awesome squad from Columbia, the defending champion of the Eastern League.

The fans, critics and allies alike were treated to a classic baseball game. Columbia, led by crafty hurler Rolando Acosta, defeated Harvard and Stewart, 3-1. Clutch hitting and run production were absent, but tenacity and confidence on the part of the Crimson were manifest. "We showed everyone what kind of a ballclub we were going to have," Park said. "The kids showed a ton of confidence here as they did all season long."

The third week of the season proved to test the Crimson as to just how far they had come back in a year. In 1976 the Harvard team had lost to Holy Cross by a gridiron margin of 21-4. This year, however, the Crusaders, even with the addition of basketball phenom Ronnie Perry at shortstop, did not find the going as easy. Perry made three errors at short and Holy Cross was held to only a field goal in a 9-3 Harvard win. A day later MIT was derailed for the second time, 10-0.

The first Big Weekend of the season was now upon Harvard. The team stood 14-1, 5-0 in the Greater Boston League, but 0-1 in the critical Eastern League as it went up against Navy on Friday and Princeton in a doubleheader on the following day.

To put the weekend into perspective, many of the ten teams in the EIBL (the Ivy League plus Army and Navy) had finished or played most of their respective 14-game seasons. To make post-season playoffs Harvard had to finish either first or second in the league, which roughly meant winning ten or 11 of its league games. Two losses over the weekend would dig an almost inescapable hole for Harvard. As Park pointed out, "The kids at this juncture saw in their eyes what was ahead of them."

The squad traveled to Annapolis on Friday, April 29, and a sloppy fourth inning ("Our only bad inning of baseball all season," Park said) paved a yellow brick basepath for Navy, as the Midshipmen edged the Crimson, 6-3. "This was one of the few times all year that we let the game get away from us, that we lost control of the thing," Park said later.

It was anything but the same the following day in New Jersey, which was most likely Harvard's most glorious afternoon of the spring. It wasn't so much that the squad swept a hard-hitting Princeton club to even its EIBL record at 2-2, but how they flawlessly displayed their dominance.

In the opener sophomore left-hander Paul McOsker threw "One of the finest game I've seen at Harvard," Park said. The southpaw handcuffed the Princetonians for three hits over ten innings, as it took his mates three extra frames before the batsmen exploded for six runs in the top of the tenth for a 6-0 victory.

Errorless defensive play and timely hitting prevailed in the second game once more. On the hill sophomore Timmy Clifford reeled off ten strikeouts to tame the Tigers, 7-3, while at the plate the steady heroes were emerging--Singleton, Santos-Buch, Stenhouse, Bingham, St. John. Omaha didn't seem continents away anymore.

On Monday, May 2, Harvard met up with a fiery B.C squad in the GBL grudge match at Soldiers Field. The Eagles got their revenge in the sweetest of all ways. Down 6-1 in the seventh, Boston College went though half a dozen Harvard hurlers en route to a come-from-behind 10-7 victory.

But as was the special quality of the 1977 edition of Harvard baseball, they never looked back, only ahead. Brown was the next prey in the team's sights and was soon coldly dispatched, 9-2, on May 6. Mike Stenhouse a freshmen second baseman from Cranston, Rhode Island, fired the biggest shots on the visitors from his home state, hammering two home runs to give McOsker all the runs he needed and Harvard its third win in the Eastern League.

Major league scouts from various teams were making their usual Saturday afternoon rounds of the New England colleges. Word had already circulated about the two Stenhouse shots of the day before, and the easy victory over Brown, and the Boys from the Bigs came out to see if all the hub-bub over Stenhouse and Harvard was worth it. It was. The Crimson decked Northeastern, 7-4, for the second time and Stenhouse, acting at the plate like he was taking a screen test for the movie version of "The Natural," cranked out two more round-trippers.

Indeed, things were going Harvard's way to this point in the season. They had virtually clinched the Greater Boston League title; all that was needed was a win over Brandeis in ten days. As for the Eastern League, a doubleheader scheduled again Penn earlier in the year had been postponed, and would not be played unless Harvard had a shot at the title. Aside from the two games with Penn and the Brandeis showdown, the Crimson had seven Eastern League games remaining. Very simply, they had to win six of them, then at least split the replayed Penn twin bill, to make the playoffs.

