BASEBALL '06: Byrne Among Last of a ‘Dying Breed’

The life of a two-sport varsity athlete can be a tough one.

Seasons can overlap, and then you’ve got to choose one team over another. The playing surfaces are different, and so you’ve got to jump from one conditioning regimen to another. And the time spent across the Charles—well, it adds up.

And then there’s the issue of loyalty, as Rob Fried ’04 indicated to The Crimson during his senior year. A hockey recruit and lacrosse walk-on, Fried explained that an incoming athlete “has a certain level of indebtedness to those coaches who facilitated his matriculation.”

And, Fried added, “some coaches do not feel comfortable with the two-sport commitment because of the risk of injury.”

Joe Walsh is not one of those coaches.

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“Where the two-sport athlete has gone at Harvard has been a huge disappointment to me,” says Walsh as he prepares to enter his 11th season at the helm of Harvard’s baseball program. “Growing up in this area, where everybody played, you just picked up what was going on.”

“Summer baseball, fall football, winter hockey—it all sounds obvious enough, but it’s just not the way things are anymore.”

Which is why Walsh is tickled to death with junior Brendan Byrne, his .300-hitting second baseman who moonlights as a backup forward on the hockey team until spring rolls around and the grass of O’Donnell Field beckons.

Along with sophomore Brad Unger, a forward on the basketball team, Bryne represents what Walsh calls a “dying breed.” He stays with the nationally-ranked skaters until mid-February, and then it’s over to the diamond, where skates become cleats, stick becomes bat, and Byrne steps onto the infield.

Walsh doesn’t think that a winter of hockey leaves his kid any less prepared. In fact, the coach says, “It’s a lot better than sitting around hitting off a tee. There’s a lot you can get from game action.”

And though he entered his freshman and sophomore seasons as a reserve behind one-time Red Sox draft pick Zak Farkes, Byrne ended each as the starter thanks to his timely hitting when presented with an opening.

He hit .326 last year in 35 games, 27 of which were starts, and his slugging percentage of .483 was sixth-best on the team. His on-base percentage was .388, and though he is listed at just 5’9, Byrne was drilled by six pitches last season—the three people to top him all started at least 43 games.

“It’s hard to keep him out of the lineup,” says current captain Morgan Brown.

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A hockey and baseball player since his youth, Byrne spoke with a number of Division I hockey programs—none, however, were as high-profile as the Crimson, with whose coaches Byrne had some contact.

They discussed the possibility of his walking onto the team, and Byrne knew “the only place I really wanted to play college baseball was Harvard—if not, I probably would have played hockey somewhere.”

So he came to Cambridge, not so far from Milton Academy, where he captained both teams as a senior.

He was content to play JV hockey—“just for fun,” he says, “just to kind of screw around”—until Kenny Turano ’04 broke his ankle in early February 2004 and Byrne got the call up. His first game and only game came this November, two years later, but when he graduates, Byrne will have had eight years of varsity Harvard athletics under his belt—not something a lot of people can say these days.

“I like those guys that are playing two sports,” Walsh says. “I don’t think you’ll have a lot of coaches that will say that.”

But Walsh’s strategy is simple—“I just think, ‘Hey, you should get out there and play,’” he says—and it suits Byrne just fine.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.