Suffolk University Alumni Magazine

His head slightly bowed, Joe Walsh unhooks his thumbs from his belt and makes the slow walk from the dugout to the pitcher’s mound. On a cloudless spring day, it’s the Harvard University baseball coach’s second trip there, and with a wave of his right arm, he signals the end of starting pitcher Eric Eadington’s day. Three outs away from a win against Ivy League division rival Princeton University, Harvard’s 3-0 lead has evaporated into a 3-3 tie, and Walsh isn’t taking any chances. Coming off a staggering 24-game road trip–and 3-21 record–Walsh is eager for a win back home at O’Donnell Field in Cambridge which, he hopes, can “get things rolling a little bit.”

Unfortunately, things roll off the rails in rapid succession: two pitching changes, a squib of a hit to load the bases, and then an otherwise catchable fly ball lost in the blinding midday sun. Just like that, Princeton has a 5-3 lead, and the Harvard Crimson soon endures another crushing defeat. As the Princeton players exchange congratulatory high-fives (and the PA system inexplicably blasts Hootie and the Blowfish’s sappy song “Let Her Cry”), Walsh rallies his players for the second game of the day’s doubleheader.

“There’s different ways of doing it,” says Walsh of coaching his team through a losing streak. “Sometimes you’ve got to get in their faces a little bit, sometimes you have to hug them. We’ve been trying everything. We’ve had our injuries, but everybody else has, too. We’ve just got to start playing some baseball.”

Harvard will wait another day for their first home victory of the season, captured in dramatic fashion with a walk-off grand slam against Cornell University. More than many, Walsh understands the capricious nature of the game, and the ways it can humble even the most seasoned players.

“A Recipe for Winning”

For most of his 57 years, Walsh has lived a life between the lines, buoyed by an evergreen love for the national pastime. To watch him now on a baseball diamond is to see the working-class Dorchester kid who inherited his father’s love of sports and spent endless weekends shagging flies and peppering line drives across Boston’s sandlots. “In my neighborhood, either you got in trouble or you played ball,” recalls Walsh. “And, for the most part, I played ball.”

As he gives constant, steady instruction to his players, one understands his successes first as a pitcher at Suffolk, and later as the New England Division III Coach of the Year that revived the Rams’ baseball program when he took over in 1982, leading his teams to a 218-167-1 record.
 He’s in his 16th season at Harvard, where he earned his 500th win as a collegiate head coach in 2007, a testament to both his ability and longevity. In 2009, he was inducted into Suffolk’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

After 14 seasons at Suffolk, Walsh became Harvard’s first full-time baseball coach in 1995. His formal title is the Joseph J. O’Donnell ’67 Head Coach for Harvard Baseball; it is an endowed position, like that of a professor. Before Walsh’s arrival in Cambridge, the team had gone 82-102-1 in the previous five years and was coming off a losing season. Two years later, Harvard won the Ivy League title, a feat the Crimson repeated four more times, along with five appearances in the NCAA Tournament.

Though the 2011 campaign has seen more heartbreak than wins, Walsh hasn’t allowed the final score to affect his spirit. “The great thing about Coach Walsh is that he’s honestly never down,” says Harvard center fielder Dillon O’Neill. “Whether or not we play well…he’s supportive in all the right ways.” It was O’Neill who lost that fly ball in the sun, allowing Princeton to score the game-winning runs. When O’Neill returned to the dugout, Walsh’s reaction was characteristic. “He didn’t say anything. It’s not his style to get on you,” says the senior, who has played for Walsh for four years. “Coach Walsh would never do anything like that unless you were really out of line.”

Standing in the third base coach’s box during the game, Walsh keeps his eyes focused on the batter at the plate. He periodically claps his hands, encouraging his team: “Let’s go, let’s go!” When designated hitter Marcus Way blasts a two-run homer over the right field wall, Walsh quickly shakes Way’s hand as he rounds the bases, but he never does anything more demonstrative. He respects the game too much to show up his opponents, and knows that until the final pitch is thrown, there is little room for premature celebrations. Yet beneath his understated on-field demeanor is a wealth of passion.

“The intensity he brings to his job everyday is contagious,” says Brendan Byrne, a former Harvard second baseman. “It makes his players have fun and enjoy playing, and usually that’s a recipe for winning.”