It just didn't make sense. After all the class and strong play the team had shown thus far in jetting to an 18-3 record, it would still be an uphill basepath to post-season competition. To the unobjective fan it seemed unfair, to the Harvard baseball team it didn't seem to matter. The ballclub was so uniformed in confidence that the challenge of the Eastern League was welcomed. There was very little now that needed to be proved. The freshmen had shown their consistent talent, Loyal Park had reaffirmed his.

But there were some things over which the Harvard squad didn't have control. The Yale doubleheader, scheduled for Monday, May 9, was postponed to Tuesday, then Thursday on account of rain. It meant that Harvard would have to play five crucial Eastern League games in three days.

In addition, the University's famous "Reading Period During Spring Sports Season" had come around, so academic pressure had now worked its way into every strike zone, every pitching motion, and every individual psyching procedure. Somehow, in the midst of this grand conflict, optimism still reigned.

The team did not play well in the Yale twinbill and that, coupled with Yale's mediocre team rising to the occasion, made for two exciting ball games.

In the opener Peter Bannish, last season the starting first baseman for the Crimson and this season Park's top (and only) left-handed reliever, used this day to turn in his best performance of the year. The Crimson, on the strength of the southpaw's three-inning stint, rallied from a 4-1 deficit to overtake the Elis, 6-4. Offensively, Dave Singleton shone with a 4-for-4 day at the dish, but the big play was donated by little-used outfielder Bobby Jenkins. The speedy Jenkins, yet another one of Park's adept freshmen, singled as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning and eventually scored what proved to be the winning run when he scampered homeward on a wild pitch. He was met at the plate by a furious bear hug from Park.

Park and his team lost their grip in the second game, however, as Yale utilized Harvard starter Jamie Werly's wildness to score three quick runs. The Bulldogs added two more for a 5-1 lead by the sixth inning. But Crimson bats came alive in the home half of the sixth, which eventually found Harvard with the bases loaded, one out, and two runs behind at 5-3.

Bannish, having switched roles for Game Two, now came up as a pinch hitter. The versatile junior promptly stroked a single to left, but strangely only one run scored. The next two batters failed to produce with the sacks filled, and three more went down the next inning. There was no bear hug after this one, a 5-4 loss, the squad's third in the Eastern League.

With not even enough time to second-guess, the team was on a plane to West Point less than 15 hours later. Harvard started its second and final Big Weekend with a superbly played 10-3 thrashing of the Cadets. Clifford on the mound was even stronger than in his Princeton performance, and Jenkins started his first game of the season and responded with a long triple to left, Meanwhile in center field. Singleton added yet another exclamation point to his outstanding all-around season with a diving catch to quell an Army uprising.

It came down to a doubleheader the next day in Ithaca. New York versus league-leading Cornell. Sure there were three, possibly five other games left on the schedule, but it all came down to the two games of May 14. Harvard had to take both games, as the Big Red with two losses and Columbia with three already occupied the top two spots in the EIBL, and consequently the two playoff positions.

Stewart notched his seventh win of the season in the first game, as a 19-hit Harvard attack paced the Crimson's 12-3 romp. Stenhouse popped yet another round-tripper, his eighth of the season.

Unfortunately, when a team is in the must-win situation that Harvard was, the most important win is always the next one.

Deadlocked 1-1 after the regulation seven innings had passed, the Crimson raced two runs home in the first extra frame on the strength of a triple by freshman first baseman Mark Bingham. Starter Steve Baloff, who had returned the past season from a leave of absence to provide Park with yet another strong right arm, was ready to burst his fastballs by Cornell for just three more outs. Baloff did just that, but two sloppy fielding plays, events which nobody had seemed to expect or worry about during the other 25 games of the season, were made the in the infield and Cornell clinched victory for itself and disqualification for Harvard with a 4-3 triumph.

