Harvard’s Palmer-Dixon Tennis Courts are housed in a shapeless edifice that squats like a military barracks between Dillon Fieldhouse and Jordan Field. One could imagine the building playing home to a stable of dusty, spider-webbed tractors. Or a collection of iron pipes. The expanse is imposing, stale, and very wide. So wide that it can fit a baseball team—32 players, three coaches, bats, balls, and a batting cage. Barely.
“Palmer-Dixon is terrible,” pitcher Frank J. Herrmann ’06 groans.
For a game associated with breezy, clear days, the effect of chucking a ball inside an airplane hangar is, well... “It gets monotonous sometimes,” Herrmann says.
Herrmann and his teammates have no other choice. What else do you do when your field is buried in snow and ice? And how in the world do you compete?
Enter Joe Walsh.
It takes a rare talent to make indoor baseball practice work inside a place like Palmer-Dixon. It takes a rarer talent to convert that practice into wins—13 in the Ivies last year, to be exact. Walsh, Harvard’s head coach, has it in spades. He’s a salty old cod, a jovial man bent on making games worth playing: he hasn’t had a losing Ivy season in ten years.
With the lion’s share of power returning to the middle of his lineup, including school home run king Zak U. Farkes ’06, a fifth Ivy League title appears to be within Walsh’s reach.
So what, exactly, is the secret to his success? Walsh tries to make it fun.
“Once you see March, and you start seeing those box scores or line scores from the other teams appearing, it starts getting on you,” Walsh explains. “So we try to mix it up a little bit. Changing things in the daily routine, working on something instead of going through the same ol’ same ol’ each day, you know?”
MAKING MISCHIEF
Take what the team calls the Valentine’s Day Massacre.
No ordinary man could hatch such an ambitious plan. The Massacre takes so much work that Walsh needs help—a couple of spies, like Herrmann and first baseman Mike J. Dukovich ’06—to get the dirt on his own players. Hook-ups, embarrassing weekend details—little is sacred.
“I get a little bit of information,” Walsh says. “Inside information on the team. A few little things.”
During the team’s Valentine’s Day baseball practice, he uses the information to structure sprints, says Lance L. Salsgiver ’06.
“He’ll say, ‘for all you guys who have done this, run.’ Except one guy will start running and he looks behind him and sees no one else,” Salsgiver says. Inside info, indeed.
“Coach tries to keep the mood light,” Herrmann says. “He’s good at that.”
A week ago, the team engaged in a little intrasquad East-West rivalry, a foot race for coastal supremacy. Under Walsh’s direction, a piggyback element found its way into the race’s rulebook. A casual onlooker, upon entering the compound, might have happened upon 215-pound All-Ivy catcher Schuyler O. Mann ’05 atop the back of first baseman W. Rob Wheeler ’05. Team West suffered when Wheeler stumbled. “He did a complete swan-dive face-plant,” according to Salsgiver, and Mann “tumbled over him” end-over-end.
For Walsh, it’s not only about being a big kid—which, of course, is the reliable Palmer-Dixon antidote, and which, of course, he is—but also about winning games. In nine seasons, Walsh-coached Harvard teams have won four Ivy League titles. When Walsh came to Harvard, the team had endured a decade of mediocre performances, but the coach quickly returned the Crimson to its glory days of the ’70s.
“These guys work hard,” Walsh says. “They’re pretty business-like. I know some of the work ethics of these guys are very good. But sometimes, though, in baseball, you’ve gotta play loose, too. So to add a few of those things in and keep the club loose is great.”
MAKING STARS
A visit with the man behind baseball’s killer record turns up all the qualities of a Boston folk hero. He’s stocky, quick to smile, round-faced, and Irish. His accent is Beantown, chowder, Cheers, and Papi—combined.
“When I pick up the phone and I say, ‘hey, it’s Hahvahd baseball callin,’ it’s a dead giveaway,” says Walsh, ever the active recruiter. “Especially when I’m calling some other places in the country. Yeah, I’m a Boston guy.”
His search for prime young baseball talent usually takes him to places where the accent sounds more Mars than Massachusetts. “When I make calls down [South and West], they’re on the other end of the line going, ‘who is this guy?!?’”
Five years ago, Trey Hendricks ’04, one manifestation of Walsh’s recruiting versatility, arrived on campus from Spring, Texas, an uncelebrated pitching recruit dreaming Major League dreams. He finished his senior season as a hard-hitting first base prospect, then left Harvard as the 24th-round draft pick of the MLB’s Arizona Diamondbacks. “I think a lot of kids have that dream,” Walsh says of his former star, with whom he still keeps close contact. “And it’s a great dream to have.” And a possible dream, even within the dreariness of Palmer-Dixon.
GOING OUTDOORS
And so when the Harvard baseball team trudges to the doors of the Palmer-Dixon Tennis Courts each winter day, Walsh cheerfully makes the most of it.
“Hey, we may be the best team indoors in New England right now,” he says.
Right on. If Harvard opens positively next weekend inside Minneapolis’ amorphous blob of a Metrodome, then they very well may be.
And the players will know who to thank.
