A couple of weeks into the team’s phantom season—the part of the schedule played thousands of miles from Cambridge when O’Donnell Field is still blanketed in snow—Zak Farkes sits in street clothes and looks every bit the ball player he’s always been, plus a few extra pounds of muscle.

But he sounds a lot different since the last time you saw him.

Last June, when the first day of the draft went by without his name being called, and Farkes plummeted to the 39th round, he was careful choosing his words.

“It’s an absolute dream come true [to be drafted by the Red Sox],” he said.

“Really,” he added a few minutes later, “I’m lucky to have the chance to get drafted.”

Ask him now about that day and Farkes is far more candid.

“I was so disappointed,” Farkes says, his baby face softened in serious sincerity, no eye black tarring his cheeks. “It was devastating. I had all these scouts saying, ‘Yeah, we’re going to take you in the seventh round, blah, blah, blah.’ A lot of it was signability and what not, but at first I was really angry.”

He planned to prove them all wrong in the Cape, the place small school guys make a name for themselves—like former Crimson ace Ben Crockett ’02, who went from a solid Ivy pitcher to a potential first-round pick with a single stellar summer.

But even though Farkes claims his shoulder didn’t affect his swing, he slumped badly to open the season, not uncommon for good college hitters in the pitcher-dominated Cape.

“It was tough to get in a good groove,” Farkes says. “But as my arm started feeling better near the end, I started hitting better and playing better, and I got more comfortable.”

He may not have proved much, but he insists he improved.

Playing on the Cape means baseball is your job, a 12-week whirlwind tour of the minor leagues, or at least the closest simulation in amateur baseball. Every morning you go to the field at 9 a.m. to lift. You return at 4 p.m. for stretching, hitting and fielding before a 7 p.m. game. That’s five hours a day before the game even starts, and a far cry from the life of a Harvard student-athlete.

“As much as it’s my favorite thing in the world to be at the field, and I would be there longer if they’d let me, it wears you down if you don’t know the right way to approach the work you’re getting in,” says Farkes, who is universally admired for his work ethic.

“I thought, ‘Oh, everyone says I have a great work ethic, I’m going to go out and take a hundred more swings,’” he adds. “But it was just too much focus on quantity. I was always paranoid that someone in Florida was working out harder than I was up here in Boston. I was always competing against that.”

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