“Captain Dana Joseph Paine Wingate ’14, of Winchester, Mass., short stop, entered College three years ago from Exeter where he captained the team and played third base. He was third base and captain of his Freshman team. Last year he played short stop and third base on the University team. He is 22 years old, is 5 feet 8 1-2 inches tall, and weighs 135 pounds…”

—The Harvard Crimson, June 17, 1913

Senior Chaney Sheffield is a good four inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than the Crimson’s description of Wingate, who played back when Babe Ruth had yet to don a Red Sox uniform, let alone get dealt to the Yankees. Sheffield’s resemblance to Wingate in the mind’s eye of a local Boston journalist—along with a timely milestone in Boston sports history—combined to alter Sheffield’s role on the Harvard baseball team and give the Crimson a much-needed boost at the plate.

Confusing? Baseball teems with such convoluted tales. This one happens to begin before World War I.

Dana and Me

It was on April 9, 1912, that Dana Wingate ’14, the third baseman for the Harvard baseball team, stepped into the batter’s box to lead off an exhibition game against the Boston Red Sox. With this game, the Red Sox christened their new facility, a still-unfinished structure called Fenway Park. Wingate became Fenway’s first batter, and the full significance of this was probably lost on him—Wingate died in 1918.

But Fenway’s status in baseball lore swelled with the decades, and the Red Sox’ 100th anniversary last year rekindled media interest in the park and its history. Steve Buckley, a baseball columnist for the Boston Herald who also does sports spots for New England Cable News, wanted to produce a segment on Fenway’s first at-bat. In search of a possible body double for Wingate as part of the spot, he visited a Harvard baseball practice run by Coach Joe Walsh.

“We were walking around the ballpark and [Buckley] said, ‘He looks like him,’” Walsh says. “And it’s Chaney Sheffield.”

Sheffield, then a junior, had not been one of the more heavily used Crimson pitchers that year. On a team with such standouts as classmates Ben Crockett and Justin Nyweide along with stalwart staff ace John Birtwell ’01, Sheffield saw limited action. He threw in seven games last year and started only one, picking up a win and a save in 16 total innings. Sheffield had seen even less time the previous season.

But something in Sheffield’s demeanor during that practice caught Buckley’s eye and made him think of the famed Wingate.

“I knew I wanted to get a kid that looked like him,” Buckley says of Sheffield. “He looked like him, had the right kind of trot, good smile, seemed the right kind of guy. He sort of looked like an old -timer. Then we put the uniform on and he was a dead ringer for him.”

Sheffield put on a vintage uniform, grabbed a bat and reluctantly swung at live pitching for Buckley’s cameraman. But as Sheffield kept swinging, the balls jumped right off the wooden bat Buckley had lent him.

“The best thing about this kid was that when I was introduced to him, he wanted nothing to do with it,” Buckley says. “It was only after we had him up there for a while and started swinging that he got into it.”

As the camera rolled, Walsh saw how the balls were flying and realized that Sheffield—who had occasionally been brought in as a defensive replacement in the outfield and on the basepaths—may have had a future in the lineup.