Saved by the Bell: Stellar senior class comes full circle, returns Harvard to the top of Ivy League

There was a time when senior shortstop Mark Mager thought he could take events like Saturday’s for granted.

Coming in as a freshman and taking over a position that had been manned by the great David Forst ’98, Mager played an integral role on a Harvard baseball team that won its third straight Ivy League title and fourth straight Red Rolfe Division crown. As he watched fellow freshman Faiz Shakir knock in the run that clinched a spot in the NCAAs, he had no reason to believe that the triumphs would ever stop coming, that Harvard couldn’t dominate another three seasons and, for all he knew, forever.

“Freshman year, I came in wide-eyed and excited,” Mager said. “I looked around and thought we’d win the Ivy championship every year.”

Three years can do a lot for a guy’s sense of perspective. So can falling short. Mager and his teammates were competitive for the next two years, but unable to return to that level of greatness. Harvard and Princeton had battled each other through four straight league championship series, but Mager and his classmates watched from afar as Princeton won in 2000 and 2001.

But the seniors remembered the way things had once been—the way things were supposed to be—and buckled down as a group. And make no mistake about who’s responsible for the team’s return to greatness.

“Freshman year was an all-age kind of thing,” pitcher Justin Nyweide said on Saturday. “This year we looked to the seniors throughout the lineup. And we sat down and we realized we were the ones who had to put it together.”

There might be something to Nyweide’s words. In 1999, Ben Crockett was already an established part of the rotation, Mager was already a fixture at short and Shakir’s hit won it all. Sophomore John Birtwell ’01 was Ivy League Pitcher of the year and Scott Carmack ’01 looked on the verge of superstardom.

This year, even though sophomore Trey Hendricks was the team’s best hitter all year, even though freshmen Schuyler Mann and Ian Wallace turned in key hits and junior relievers Kenon Ronz and Barry Wahlberg made games down the stretch seem two innings shorter, this championship belonged to the Class of 2002. Everyone contributed to the title run. The seniors won it.

There were Nyweide and Chaney Sheffield, pitching perhaps the greatest games of their lives on Saturday. Nyweide’s gritty 154-pitch effort demoralized the Tigers, and Sheffield swept up the remains with the best five innings anyone could have asked of him.

There was Mager, batting 6-for-10 and stealing two bases. There was the infield of Mager, Shakir, third baseman Nick Carter and first baseman Josh San Salvador, an all-senior unit that had the best fielding percentage in the Ivy League, erasing the few mistakes the Crimson’s starters made.

And seniors made Saturday possible in the first place. Crockett’s 16-strikeout performance against Brown on three days’ rest will go down as one of the all-time great efforts. Shakir pulled off another bloop single for the ages to make that effort count.

And a week before that, a parade of seniors homered against Brown to pull off an eight-run comeback that breathed life into their season. San Salvador. Carter, who had been struggling but kept swinging when the lead seemed insurmountable. Lopez, who hit the first home run of his career. And all the while, Mike Dryden quietly helped solidify a bullpen that became lethally efficient down the stretch.

But it was more than that. On Saturday, Mager spoke of his classmates talking to each other on the field, dissecting their at-bats against various pitchers. Lopez noted with pride that at one point in the second game, seven of the nine Harvard players on the field were seniors. It was about presence as much as anything else, an intangible that only guys who had been there before—who had seen it happen before—could bring.

Go ahead, don’t think any of that rubs off on a Hendricks or a Wallace. Go ahead and doubt that a Wahlberg isn’t moved by that presence as he warms up to start the ninth.

So it is done. The dynasty has been revived, and the seniors can look forward to improving upon the 1999 team’s quiet showing at NCAA Regionals, when the Crimson mustered only two runs in two games. Mager, who inched closer to Hal Carey’s ’99 career hit record with his six-hit outburst on Saturday, thinks the Crimson has “a good shot at doing something there, turning some heads.”

Given the problems the Crimson has had at the plate this season, one might think that this is just a resurgence of the wide-eyed, optimistic Mager of a few years ago. But anyone familiar with what the seniors have accomplished in the past few weeks would have a little more perspective on things.