But you know what happens next? You go home. Or to a hotel. And you calm down, make adjustments, take some deep breaths and remind yourself that one bad day isn’t going to decide your season. It’s a long year, and it’s just one game out of 60.
But the Harvard baseball team can’t do that.
Saturday was, by all accounts, just one bad day, but unfortunately it has to be more than that, too.
Saturday was one-tenth of the Ivy League season and one-sixth of the division schedule.
Saturday was enough to start the season over again. The Crimson began the day a game up on Brown and Dartmouth in the Red Rolfe standings, and it concluded it in a four-way tie for first place at 7-3. The too-short Ivy League season was all of a sudden even shorter, beginning again with only 10 games remaining on the schedule.
Both the Northeast’s wretched weather and the Ivy League’s stringent travel restrictions artificially condense the conference schedule into one month of exhausting play. The early-season swings through the South are in practice just preseason tune-ups, used to find a fourth starter and actually see some live pitching for the first time in six months. In a league where it’s virtually impossible for a team to receive an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament, none of that matters.
The real season is only one month long, and all of a sudden one bad day becomes a lot more than it should be in the game of baseball.
I guess that’s the price you have to pay for playing in a league where you face aces named Josh—instead of Jeremy—Sowers and graduate with a degree that could earn you big-league dollars even if you’re never drafted. But sometimes, when you’re used to seasons that stretch on forever, it doesn’t feel much like baseball.
The Crimson pulled it together to split a pair yesterday, and now stands one game behind division-leading Dartmouth. It looks like it will once again come down to the season’s final weekend, the home-and-home series between the Crimson and the Big Green.
No matter how the season begins, it always comes down to that last doubleheader.
The smart money says it won’t be another bad day.
—Staff writer Lande A. Spottswood can be reached at spottsw@fas.harvard.edu.