"Mr. Merullo knows all the local guys who were thinking of signing me, and I told him that I wasn't going to sign, that I didn't want to be drafted by some team and have them pissed off at me when I'm draft-eligible again," Lentz says. "So I wrote a letter which he forwarded to all the teams."

Lentz entered Harvard in the fall of 1998 and almost immediately began having problems. Signed by Harvard football coach Tim Murphy as a football recruit as well, Lentz twisted his knee before the football season started and needed arthroscopic surgery to remove some of the cartilage. At that point he decided to drop football and concentrate on catching.

But he messed up again.

"Beginning the second semester, I was already on academic probation," Lentz says. "I just wasn't taking it seriously, blowing it off, and spring came around. I missed a Sunday morning baseball practice--slept through it--and [Harvard Coach Joe] Walsh cut me from the team."

Having already been in trouble earlier in the year for an alcohol-related incident, Coach Walsh was sending Lentz a clear message--clean up your act.

The freshman had a decision to make.

"It's tough...when you need that [achievement in high school athletics] to get into a school like Harvard. You never have that option of taking some time off after high school," Lentz says. "When things began to go bad, I decided I couldn't avoid the problems. I decided the best thing would be to get out of here for a couple months."

Lentz withdrew from Harvard for the spring semester and had to re-enroll in 1999 as a freshman. He came back and started every game behind the plate and was one of the few Crimson players who had a successful season. Though the team overall had trouble getting the bats going, Lentz finished first in on-base percentage (.363), second in hits (39), and third in RBI.