No Excuses

A week before the start of the 2011 season, Walsh strolls into “The Bubble,” Harvard’s inflatable indoor practice facility. With his barrel-chested build, closely buzzed hair, and thick forearms sculpted by decades of gripping and swinging a bat, Walsh looks like a baseball coach straight out of Hollywood central casting, and he inhabits the part to perfection. He’s on the field working his team though run-downs (when an offensive player is caught between bases), pick-off moves (when a pitcher tries to catch an opposing player off the base), and fielding bunts—the kinds of plays that rarely make highlight reels. It’s Walsh laying down the bunts, just as it’s the coach in the cage pitching as his players take their cuts. As his pitch count inches beyond 100, the wily southpaw keeps winding up and tossing ’em. When one of his players barely makes contact with his pitch, a fastball that breaks as it ap proaches the plate, Walsh grins and bellows, “The cutter’s still working!”

Though the ground outside is still spackled with the remnants of winter’s snowstorms, in the crack of the back, the velvety thwack of a tossed ball kissing the well-worn pocket of a leather mitt, Walsh hears the symphony of spring, the promise of a fresh start. The Crimson had a 17-26 season in 2010, and though the team was riddled with injuries, Walsh isn’t making excuses. He still wants to face the toughest teams.

“I’ll see a coach from a big school at a convention, and I’ll say something like, ‘When are we gonna play you guys? Have you been ducking us?’” Walsh says. “I like to play hard-nosed ball clubs, teams that have that reputation of playing the game aggressively. I think that’s one of the goals I’ve established here, of having an aggressive, offensive team—stealing bases, running, diving, just taking the field with enthusiasm. Once you get off that bus, it’s game time. I want guys who’ll play until you have to tear the uniform off their backs.”

Along with his passion for the game,
Walsh also brought to Harvard a swagger forged during his 20 years as a player, then coach at Suffolk. As a Division III team, Walsh says Suffolk always played “up,” meaning his players often rose to the level of the competition when matched against favored Division I and II teams. It wasn’t always easy. Unlike some of its well-heeled neighbors on either side of the Charles River, Suffolk’s baseball team didn’t have a field to call home, or its own practice facility. Finding places for the team to practice required perseverance and ingenuity.

“At that time, we were real gypsies,” recalls longtime Suffolk Athletic Director Jim Nelson of the effort to find playing fields. “For us, even home games were away games. Joe thought nothing of going to another Suffolk for practice sessions: he took our team to Suffolk Downs (a horseracing track in East Boston). We’d get the rubber baseballs and go over and have a simulated infield in the parking lot. He was quite creative.”

Suffolk’s baseball team even had T-shirts made with the slogan, “No Field. No Cage. No Problem.” Walsh groomed his team to use the lack of facilities as a rallying cry, rather than a setback. “We nicknamed ourselves ‘The Mutts’ and that really brought the team together. When I got to Harvard, and they had all these facilities, it was like I had died and gone to heaven.” Yet despite the plush amenities, Walsh has instilled in his Harvard players the same no-excuses attitude that propelled Suffolk baseball teams to great success during his tenure.

“It’s easy to make excuses when you’re playing in a cold-weather environment and playing a Division I schedule at an academically challenging school. But for him, excellence breeds excellence,” says Christopher Mackey, a former Harvard outfielder whom Walsh coached for four years. “He’s not going to make excuses for his teams, and they respond to that. I think that’s why his teams have been successful.”

Philosopher/Coach

Byrne, who played for Walsh for four years, first met the coach when Walsh was hosting a summer baseball clinic at Harvard for kids. Like Walsh, Byrne grew up in Dorchester, and felt “an immediate connection” to the coach. “I went to his camp when I was 10, and from that point on I always wanted to play for the guy,” he recalls. “You could put Coach Walsh in an equipment room with bats and balls, and he’d still have fun so long as it had anything to do with baseball.”

It’s always been that way for Walsh, the oldest child of a Boston police officer and a secretary. When he was a boy, Walsh was befriended by a local man named Jake who would show up at the park with “a bat bag over his back and a bunch of brand new balls, looking for any kids who wanted to play. He was just a guy who loved to play, and that was a big motivation for me,” Walsh says. “We would play every Saturday and Sunday, as soon as the fields were cleared [of snow] right up to the end of October. I can remember with Jake, he was like 60 years old, and after four hours of chasing up and down behind balls, I always had to be the first one to say, ‘Hey, let’s wrap it up today.’ I was really lucky to have a guy like that. We’d sit and talk baseball for hours.”

