With Klimkiewicz, the speed with which he rattles off his injuries reflects the time he’s spent mulling over them.

For any high schooler, after all—especially one whose team won an Independent School League Championship the year before—the whole experience would be horrific.

But then consider the fact that Klimkiewicz was arguably the best player in the league at the time, and had already attracted pro scouts after hitting nearly .480 with 15 steals, eight homers, and just a shade under 50 RBI.

A shredded ACL, somehow, manages to get even worse.

“I was depressed for awhile, so I tried to look at it as positively as I could,” he says. “I thought I had a lot of time to get in shape for baseball, work on my swing.

But a lot of that didn’t happen. I couldn’t run for nine months, and couldn’t do any leg lifting except for light rehab. I couldn’t swing because of the pivoting of my knee.”

While it’s uncertain whether a previous football knee injury, an impact fracture, had anything to do with his damaged ACL (...and MCL, and LCL), it was clear that Klimkiewicz would need to be shelved for the entirety of his senior year.

Almost.

“I got in one at-bat in the final game of the season,” he clarifies. “They told me I couldn’t run down to first.”

HELP FROM ON HIGH

Predictably, Division I suitors began backing away, Klimkiewicz says, simply “moving down to the next number on their list.”

Neighboring and neighborly Harvard, however, only inched closer.

Crimson head coach Joe Walsh long had designs on transplanting the BB&N keystone combination of Klimkiewicz and Farkes, and was well aware of the immense “power potential” in the Lexington, Mass., native.

But while going to Harvard would entail all the accomodations a BB&N grad could ask for—from the education to a lighter travel load for his family, which impressively still hasn’t “missed a baseball game since tee-ball”—intensive rehab work would be necessary anywhere for a return to form.

“I was asking the doctors every week, ‘Can I swing,’ ‘Can I do this, do that,’” Klimkiewicz says. “But [at that time,] I couldn’t walk without feeling out of whack.”