BREAKOUT ATHLETE OF THE YEAR: Frank Herrmann

The recruit stayed in Cambridge but for a fleeting afternoon—time enough, in other words, for Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh’s brief glimpse of the future.

“He drove up from Jersey and was here for about three hours,” Walsh recounts of his first encounter with Frank Herrmann, then a junior at New Jersey’s Montclair Kimberly Academy, “and then Frankie drove back to football practice.”

The setting: Walsh’s camp for prospective Crimson ballplayers.

“We hit a couple of one-hoppers to him out in right field and he threw a couple of one-hoppers to the plate,” Walsh says. “And I said, ‘We’re going to get that boy on the mound some day.’”

Four years later, Walsh’s prescience came full circle.

Now a Harvard junior, Herrmann, the strapping 6’4, 220-pound bulldog of the Crimson pitching staff, blew Ivy League hitters away during his breakout 2005 campaign.

It wasn’t always so easy.

After two nondescript seasons as a spot starter and bat off the bench—until this season, his greatest collegiate accomplishment was pounding two home runs in a 2004 loss to Northeastern—Herrmann appeared to be set for a career as a useful two-way utility player, and not the indispensable star he became.

Key to his offseason metamorphosis was a summer stint in the 13-team New England Collegiate Baseball League.

Relying on steady control and improved velocity, Herrmann finished second on the Berkshire Dukes—the team run by former Red Sox GM Dan Duquette—with a 2.49 ERA. More importantly, he honed his approach on the advice of players from around the country.

“I learned,” Herrmann says. “I was just talking to different teammates and stuff. How they gripped the ball, how they through in the offseason, how often they did long-toss.

“I was getting different pieces from different places. It was the learning experience more than anything.”

Herrmann arrived in the fall with what he calls “a new perspective and new attitude.”

He watched how teammates Mike Morgalis, the staff veteran, and Shawn Haviland, the rookie, prepared to pitch. He primed himself for a regular spot in a weekend rotation that—with Morgalis’ injured foot and Haviland’s unproven track record as concerns—looked shaky at season’s onset.

“Everybody knew we could hit the ball,” he says. “Pitching was a void we needed to fill.”

Early on, Herrmann wowed coaches and teammates in throwing sessions. But he didn’t surprise himself.

“I knew how hard I worked,” he says.

Walsh, for his part, saw visions of success.

“I tell you what,” Walsh says now, “in the gym, it was earlier in the year, and I pulled him over. I said, ‘You just went from being a suspect to a prospect.’”

“He was bringing it,” Walsh adds.

Immediately, Herrmann displayed breakout potential. In his first start, a March 13 appearance at the indoor Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, the junior shut out Minnesota—a team that would finish with a winning record in the Big Ten—over six innings in an eventual 9-1 win.

By the arrival of the Ivy season, Herrmann had locked in. From his complete game one-hitter against Cornell on April 9 to his two-hit shutout against Yale on April 16, Herrmann allowed just three hits and one run over 14 dominant innings.

Herrmann battled through tendonitis and struggled in subsequent starts against Penn and Dartmouth, but then returned to finish a nine-inning complete game shutout in Game 1 of the Ivy Championship Series against Cornell.

Through it all, Herrmann never stopped working.

“He’s very devoted to weightlifting,” Walsh says. “He does all the right things in there. And those are the things, the sacrifices that you’re going to make on your own, and he’s done that.”

Surprised by his success?

“Not surprised by his work ethic,” Walsh says.

Herrmann maintains that he can “always tell” when he hasn’t worked hard in the gym before a start.

“I don’t know if it’s mental or physical or what,” he says. “If I half-assed it that week, I’m second-guessing myself.”

To the observer, “second-guessing” doesn’t appear to be part of the Herrmann vocabulary. Off the field, his spirit is jovial, self-assured, and straightforward—with a dash of raucous humor.

“He’s got these one-liners,” Walsh testifies, “that just go and go.”

On the field, Herrmann remains dogged. It is commonplace to see the broad-shouldered pitcher—Walsh once reported that Herrmann could play a passable linebacker for football coach Tim Murphy—pop his glove with a growl after striking out a batter to end an inning.

“He wants the ball,” Walsh says. “He’s a bulldog. Nothing’s going to bother him. He’s a team leader.”

“I tell you what,” Walsh adds. “If we’ve got two teams and something breaks out, I’m going in right behind Frankie!”

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.