Heating Up—And Just in Time

You don’t measure the worth of a performance like this in batting average, or RBI, or feet, or even wins, although quantifying all four would be easy enough.

No, instead of looking at the box score, let’s try a more creative approach.

Let’s interrogate the guy Sky Mann effectively upstaged.

“Schuyler’s the man,” junior pitcher Frank Herrmann said after Saturday’s doubleheader against Yale.

No pun was intended. “I lost my voice screaming,” Herrmann said. “I’ve never been that excited in my life.”

High praise, especially coming from Herrmann—the righty who had hurled his second straight shutout just a few hours before Mann got the chance to take his breath away.

“Do you know he had five of our six RBI?” Herrmann added, grinning.

Indeed, in the second game of Saturday’s doubleheader against Yale, it took one particular at-bat for Harvard’s captain to give empirical proof to a markedly unscientific scouting report.

As the weather gets better, so does Schuyler Mann.

With Bulldog hurler Mike Mongiardini imitating Herrmann’s performance from the first game, the Crimson trailed 4-0 going into the eighth. Runners finally began reaching, but none could score. Soon, it was bases loaded, with Yale’s de facto closer Brett Rosenthal on the hill.

A struggling Mann—stuck in the seven-hole for the first time—was up.

Admittedly, while no thermometers were immediately on hand at O’Donnell Field, the sequence went something like this: one fastball, one swing, one grand slam into the shrubs of left-center.

Harvard 4, Yale 4.

“The thing with Schuyler,” Harvard coach Joe Walsh explained, “is that last year and the year before, he may have been the hottest hitter the second half of the season.”

Mann, however, wasn’t done yet.

Although the Crimson’s go-ahead run was notched later in the inning, a wild pitch knotted things up again at five in the top of the ninth.

Unfortunately for the Bulldogs, Harvard had last licks at home, and freshman Taylor Meehan did his part, singling to get on base.

“I wanted to be up there so bad,” Mann said. “I knew I was going to hit something hard.”

The senior ultimately got his chance.

It wasn’t a home run, but it was close enough. Mann punished a fastball 410 feet over the dejected head of Yale centerfielder Jake Doyle for a walk-off RBI double and another win for the Crimson’s Ivy-leading total.

In the end, one would imagine that it was then that the upstaged Herrmann lost his voice for good.

Not, of course, that he cared.

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