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BASEBALL 2005: All Grown Up

Zak Farkes went through an off-season from hell, and now he says he’s better

The last time you saw him, the sun was shining.

His red cap was pulled low to shield eye-blackened cheeks, and Harvard was in the frantic stretch of an Ivy title run, a time when eight months of exhaustion and irritation and monotony condense into eight games of ecstasy. And through it all, the shortstop was making history, one sweet swing and hurried home run trot at a time.

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The last time you saw him, it was almost summer.

The hometown boy with the name of a Greek hero and the crown of a home run king was a month away from all he’d ever wanted—a shot at the big leagues, and with the Red Sox, no less.

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The last time you saw him, Zak Ulysses Farkes was on top of the world.

So why does he seem so much closer to the promised land now?

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A lot has happened since the last time you saw Zak Farkes, and a lot of it was hell.

Farkes, disappointed with falling to the 39th round of the draft, went to prove himself against the best amateur competition in the country, the Cape Cod Baseball League.

It’s the kind of chance that kids playing high school ball in places like Cambridge dream of, but halfway through the season a kid with no quit in him almost did just that.

His throwing shoulder—long tight and often sore—was throbbing. X-Rays and MRIs from the fall had come back clean, but finally at the end of Harvard’s season an arthroCT scan had revealed a frayed labrum. His shoulder would hurt until he had surgery.

But Farkes had played through pain for two full seasons, and he couldn’t say no to the Cape. So standing deep in the infield grass, he’d pray the guy from Florida State or Texas digging into the dirt of that batter’s box didn’t hit a ball to his backhand, because the long throw from the hole just hurt too much.

“[In June] they said we can fix this now and you can miss the Cape season, or you can go out and play and we can fix it later,” Farkes says. “At that point, I had just been drafted, and was still thinking about that, and I thought I could keep playing. But the pain got to that point where I wasn’t sure.”

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