After high school, Walsh became the first in his family to attend college, and Suffolk offered him a small baseball scholarship. He thought about majoring in math, but soon made a surprising choice. “I met someone, when I was being pushed to make a decision about a major, who was in counseling, and they had a philosophy degree. In a conversation, she told me it was a good background for counseling. And I started thinking ahead, thinking about counseling, sports, and working with kids. So I majored in philosophy.”

He also immersed himself in Suffolk sports. “From the time I met him, I was struck by his enthusiasm for life, which certainly translated to how he behaved as a competitor,” Nelson says. “He was best known as a baseball player for us, but he also competed in cross-country, played some basketball, and was also team manager in basketball. He had a great passion for whatever activity he was involved in.”

When he wasn’t competing or attending class, Walsh was juggling jobs, including working for the late Lou Connelly, then Suffolk’s director of sports information and public relations. After graduating from Suffolk, Walsh knew he wanted a career in sports. He traveled around the country, landing in San Diego, where he became an office equipment salesman. Then came the call from an old mentor that changed his life.

“I had wonderful respect for him as a student athlete, and he had values I wanted to see represented here at the University by our student athletes. I also thought he could play that role as mentor to students here,” says Nelson, who had stayed in touch with Walsh after he graduated. “When I offered him the coaching position here, he refused it. He was talking about taking another position with a program that worked with handicapped and mentally disabled individuals. What I said to him was ‘I think what you want to do is noble, and I won’t discourage you from doing that, but I think here at your alma mater, you have a role to play as well.’ I gave him a weekend to think about it—and I’m sure that as a philosopher he really thought about it—and he came back and said he wanted to return to Suffolk.”

Walsh also coached women’s basketball, both the men’s and women’s cross-country teams, and was the director of the intramural sports program. Walsh even planned his March 1, 1986 marriage to his wife, Sandra, with whom he now has four daughters in New Hampshire, around the Suffolk sports calendar. “Well, basketball ended [February] 28th, and I could take the next day off,” he says with a hearty laugh. “We had a short honeymoon, then she dropped me off at the Cambridge Y for baseball practice.”

After 14 seasons at Suffolk, Walsh was eager to be a single-sport coach and to test himself in Division I, the highest competitive level in college athletics, though leaving his alma mater wasn’t an easy decision. In 1995, his final season at Suffolk, the team finished the season with a stellar 26-11 record and made it to the Eastern Conference Athletic Conference finals. To top it off, Walsh had been named New England Division III Coach of the Year. That summer, while Walsh was coaching in the Cape Cod League, he went to see Bill Cleary, Harvard’s athletic director at the time. He knew the university was in need of a new baseball coach. “I said to him, ‘Coach, nobody wants this job more than me. I want this job,’” Walsh says. “Next thing I know, my references were being called.” One of those references was Suffolk’s Nelson, a longtime friend of Cleary’s.

“Bill was going out on a limb in selecting someone who was a Division III coach, regardless of how successful he had been,” Nelson says. “He asked my thoughts on Joe and I said, ‘You will not be disappointed. He will put his heart and soul into the job.’ I knew [Walsh’s] time had come. I knew he had achieved many of the goals he had established here and he wanted to do baseball full-time.”

After a lengthy search, Walsh was hired, but the transition was also bittersweet. “I can still remember when I got in that room to say goodbye to that team,” Walsh says about leaving Suffolk. “I had tears in my eyes, and when I left I walked all the way down to Park Street station, sat on a bench, and lost it. I was overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing because I was such a fit [at Suffolk].”

Now he’s not just a fit at Harvard; he’s become a fixture. Though his team’s 2011 season has been difficult, Walsh understands the vagaries of the game, and how a well-timed rally or a pitch that paints a corner for a needed strikeout can turn a streak from cold to hot. What he never doubts is his team’s desire to play hard. His players, in turn, recognize the same quality in him. “I think everyone on the team really appreciates his willingness to work through a tough season,” O’Neill says. “It does incentivize us to work harder when we see him showing up every day with a positive, constructive attitude.”

When he first started coaching at Suffolk, Walsh’s mother needled him about finding “a real job.” Later, his father-in-law posed the same question. “To them, it wasn’t a real job; I was just out there playing.” More than 30 years later, Walsh remains a man hard at play–and he wouldn’t want it any other way. “The more you learn, the more you realize you still have to learn,” he says. “After all these years, I’m still just a guy who loves the game.”