The rest of the season was played out with anti-climactic results but in the same intense fashion with which it had begun. The following Monday an underrated Brandeis squad ("They proved to be the strongest team we faced all year," Park said) snatched the Greater Boston League crown from Harvard with a 5-2 win at Soldiers Field. It was the same day when Park found out that his team had not received an at-large berth for the District One playoffs, as they were overlooked in favor of Boston College and UMass, two teams that each had a record poorer than the Crimson.

But Park is not a bitter man and his teams reflect the class with which they play. Harvard closed out its season with a twinball split against Dartmouth and with that the baseball season became a Cinderella story that ended just after midnight.

True, the chapter is over, but the book is far from finished. All factors indicate that this past season's 22-7 record will be the team's poorest for at least a couple of years. Only one starter, Captain Tom Joyce, will be missing next year, and Park finds himself with an overabundance of substitutes there. The all-freshman infield of Bingham, Stenhouse, Burke, St. John and Rick Pierce "should be the best defensive infield I've ever had at Harvard in another year," Park noted. Singleton will continue his leadership in center field and everywhere else. The arms of Stewart, Clifford, Baloff, McOsker Bannish and Larry Brown cannot help but mature, and will eventually provide Park with at least one or two "stoppers" like Milt Holt or Roz Brayton of Harvard champions past.

"Our two years of experimenting are gone," Park summarized; "We'll leave nothing to chance now. We know exactly where we're headed." Anyone who has 1976 Season FLORIDA  Won 11, Lost 3 BOSTON COLLEGE  5-4 PENN  3-11 COLUMBIA  4-19 COLUMBIA  12-14 M.I.T.  7-8 YALE  0-4 BROWN  9-3 BROWN  6-8 HOLY CROSS  4-21 NORTHEASTERN  7-3 TUFTS  1-4 BOSTON COLLEGE  3-5 BRANDEIS  1-3 DARTMOUTH  2-0 DARTMOUTH  7-6 PRINCETON  0-9 NAVY  2-17 NAVY  3-1 CORNELL  3-16 ARMY  7-8 ARMY  3-4 NORTHEASTERN  2-4 FINAL:  Won 17, Lost 18

1977 Season FLORIDA  Won 8, Lost 0 BOSTON COLLEGE  12-2 M.I.T.  15-1 TUFTS  13-4 NORTHEASTERN  19-3 COLUMBIA  1-3 HOLY CROSS  9-3 M.I.T.  10-0 NAVY  3-6 PRINCETON  6-0 PRINCETON  7-3 BOSTON COLLEGE  7-10 BROWN  9-2 NORTHEASTERN  7-4 YALE  6-4 YALE  5-6 ARMY  10-3 CORNELL  12-3 CORNELL  3-4 BRANDEIS  2-5 DARTMOUTH  19-1 FINAL:  Won 22, Lost 7

watched or read about Harvard baseball also knows where the team's talent, confidence and desire can and very well might take them. True, this analysis and appraisal is dated, but one will never understand how far this ballclub can go without a good look at how far it has already come

1977 Season FLORIDA  Won 8, Lost 0 BOSTON COLLEGE  12-2 M.I.T.  15-1 TUFTS  13-4 NORTHEASTERN  19-3 COLUMBIA  1-3 HOLY CROSS  9-3 M.I.T.  10-0 NAVY  3-6 PRINCETON  6-0 PRINCETON  7-3 BOSTON COLLEGE  7-10 BROWN  9-2 NORTHEASTERN  7-4 YALE  6-4 YALE  5-6 ARMY  10-3 CORNELL  12-3 CORNELL  3-4 BRANDEIS  2-5 DARTMOUTH  19-1 FINAL:  Won 22, Lost 7

watched or read about Harvard baseball also knows where the team's talent, confidence and desire can and very well might take them. True, this analysis and appraisal is dated, but one will never understand how far this ballclub can go without a good look at how far it has already come

watched or read about Harvard baseball also knows where the team's talent, confidence and desire can and very well might take them. True, this analysis and appraisal is dated, but one will never understand how far this ballclub can go without a good look at how far it has already come