The first Big Weekend of the season was now upon Harvard. The team stood 14-1, 5-0 in the Greater Boston League, but 0-1 in the critical Eastern League as it went up against Navy on Friday and Princeton in a doubleheader on the following day.

To put the weekend into perspective, many of the ten teams in the EIBL (the Ivy League plus Army and Navy) had finished or played most of their respective 14-game seasons. To make post-season playoffs Harvard had to finish either first or second in the league, which roughly meant winning ten or 11 of its league games. Two losses over the weekend would dig an almost inescapable hole for Harvard. As Park pointed out, "The kids at this juncture saw in their eyes what was ahead of them."

The squad traveled to Annapolis on Friday, April 29, and a sloppy fourth inning ("Our only bad inning of baseball all season," Park said) paved a yellow brick basepath for Navy, as the Midshipmen edged the Crimson, 6-3. "This was one of the few times all year that we let the game get away from us, that we lost control of the thing," Park said later.

It was anything but the same the following day in New Jersey, which was most likely Harvard's most glorious afternoon of the spring. It wasn't so much that the squad swept a hard-hitting Princeton club to even its EIBL record at 2-2, but how they flawlessly displayed their dominance.

In the opener sophomore left-hander Paul McOsker threw "One of the finest game I've seen at Harvard," Park said. The southpaw handcuffed the Princetonians for three hits over ten innings, as it took his mates three extra frames before the batsmen exploded for six runs in the top of the tenth for a 6-0 victory.

Errorless defensive play and timely hitting prevailed in the second game once more. On the hill sophomore Timmy Clifford reeled off ten strikeouts to tame the Tigers, 7-3, while at the plate the steady heroes were emerging--Singleton, Santos-Buch, Stenhouse, Bingham, St. John. Omaha didn't seem continents away anymore.

On Monday, May 2, Harvard met up with a fiery B.C squad in the GBL grudge match at Soldiers Field. The Eagles got their revenge in the sweetest of all ways. Down 6-1 in the seventh, Boston College went though half a dozen Harvard hurlers en route to a come-from-behind 10-7 victory.

But as was the special quality of the 1977 edition of Harvard baseball, they never looked back, only ahead. Brown was the next prey in the team's sights and was soon coldly dispatched, 9-2, on May 6. Mike Stenhouse a freshmen second baseman from Cranston, Rhode Island, fired the biggest shots on the visitors from his home state, hammering two home runs to give McOsker all the runs he needed and Harvard its third win in the Eastern League.

Major league scouts from various teams were making their usual Saturday afternoon rounds of the New England colleges. Word had already circulated about the two Stenhouse shots of the day before, and the easy victory over Brown, and the Boys from the Bigs came out to see if all the hub-bub over Stenhouse and Harvard was worth it. It was. The Crimson decked Northeastern, 7-4, for the second time and Stenhouse, acting at the plate like he was taking a screen test for the movie version of "The Natural," cranked out two more round-trippers.

Indeed, things were going Harvard's way to this point in the season. They had virtually clinched the Greater Boston League title; all that was needed was a win over Brandeis in ten days. As for the Eastern League, a doubleheader scheduled again Penn earlier in the year had been postponed, and would not be played unless Harvard had a shot at the title. Aside from the two games with Penn and the Brandeis showdown, the Crimson had seven Eastern League games remaining. Very simply, they had to win six of them, then at least split the replayed Penn twin bill, to make the playoffs.

It just didn't make sense. After all the class and strong play the team had shown thus far in jetting to an 18-3 record, it would still be an uphill basepath to post-season competition. To the unobjective fan it seemed unfair, to the Harvard baseball team it didn't seem to matter. The ballclub was so uniformed in confidence that the challenge of the Eastern League was welcomed. There was very little now that needed to be proved. The freshmen had shown their consistent talent, Loyal Park had reaffirmed his.

But there were some things over which the Harvard squad didn't have control. The Yale doubleheader, scheduled for Monday, May 9, was postponed to Tuesday, then Thursday on account of rain. It meant that Harvard would have to play five crucial Eastern League games in three days.

In addition, the University's famous "Reading Period During Spring Sports Season" had come around, so academic pressure had now worked its way into every strike zone, every pitching motion, and every individual psyching procedure. Somehow, in the midst of this grand conflict, optimism still reigned.

The team did not play well in the Yale twinbill and that, coupled with Yale's mediocre team rising to the occasion, made for two exciting ball games.

In the opener Peter Bannish, last season the starting first baseman for the Crimson and this season Park's top (and only) left-handed reliever, used this day to turn in his best performance of the year. The Crimson, on the strength of the southpaw's three-inning stint, rallied from a 4-1 deficit to overtake the Elis, 6-4. Offensively, Dave Singleton shone with a 4-for-4 day at the dish, but the big play was donated by little-used outfielder Bobby Jenkins. The speedy Jenkins, yet another one of Park's adept freshmen, singled as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning and eventually scored what proved to be the winning run when he scampered homeward on a wild pitch. He was met at the plate by a furious bear hug from Park.