BASEBALL '07: Front and Center

Even as a heavily recruited shortstop out of Solana Beach, Calif., Matt Vance knew that baseball at the college level would require adjustments to his game. But when he prepared to suit up for his first action in a Harvard uniform, he realized that playing for the Crimson would be even more of a change than he had anticipated.

“I had never played outfield before,” Vance recalls. “Then I look up at the lineup card, and I’m playing centerfield and leading off the game.”

Vance’s new placement was understandable: Morgan Brown ’06 would go on to earn All-Ivy League honors at shortstop in his junior and senior seasons, and Vance’s blazing speed made him an asset in centerfield and at the top of coach Joe Walsh’s batting order.

Still, Vance’s future with the team seemed pretty clear: Brown would graduate in June 2006, leaving a hole at shortstop that he would scamper in to fill.

But an injury during a simple weightlifting drill two weeks before the start of the 2006 season changed Vance’s plans.

The diagnosis: a torn labrum in his right (throwing) shoulder that would require surgery after the ’06 campaign. As a result, Vance served as Walsh’s designated hitter for much of the Crimson’s non-conference schedule, returning to centerfield in a March 27 game against Barry University in Florida.

Despite uncertainty about the severity of his injury, the Ivy League slate turned out to be a coming-out party for Vance, who recorded a .391 batting average (.318 overall, up over 40 percentage points from his rookie mark) and .591 on-base percentage against Ancient Eight opponents and added 25 steals in 29 attempts overall to pick up an All-Ivy First Team nod.

“When he’s up, you feel like anything can happen,” junior Jeff Stoeckel says. “I don’t know if there’s anyone else on the team that can provide his kind of electricity.”

Harvard’s outstanding regular season ended when Princeton pulled the plug on its championship plans, sweeping the first two games of the Ivy League Championship Series last May at O’Donnell Field. Just like that, Vance’s stolen time had run out, and the time came to face the looming shoulder surgery. While his teammates were playing in the nation’s top summer leagues, Vance was at home in California, recovering from the operation and working at Staples—“the worst job ever,” he jokes.

Worse yet, with the injury and lengthy rehabilitation, Vance lost his grip on the starting shortstop job he had so highly anticipated. With his shoulder still ailing and Stoeckel making great strides at short in the offseason, Vance will likely see most of his time in centerfield for the third straight year.

“It is definitely a downer,” Vance says.“Last year, I thought that I was going to get to play shortstop, then I rip my shoulder and now it’s, ‘We’ll see.’ But that’s how Coach has done it.”

After waiting until October to begin throwing for the first time since his surgery, Vance admits that he might have pushed himself too hard in an effort to regain his strength. He wound up having to rest his arm for over a month more, taking up normal throwing workouts again in early February.

Though Vance’s nine-month recovery has been an up-and-down journey, it’s been mostly up as of late. With the Crimson’s non-conference schedule under way and the Ivy League opener at Penn approaching on April 2, Vance has made his greatest strides toward a full recovery in the last few weeks of the offseason.

“These past couple of weeks, we’ve had to tighten up because we’re running out of time to get ready,” he says. “I’m definitely not where I want to be, but I’m close enough to the point where it shouldn’t affect me.”

While Vance is anxious to get back into the swing of things—he hadn’t faced real competition in nearly 10 months before leading off Harvard’s March 10 season opener against Quinnipiac—the Crimson coaching staff remembers the heartbreak of Vance’s injury all too vividly.

“He feels he’s on time, but we’re being real careful with him, real cautious,” Walsh says. “We thought he’d be a little ahead of where he is right now, but it’s an injury that takes some time, and we’re not going to rush it.”

It helps that Walsh doesn’t have to rush Vance back to shortstop. Stoeckel, who, along with five other members of the team, happens to be Vance’s suitemate, walked on to the squad as a sophomore and saw limited time as a utility infielder last season. At the plate, Stoeckel—with just three singles in 20 career at-bats—won’t scare opposing pitchers the way Vance does, but his quick hands remind the Crimson coaching staff of the solid defense Brown brought to that position during his All-Ivy campaigns.

“Stoeckel has played all summer and worked really hard at it,” Walsh says. “For a team that’s not going to score a lot of runs, that’s going to beat you with pitching and defense, shortstop is going to be a huge position for us.”

Vance, on the other hand, is a leading candidate to fill the power shortage in the Harvard order, which lost several big bats to graduation after last season. In designing prospective lineups, the coaching staff has been torn between putting his explosive bat in the middle of the lineup or his burning speed at the top. Though he went deep only once in 2006, Vance found the gaps with regularity, tallying 10 doubles and five triples—and the hitters coming up behind him were more than happy to drive him home.

In the early going this season, Walsh seems to be sticking with that formula—Vance has led off each of the Crimson’s four games thus far.

“He’s definitely the quickest kid on the team—the best base-stealing threat we have out there,” junior Taylor Meehan says. “But as much as we’re looking for him to get on base for us, we also need him to hit for power. He’s developed a lot more, and the coaches are going to be asking him to do more.”

Vance’s quick bat and quick feet on the basepaths will be instrumental to Harvard’s success no matter where he hits in the lineup—and no matter where he plays in the field. So keeping Vance in centerfield for the time being, then alternating Stoeckel and Vance at shortstop as the shoulder heals, may be Harvard’s best bet.

“To think that someone coming off surgery could play four games at shortstop would be unrealistic on our part—it would be setting [Vance] up to fail,” says assistant coach Tom Lo Ricco. “Once Vance’s arm is healthy, it’s as good as any. But [Stoeckel] may be doing a good enough job that we won’t have to move him.”

While the Crimson brain trust feels pretty good about the flexibility that alternating Vance and Stoeckel affords it, Vance can’t help but remember the excitement he once felt about taking over the starting role at shortstop.

He points out that Stoeckel and second baseman Brendan Byrne give Harvard a great duo up on the middle—“in the field, Stoeckel’s one of our best,” he says—but admits that talking about lineups with Stoeckel can get “kind of touchy.”

“If I had my choice, I’d be playing shortstop every day,” Vance says. “But if I’m out there in center, so be it. We’re just trying to put the best lineup out there.”

As Walsh realized upon Vance’s arrival two seasons ago, the best Harvard lineup has Vance at the top. And if Vance is happy with his position, the Crimson could find itself at the top of the Ivy League come springtime.

—Staff writer Emily W. Cunningham can be reached at ecunning@fas.harvard.edu.