“In practice, the pitchers shag balls for batting practice,” Sheffield says. “For me, it was the most fun part of practice, and Coach saw that I had good speed.”
Sheffield has an athletic versatility that has served him beyond baseball. Growing up in Woodland Hills, Calif., he was captain of Viewpoint High’s soccer team in addition to being a two-time captain of the baseball team. A few seniors on the Harvard team have taken to calling him “Country Club,” a play on his affinity for and skill at golf and racquet sports. Walsh attributes the sobriquet to Chaney’s overall athleticism, but Sheffield has another explanation.
“A couple of the seniors make fun of me,” Sheffield says. “I play golf, tennis, a little squash. My main problem is I’m real bad at basketball, [which] everyone else plays when they’re not playing baseball, so they make fun of me. It’s not that fun a nickname.”
That weakness aside, the rest of the team appreciates his myriad skills and love of the sport he actually plays most often.
“He’s Mr. Everything,” says teammate and fellow senior Mark Mager. “He really is.”
Chaney did a little bit of “everything” during Sunday’s doubleheader against Columbia. He started the second game and gave the Crimson six solid innings after high scoring games earlier in the weekend had depleted the bullpen. He struck out six batters, then moved to left field and proceeded to line a double deep to left, later scoring on a wild pitch to give the Crimson some insurance. In the first game, Sheffield nearly prevented a double with a sharp throw to second.
All this on a pulled hamstring that had aggravated Sheffield for weeks.
“You knew he was feeling every pitch,” Mager said.
Sheffield took injured sophomore Marc Hordon’s spot in the rotation this week, but this weekend proved that the senior will be a vital cog for the Crimson even after everyone is healthy.
“He’s inspiring,” Mager said. “Especially with what he’s done here, walking on as a freshman, he’ll probably end up being one of our key players this year. Just seeing him play, you know that he loves the game.”
Sheffield’s ability to turn a JV spot into a relief/spot-starting role—and then turn that into a fairly regular gig in right field—is enough to make one wonder how else he can surprise in this, his final season with the Crimson.
“If he turns into a big major league star, I want everybody to know it was my bat he was using that day,” Buckley says.
Considering the size difference alone, Buckley’s pegging Sheffield for Dana Wingate that day may have been a stretch. But perhaps Buckley had read a lot into his own research. In an April 29, 2001 Herald article about Wingate, Buckley quoted one of the paper’s columns from 1918. The column remembered Wingate as “that rare, clean athletic type,” someone who was “immensely popular.”