There was Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh, stoically positioned in front of O’Donnell Field’s home dugout, clearly choked up.

There he was, ignoring the miserably biting wind, the lifeless cold, the crooked numbers on the scoreboard and the empty seats. Northeastern had just pounded Harvard on the last game of the season, 12-6, in a non-conference makeup that hadn’t meant a lick. But it hurt.

Walsh took a moment to collect himself, then gathered the team for a final meeting. He cleared his throat to talk, but his voice faltered. Against the elements, against the dejection that should have come from a season capsized in the final week, the largeness of Walsh’s pride in his Crimson ballplayers shone through.

“I told them that I thought we played the last couple of weekends like warriors,” Walsh said after the meeting, sincere as ever. “I thought we came out there, and we were warriors.”

The story of the season. Words like “warrior” and “soldier” get thrown around quite a bit in sports—perhaps more than many would care to hear—but if there ever was a team that went down fighting, it was the 2004 version of Harvard baseball.

The Crimson (21-18-1, 13-7 Ivy) entered the Ivy season’s final weekend two games behind Dartmouth in the Red Rolfe division standings, needing three wins out of four against the Big Green—the nation’s hottest-hitting team at the time—to force a one-game playoff.

Harvard took Dartmouth down to the very last game, coming up excruciatingly short—by a score of 7-2—in the end. That was the unfortunate finale of two exhilarating weeks of offensive fireworks, cathartic comebacks and late-inning heroics.

In the end, the season’s final turn of fortunes did little to overshadow the spring of 2004’s many positives for Harvard baseball.

For one, there was the emergence of Zak Farkes, the sophomore middle infielder whose assault on the Harvard record-books, for a stretch, transcended wins and losses. Farkes blasted four home runs against Dartmouth in the final weekend, shattering the 34-year-old school single-season record. The last of them, a missile into the trees beyond Dartmouth’s Red Rolfe Field, broke the school career record of 21.

Two, there was the quiet leadership of the team captains, Trey Hendricks and Bryan Hale. Hendricks led the Ivy League in batting average (.427) and pitching wins (nine)—one of them, a complete game shutout of Dartmouth on May 2, kept Harvard’s season alive—and was voted Ivy League Pitcher of the Year. Hale, a senior from Seattle, played spectacular centerfield defense the entire year, making the most difficult plays appear easy; the most strenuous, merely graceful. His two highlight-reel catches against Brown on April 25—the last of which, a dive on the warning track gravel, inspired Walsh to praise his “fearlessness”—energized the team for the stretch run.

Three, there was the powerful offensive supporting cast that led Harvard to a 2-0 sweep of eventual Ivy League champion Princeton, a 21-18-1 record against conference and non-conference opponents, and a 14-8 record against the Ivy League. Both marks were Harvard’s best in five years. The Crimson led the league in home runs, paced by league leader Farkes (14), junior Schuyler Mann (11) and Hendricks (seven).

Harvard loses four seniors this year, including Hendricks, Hale, and starting pitchers Mike Morgalis and Jason Brown. All four cogs will be difficult to replace for a repeat-run at the Ivy title in 2005.

IVY DANCE

Harvard baseball opened the 2004 season on a Texas-sized offensive binge in Lubbock but struggled to find its groove, wrapping up the non-conference schedule with a losing record (6-7-1).

The Crimson hit its stride on April 3, when Morgalis’ nine-inning shutout against Cornell ushered in a stretch of outstanding pitching.