For the Love of the Game

It’s Game 6 of the 2003 World Series.

All eyes are on 23-year-old Florida Marlins pitcher Josh Beckett, starting on three days’ rest with his team one win away from beating the New York Yankees and clinching the title. But while most spectators are watching the ball fly out of Beckett’s hand as he dismantles the Yankees’ lineup en route to a complete-game shutout, Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh has his gaze set just above the open top button of Beckett’s jersey.

“He’s wearing the Harvard shirt,” Walsh remembers thinking. “You could see the ‘R’.”

Walsh and the Crimson had given Beckett a Harvard t-shirt when he joined the team for dinner on one of its spring break trips to Florida, and now it claimed a share—just a sliver, but a share nonetheless—of the spotlight on baseball’s biggest stage.

This is the reality of Joe Walsh. He is not, and probably never will be, a household name for fans of America’s pastime. Such is life in the Ivy League. But Walsh has lived the elusive dream of “getting a paycheck from doing something you love.” He’s an innovator, the first Northeast coach to hold a Scouting Day; he’s sent players to minor league fields and major league front offices; and, in the prestigious Cape Cod Baseball League, he’s coached some of the greatest athletes in the history of the game.

In his own way, through the countless relationships he’s forged over a career spanning three decades and a coaching philosophy rooted in a lifelong love affair with baseball, Walsh’s imprint on the sport can be felt at every level.

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If Walsh never imagined he’d be a Harvard coach the first time he stepped onto the school’s baseball field, it’s probably because he had just jumped over the fence.

Suffolk University—where Walsh played college ball and began his coaching career—had no home field, so Walsh and his teammates would come across the river to Cambridge and use Harvard’s.

More than 30 years later, Walsh is the same blue-collar kid from Dorchester, still feeling most comfortable on the baseball diamond—regardless of its owner.

“You can’t be around Coach Walsh and not know how much he loves baseball,” says former Harvard pitcher Shawn Haviland ’07, now a farmhand with the Oakland A’s. “It goes beyond love—he lives baseball.”

Walsh also still carries an underdog mentality that got him through years of coaching a Division-III Suffolk team that managed to win despite negligible resources and prepared him as he made the transition to Harvard.

Before former athletic director Bill Cleary ’56 hired him in 1995, Walsh says there were doubts about his ability to make the switch to coaching Division-I talent. This was news to a guy who in 1988, his first year managing in the Cape League, had a first baseman named Dave Staton, “the greatest hitter who ever lived,” according to Walsh.

If even a serious baseball fan hasn’t heard of Staton, it’s because he only played 46 games in the majors. But the names of his backups might sound more familiar: Frank Thomas and Mo Vaughn.

After watching Walsh coach in the Cape (as well as pulling into work at seven in the morning to find Walsh waiting with a message: “No one wants this job more than I do.”) Cleary knew he had his man.

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At Harvard—a place not normally associated with the plucky underdog—Walsh inherited a baseball team that lacked discipline and was unfamiliar with success. So while he had an endowed position and more financial security than he had ever experienced in his life, it was no time to remove the chip from his shoulder.

The first call Walsh received in his new office—which sported a “desk” made from a door resting on two file cabinets—came from a lawyer in Texas whose son had previously expressed interest in playing at Harvard.

“Coach, my son is thinking about going to Yale,” the lawyer said, “and I just noticed that the Yale coach has a professional background and you don’t. What is your background?”

“Well, I’ll give you my immediate background,” Walsh responded. “For the last 24 hours I’ve been in this office with a bottle of 409 cleaning fluid. Your son can go to Yale, and when we see him in the spring we’re gonna rip him.”

That season, Walsh instilled the same fiery spirit in a previously-lackluster Crimson team.

“He came in and changed the culture and the attitude of the program,” says David Forst ’98, now Oakland’s assistant general manager.

Harvard won the Ivy League title in 1997 and 1998, and the lawyer’s son never beat the Crimson, according to Walsh.

***

Walsh has had good seasons and bad seasons as Harvard’s coach, but his competitiveness, intensity, and love for the game have never wavered.

“He coaches not to lose,” says Peter Woodfork ’99, assistant GM of the Arizona Diamondbacks. “He pushes the envelope. He wants to win games.”

These qualities have transferred to many of his former players, who have passed on lucrative post-college careers in finance and consulting to keep playing baseball until “they rip the jersey off,” as Steffan Wilson ’08, a minor leaguer in the Brewers system who has been called to the major league camp in Spring Training, puts it.

With many of his former players working their way through the minors or taking positions in major league front offices, Walsh continues to be a valuable resource for those in the know.

“In addition to being an outstanding baseball person, his knowledge and experience is something that you don’t take lightly,” says Mike Hill ’93, general manager of the Florida Marlins. “[If] he calls you and he says there’s a player he likes, you take notice.”

But despite his extensive network throughout the broader baseball community, the Harvard coach is most concerned with what’s happening on the field—his field. Because while Walsh values what he’s done in the past, the real thrill comes from what’s next—the next pitch, the next inning, the next game. Baseball.

“I don’t think there’s a moment that passes where he’s not thinking about it,” Wilson says of Walsh and baseball. Then, echoing his former teammate Haviland, Wilson spells out the reality of Joe Walsh.

“He lives the game.”

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@fas.harvard.edu.