The Harvard Crimson baseball team is the varsity intercollegiate baseball team of Harvard University, located in Boston, Massachusetts. The program has been a member of the Ivy League since the conference officially began sponsoring baseball at the start of the 1993 season. The team plays at Joseph J. O'Donnell Field, located across the Charles River from Harvard's main campus. Bill Decker has been the program's head coach since the 2013 season.
The program has appeared in four College World Series and 14 NCAA tournaments. It has won five Ivy League Championship Series, eight Rolfe Division titles, 15 EIBL regular season titles, and 12 Ivy League regular season titles. In 2019, the team won its first Ivy League title since 2005 when they defeated Columbia in the Ivy League Playoff Series.
As of the start of the 2014 Major League Baseball season, 12 former Crimson players have appeared in Major League Baseball.
History
19th century
Harvard College's first season of baseball came in 1865; the team went 6–0 that year. It played one intercollegiate game (against Williams) and five against semi-professional teams. Organized baseball at the college had begun a few years earlier, when "class nines" (the teams of each of Harvard College's four class years) were first fielded; the first of these was the '66 Baseball Club, formed in 1862 by members of that year's freshman class. Despite these early years of competition, 1865 was the school's first varsity intercollegiate season.
Along with rowing, baseball was popular at Harvard in the late 19th century. A newspaper review of the 1871 book Four Years at Yale says that the book includes "interesting accounts of the sports common in colleges, especially baseball and rowing, and the principal matches which have taken place between Harvard and Yale." An 1884 edition of the Washington Bee reprinted a Lowell Courier humor section piece that reads, "Sixty Harvard freshman have dropped their Latin, eighty their Greek and 100 their mathematics. None of them have dropped their baseball or their boating, however, and college culture is still safe."
In a game against a semi-professional team from Lynn on April 12, 1877, Harvard catcher Jim Tyng became the first baseball player to use a catcher's mask. The mask was invented by another student, Frederick Thayer, and manufactured by a Cambridge tinsmith. Tyng later became the first Harvard player to appear in Major League Baseball when he played in a September 23, 1879, game for the Boston Red Caps.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Harvard was a member of two loosely organized forerunners of the Ivy League. The Intercollegiate Base Ball Association, which it played in from 1879 to 1886, included Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and Amherst. The College Baseball League, which it played in from 1887 to 1889, featured Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.
The school continued to field a varsity baseball team through the end of the 19th century. It played both fall and spring regular season games in its early years, but moved to a spring-only schedule after the 1885–1886 season. The program's highest 19th-century win total was 34, a mark it reached in both 1870 (34–9–1) and 1892 (34–5). Through the end of the 1899 season, the program played without a head coach and was instead led by its captains.
Two important changes to the program occurred near the end of the 19th century– at the start of the 1898 season, Harvard began playing home games at Soldier's Field, and at the start of the 1900 season, it hired E. H. Nichols as its first head coach.
Pre-World War II
The program went .500 or better in 15 of the 17 seasons from 1900 to 1916. Its highest win total in that stretch, 23, came in 1915 under head coach Percy Haughton. Two head coaches served four-season tenures during the time period. L. P. Pieper coached from 1907 to 1910; the program's two losing records in this time period came under him. Frank Sexton also coached for four seasons (1911–1914); the program had a winning record in each.
In the early 20th century, Harvard held tryouts, usually in the spring, to select the members of the team from the student body. To start the regular season, the team often traveled to the Southern United States to play games in warm weather, a practice that began in 1898. Up until the start of World War I, its scheduled included professional and semi-professional teams, in addition to collegiate teams.
Hall of Fame pitcher Cy Young, then a member of the Boston Americans, served as the team's pitching coach for a brief time in 1902. Another future Hall of Famer, Willie Keeler of the Brooklyn Superbas, served alongside Young as the team's hitting coach.