Rain may have pushed back today’s contests by a day, but there’s plenty of weekend baseball left in the crucial division-opening weekend for Ivy League baseball. Gehrig and Rolfe foes will battle amongst themselves in an effort to begin forging a playoff picture.
With reigning-champ Dartmouth struggling somewhat out of the gate, and upstarts Columbia and Brown setting the pace, this weekend could start to separate division contenders and pretenders. Let’s take a look around the Ivies:
Harvard softball players wearing purple ribbons.
The Harvard baseball and softball teams showed their muscle at the plate on Saturday, racking up 36 runs in four games, but the squads also put their strongest muscle on display: the heart.
Softball and baseball teamed up over the weekend to sponsor Friends of Jaclyn Day, an event focused on increasing awareness of pediatric brain tumors through FOJ—an organization that pairs collegiate and high school teams with children suffering from cancer.
“Where it began/ I can’t begin to know when…”
It only takes a few notes of Neil Diamond’s classic for any Boston Red Sox fan—or any baseball fan, for that matter—to instantly recognize "Sweet Caroline," the song that’s become the anthem for America’s pastime in Beantown.
Senior Dan Zailskas and the Crimson baseball team are pursuing their first division crown in the last four years.
For diehard baseball fans, the stretch of time between the World Series and spring training is a veritable sports wasteland. Sure, there’s some football, a little basketball, maybe some hockey here and there, but none of it compares to America’s Pastime.
Thankfully it’s April, and baseball is back. With spring trainining over, the Major Leagues have kicked off the regular season and all is right with the world. The Harvard baseball team has also been back in action, and with the first weekend of Ivy play under its belt, the Crimson finds itself in an unfamiliar place (at least in the last few years): first.
It’s a long road from the 28th round in the MLB Draft to a roster spot on a Major League Team, but former Harvard player Steffan Wilson '08 may have a chance to complete the journey this season. Wilson was added yesterday to the spring training roster for the Milwaukee Brewers, where he was called up to back MLB star Prince Fielder.
It was a big jump for Wilson, who spent last year playing in the Class A Advanced or “A+” league for the Brevard County, part of the Brewers’ farm system. He batted .272 with 13 home runs, 15 doubles, and 60 RBIs.
Wilson played baseball for the Crimson for three years before leaving Cambridge a year early to pursue his baseball dreams. Some regarded it as a bad move given that his junior year performance failed to match preseason expectations, but the first baseman couldn’t turn down a shot at his childhood dream of making the Big Leagues even if it meant leaving Harvard coach Joe Walsh and Harvard baseball behind. General manager Doug Melvin say his primarily role will be to allow Fielder to get some rest time in drills, a comment not surprisingly left off the GoCrimson update.
So while it remains unlikely that 2010 will be the magic year for Wilson to play in a regular season game, membership on the Spring Training roster means that he can always say he was on a major league baseball team even if it was just for spring training.
And he can always follow the lead of Brian Scalabrine, speaking here on not playing during the Celtics 2008 Title Run:
“Maybe now you could say I didn't play a second, but in five years, you guys are going to forget. In ten years I'll still be a champion. In 20 years I'll tell my kids I probably started, and in 30 years I'll probably tell them I got the MVP. So I'm probably not too worried about it.”
A Crimson article on Steffan Wilson from the 2007 season can be found here.
