Brian Lentz has just been asked whether the fact that he’s never won an Ivy League championship in his Harvard baseball career grates on him, and he smiles.

“A lot of things grate on me,” he says. “That’s one of them.”

Lentz is holding court on the rocks in front of the Science Center almost serenely—cap backwards with a cursive “Crimson” on his forehead, slice of pizza in his hand. He has just emerged from a lecture about the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. A few feet away, prison activists have constructed a hut intended to simulate solitary confinement cells in American prisons.

In a couple of hours, Lentz will head off to baseball practice. In a couple of months, Lentz will finally graduate from Harvard College.

Between now and then, there are weeks of the national pastime.

“It feels like a bonus,” says Lentz, the senior catcher on the Harvard baseball team. “A second chance to come back, it’s nice. You have a chance to come and play college baseball again, go to school, do all the things that you like to do.”

Between now and then, as for every senior, there are weeks of reflection.

“I don’t think the teams I’ve been on here have been disappointments to anybody, and I certainly don’t think I’ve let people down with my play on the field,” Lentz says. “Although you could make a case for me letting people down in other ways. I’ve always played hard here, had success, played injured…I wasn’t bothered by it because I was surrounded by good ball players on good teams and caught a few tough breaks.”

Lentz enjoys his slice of pizza and a chat on the rocks outside of the Science Center. It is 57 degrees out, teasingly warm for mid-March in Cambridge, and this will make for a better outdoor practice later on. Such days come along, at least at this time of year, seemingly whenever they feel like it. March is supposed to storm in like a lion and go out like a lamb, but the products of New England weather are necessarily unpredictable.

The arm is slower now. Lentz won’t volunteer much about most things in life that grate on him, but this comes of his own admission.

Not that this should make him an ineffective catcher. Lentz’ right arm, even if weaker than in past years, is still better than what most catchers work with every day. Eighty or ninety percent of the speed to second once displayed by arguably the best underclass catching prospect in baseball is still pretty good.

Besides, as Lentz will note, controlling a game from behind the plate is about more than just having a cannon. “It doesn’t have as much of an impact on what you can do as a catcher as a lot of people think,” Lentz says. “There are plenty of ways to get the ball to second base. It doesn’t have to be at 99 miles per hour. The smaller things, the less noticeable things you do as a catcher as far as framing and receiving pitches, calling pitches, running defenses will come into play on every pitch, whereas you’ll maybe throw to a bag once or twice in a game.”

Ask pitchers about Brian Lentz, and they’ll start with his head.

“He takes all the pressure of calling the ballgame off of you as a pitcher,” says Harvard captain and reliever Barry Wahlberg. “As a pitcher, all you wanna do is go out there and throw, you don’t wanna think about the game, and he takes that out of our hands, and basically calls a great game every time out.”

See? There’s more to it than just the hose. Still, anyone who ever saw him play would take notice when they hear Lentz suggest that it’s lost a bit over the years—possibly due to overuse.