Records Crumble Before Farkes

HANOVER, N.H.—On a weekend when the Big Green faithful refused to keep their mouths shut, Zak Farkes let his bat do all the talking.

And in the end, the resounding ping of rawhide striking metal wasn’t only deafening.

It was historic.

Farkes belted four critical home runs over a span of four games against Dartmouth—three during Saturday’s doubleheader and one during yesterday’s—shattering Harvard’s single-season mark of 10 and breaking the Crimson’s all-time record of 21.

Farkes closed out the season with an incredible 14 round-trippers—tops in the Ivy League—bringing him to 22 overall.

The infielder, by the way, has accomplished all of this in exactly two years.

“What can I say,” Harvard coach Joe Walsh said. “Every time the kid comes up to bat I’m down at the third base box just saying, ‘Hey, what’s going to happen next?’ But what most people don’t realize is that he’s just a sophomore.”

In the third inning of Game 1, a grand slam dramatically launched Farkes into the record books and past the single-season home run tally originally set by Pete Varney ’71.

After Varney, Mike Stenhouse ’80, Nick DelVecchio ’92 and Brian Ralph ’98 all tied the record, but Farkes is the first player in 34 years to surpass it.

“It’s an honor,” Farkes said. “I know a lot of great players have played here.”

But by no means was the Boston native finished.

Eighteen innings and two more home runs later, the infielder hit number 22 of his career in Hanover—a three-run shot—to break the all-time mark.

“I just went up there and tried to keep my swing going,” Farkes said. “When I hit the ball well, it’s going to go out, and I know that. All I do is try to put the barrel on the ball, and if I don’t hit a home run, then hopefully it’ll be a ball up the middle.”

The fact that the former seems to occur more often than the latter, arguably, becomes even more remarkable once one takes into account not only Farkes’ age, or even his deceptively unthreatening stature—he charitably stands at 5’11, 195 lbs.—but the relatively trying schedule of modern-day Harvard baseball.

Whereas in previous years the school has scheduled Division III teams and other softer non-conference opponents for the early portion of the schedule, the Crimson has replaced them this season with major Division I opponents such as Michigan, Texas Tech and Louisiana-Lafayette.

“[I have] nothing against those players that hit it before,” Walsh said.

“But we’re playing some pretty good ballclubs. There aren’t a lot of MITs and Tufts that are on our schedule that were back then. He’s hitting some homers off some pretty good pitchers.”

And if you ask anyone on the team about what makes Zak Farkes good enough to hit those home runs, you inevitably return to the one thing the sophomore is even more notorious for than home runs: work ethic.

“He just comes to play every day,” Walsh said. “If we’re out on the field at 10:30 a.m., he’s at the batting cages at 9. You just can’t beat him to the ballpark. If you’ve got that work ethic in anything, it’s going to pay off for you, and he’s showing it at the plate.”

On Saturday and yesterday, noticeably, Dartmouth fans repeatedly shouted chants of “Eddie’s better” at Farkes—a reference to Big Green shortstop Ed Lucas, who headed into the weekend batting .458—but their jeers were without reason, to say the least.

The Crimson infielder out-hit Lucas during the series by a margin of six hits to three and 16 RBI to just six by his Dartmouth counterpart. Lucas has hit four home runs this season.

Farkes hit four this weekend.

“Those fans made me focused even more,” Farkes said. “It’s great to have people out here, whether they’re rooting for us or rooting against us. It just brings up the whole level of the game.”

But if you’d only heard that sound of rawhide striking metal, you wouldn’t even need to hear him say that.

Without hearing a word, you’d already know that no one had raised his game more than Zak Farkes.

Not then, not now, and maybe not ever.

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