While most of the baseball world focuses on the World Series between the Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves, a second-semester senior from Kirkland House is focusing squarely on next year's spring training.

Not on watching spring training, but on participating in it.

And while you may find Ted Decareau in one of his three classes at Harvard this semester (or you may not--he is taking two of them pass-fail), you can be sure to find him hanging around the batting cage at Briggs Field, or working out with the baseball team, trying to get in some extra swings and time in the field.

Decareau knows the hard work it takes to get into professional baseball, because he has done it before.

He was drafted out of his junior year at Harvard and spent a season in the San Diego Padres organization before a shoulder injury knocked him out of baseball almost seven months ago.

Before being drafted, the Norwood native spent three years at Harvard, including three seasons on the baseball team playing in right field.

While all college players become eligible for professional baseball after three years of enrollment in school, Decareau, a concentrator in history, had no intention of leaving Harvard for baseball.

There was no lack of interest in him, however.

Decareau received inquiries from several ball clubs, but none of them could give the Harvard ballplayer an offer that made him want to leave Cambridge prematurely.

Offer He Couldn't Refuse

"I was planning on coming back my senior year. I didn't think anyone would give me the kind of offer I wanted," Decareau said.

Enter the Padres.

"I had never even talked to the Padres before they drafted me," he said.

But in the 42nd round of the 1990 spring draft, the Padres picked Decareau, and promptly set out to get him.

Signed with Padres