The kid who would be captain loved the game.

He’s a man now; worldly good looks, superbly talented, strappingly self-assured, oxen-tough. But now is now and that was then. Then was his shy turn—nine years old, innocent, substantial (“well-fed,” he jokes), vaguely self-aware—the coincidental genesis of a baseball career. That, a foggy Los Angeles daydream, was when Schuyler Mann simply loved the game.

“You could steal bases, you could take leads,” says Mann, clearing the cobwebs from his memory bank, dimming his eyes fondly. “Pickoffs. They had bigger fences too. Like, not the short ones. And we could use those big-barreled bats.”

“And not,” he adds with sentimental emphasis, “those skinny ones.”

The kid who would be captain loved the game. He loved it a decade and three hometowns later, from sunny SoCal to Trumbull, Conn. to Corvallis, Mont. to Cambridge.

But now is now and that was then. And on one fateful day all those years ago, the game loved him right back.

“Third base was my chosen position,” he says of his first year playing baseball as a nine-year-old in Los Angeles. “Coach’s son was the catcher. I remember he got pissed at his son for being late. He told me to catch.”

Mann grins.

“He just threw me back there for the rest of the season,” he says.

* * *

Twelve years have passed. And Schuyler Mann, the 2005 captain of Harvard baseball, enters his senior season as one of the most accomplished catchers in Ivy League history.

Don’t believe it? Try this on for size: after a decorated career at Trumbull High School (Conn.), Mann hit the ground running his freshman year. Between spot catcher’s duties and designated hitting, he started nearly every game and finished second on the team in RBI, with 25.

In 2003, Mann earned a second-team All-Ivy designation—rare for a sophomore. With a .306 average, four home runs, and 29 RBI, he deserved it.

Last season, Mann caught all 40 games and accomplished one of the greatest single offensive seasons in Harvard history.

With 11 home runs—the school’s second-best ever, after trading bombs with school record-holder Zak Farkes in 2004—Mann slugged .559 on the way to a unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection at catcher, and played his best baseball in the season’s crucial final weeks.