Baseball Led By Herrmann

On one rainy Sunday in May 2003, longtime Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh inspected his dwindling bench and called out Frank Herrmann’s name on a wing and a prayer.

The place was Princeton University’s Clarke Field, right in the freshman’s home state.

The situation?

The decisive third game of the Ivy League Championship Series, with each team knotted up at one win apiece.

Ninth inning.

Two on, two out.

Tigers up, 5-2.

The guy on the hill?Princeton’s ace closer Thomas Pauly, the school’s all-time career leader in saves and strikeouts per nine innings. But here—maybe even more importantly—a senior eyeing a complete game four-hitter and his tenth K of the game.

And so out of the visiting dugout climbed Herrmann, the New Jersey native, a relative greenhorn standing on the most pressure-packed stage imaginable with a paltry 15 collegiate at-bats under his belt.

“The guy’s the 51st pick in the [Major League Baseball] draft and I hadn’t had the bat in maybe a month and a half,” Hermann remembers. “The guy’s throwing 95 mph with a slider. It was tough.”

He would whiff for No. 10; the championship would be the Tigers’ third in the past four years.

“He’s got a lot of power,” Walsh would go on to say afterwards. The sophomore currently stands a robust 6’4, 220, good for fourth-tallest on the team and second-heaviest. “If he could get a hold of one and hit it out of the shortest part of the park….

“We were looking for a dream come true up there.”

Well, it’s been awhile since Walsh began searching for that dream. Soon enough, in fact, it’ll be approaching exactly one year ago, to the day.

But with the Crimson (9-9-1, 3-1 Ivy) heading into Friday’s Ivy home opener against Columbia (8-14, 5-3), it seems like some of that saving grace Harvard baseball’s been looking for may have finally arrived.

And just in time.

While only one home game this season has been played at O’Donnell field—a 16-6 victory over Vermont—this weekend will see Harvard finally get to settle into familiar territory and buckle down for the Ivy stretch. The contests taper nicely with Herrmann’s emergence as a legitimate threat, whether he’s toeing the rubber or standing at the plate.

The Crimson fully believes that it can and will repeat as Red Rolfe division champions, and maybe even find itself facing a favored Princeton squad in the Ivy championship again.

Herrmann, for one, is ready.

“It’s going to be great,” sophomore infielder Zak Farkes says. “We pride ourselves on playing at home, and we want to win every single game there. We want to take all four this weekend, and thanks in [part to him,] we’re in a real position to do just that.”

Starting with this weekend’s pair of noontime doubleheaders against the Lions on Friday and Penn (7-14, 2-4) on Saturday, in fact, the Crimson will face virtually all Ivy foes the rest of the way. Only the Boston Beanpot, held in Fenway Park in late April, will provide a brief reprieve from the most crucial games of the season.

“We can sweep them both,” junior catcher Schuyler Mann said of the weekend match-ups. “We’re excited, and we expect a lot of ourselves for Ivy competition. We’re going to show up with a lot of fire.”

Fortunately for Harvard, part of that excitement can now be easily attributed to the big kid who had the ill-fated burden of ending their season last year. The former unknown has already made great strides in making his mark both on the mound and in the box.

“He has loads of talent, we’ve known that since the first day when he stepped on the field,” Farkes says. “He’s finally putting it together.”

And down the Ivy stretch, he could be the difference-maker.

A sweep of Columbia and the Quakers this weekend alone would catapult the Crimson to a commanding 7-1 record Ivy record—especially impressive considering Harvard won the division with an 11-9 Ivy mark a year ago—and a nice conclusion to their tour of the Lou Gehrig division before beginning Red Rolfe play.

Harvard is already 1-1 against Cornell and 2-0 against the Tigers in regular season action. In those four games, notably, Herrmann is batting an even .300 with five RBI, four walks and a critical home run against—fittingly—Princeton.

“He’s helped himself in the lineup, especially this weekend,” Mann said. “He’s been absolutely huge.”

But don’t let the bat fool you. Perhaps even more importantly, he has also emerged from out of nowhere to become a legitimate No. 4 starter in the Crimson rotation, behind senior Trey Hendricks, sophomore Matt Brunnig and senior Mike Morgalis.

“It has a lot to do with opportunity and confidence,” Herrmann says. “The two go hand-in-hand. Once Coach shows he has confidence in you, you begin to get it and begin to build on whatever success you have. Last year, I just never really got that [sequence] going.”

In the aforementioned game against Princeton in which he hit his third home run of the year, Herrmann also took over for injured freshman Jake Bruton, who had taken a line drive to the body and had to leave the contest. The result was 6 2/3 innings of clutch relief pitching against the team Herrmann’s been thinking about ever since that fateful at-bat.

After conceding three early runs, he fanned eight down the stretch, solidifying an 11-7 comeback win he himself helped kick-start with his offense.

It was the second sparkling performance in three opportunities.

“We need his bat, and we also need his arm pitching in these games,” Farkes says. “We’re just going to look for him to keep improving, keep getting better.”

But in truth, Herrmann’s first gem came earlier. It was Harvard’s fourth game of the year, a complete game victory in which he let up only one run and struck out six against an Air Force team which had tagged the Crimson for a startling 20 runs a day earlier.

At the time, conventional wisdom may have chalked it up to a fluke performance.

But now—slowly but surely—the sophomore is proving that Coach Walsh wasn’t so crazy in that rainy New Jersey ballgame almost one year ago.

All he needed was some time.

In a fortunate case of the present vindicating the past, sending Herrmann to the dish for that momentous at-bat—an experience Herrmann has rerun in his mind “100 times” since—may not prove to be the simple foregone conclusion it had turned out to be, after all.

He’s not a greenhorn anymore. The opportunity and the confidence are there.

And if all goes as planned, maybe the end result will finally turn out to be the stuff of dreams.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.