PORT ANGELES — In a whirlwind 15-minute conversation, Port Angeles Lefties pitcher Kieran Shaw, a rising sophomore at Harvard, touches on topics you would expect a Harvard athlete to tackle.
Namely a Sports and Empire course he attended which used the prism of British colonialism to trace the spread of sports across the world, a final paper he wrote that delved into the importance of baseball in continuing to define an American identity for interned American citizens of Japanese ancestry in World War II and a walkthrough of the Tommy John surgery he underwent in high school that helped lead him to Harvard.
Intelligent, curious and baseball-obsessed, Shaw is spending his summer working on his craft with the Lefties in a veritable baseball internship.
While some of his Crimson teammates and fellow students spend their time on the Wall Street trading floor for Credit Suisse, or for various financial services firms here and abroad, Shaw is rattling around the Pacific Northwest in a bus with 25 other ballplayers — and loving every minute of it.
So far so good for Shaw who has steadily built up his arm strength this summer, going from late-innings relief pitching to long relief to getting a start on the hill last week (June 29) as he tries to transition from a relief role with Harvard and into the Crimson’s starting rotation.
Shaw already has exceeded the amount of innings he saw as a Harvard freshman (21.1 innings) and in 25 innings with Port Angeles (through Thursday, June 29) the 5-11, 195-pound righthander has an excellent 2.52 ERA and a solid 1.20 walks/hits per innings pitched (WHIP).
He’s impressed his coaches too, according to Lefties manager Zach Miller.
“When he is on it’s on,” Miller said. “It’s good and it’s down. He’s got a good breaking ball and can throw the change on any count. He’s a definite worker too, on the days he doesn’t throw he’s out here getting his work in.”
Miller said they’ve gone slow with him in the first month of the season as Shaw tunes up his arm for the stresses of starting pitching.
“Kieran is unique because he had low innings coming out of Harvard and more of those were out of the bullpen. He wants to transition to their staff in the starting rotation going forward.
What we’ve done is start him out in the bullpen with what he is used to in and stretched him a little bit like a rubber band toward starting. Then we’ll kind of reel him back a bit to bullpen stuff and then back to starting. Just kind of a buildup phase for him.”
Shaw knows all about rubber-band analogies, having suffered a tear of his ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow at a critical moment while in high school.
“It’s about as serious an injury a baseball player can have,” he said. “Your ulnar collateral ligament is a tight ligament in your elbow that creates torque when you throw, its basically a rubber band.”
Back from surgery
Shaw returned from the surgery, which takes a tendon from the wrist, calf or other parts of the body and is reattached inside the elbow, early for a pitcher.
“I came back after seven months,” he said. “Most guys in the pros they are very cautious and they take about a year. But this was my junior year, the prime time to be recruited, that’s why I really pushed it to get back.
“I was looking at some big conference West Coast schools before I got Tommy John then word got out and scared off some coaches.”
Shaw returned for summer baseball and showed he could still throw hard and would only throw harder with continued recovery time.
And he still had good grades, having followed the advice of his parents and the example of older brother Bennett Shaw, a track and cross country runner for Emory University in Atlanta, to take the most difficult academic track he could at Bellarmine Prep in San Jose, Calif.
“I still had good enough grades to go to an Ivy League school,” he said.
Quite the safety school, that Harvard.
“That’s exactly what it was,” Shaw joked. “My parents always told me you have to get good grades because that will set you up and make anything you want to do that much easier.
“My older brother set that example for me.”
Harvard head coach Bill Decker, also a Crimson graduate, pushed academics from the first meeting with Shaw.
“The coach came up and the first thing he said was ‘You have a chance to play baseball at the best university in the world.,’” Shaw said.
“I still remember that. I was like, ‘Yes, I’ll take that opportunity.’ ”
Shaw said he received a “crash course in time management” upon stepping foot on Harvard Yard.
“Right away I had so many activities to be at, work I needed to complete and everything had to be done in a certain time frame. If I had 30 minutes of off time, I had to sit down and get my homework done,” he said.
And he said his highly motivated fellow students help each other achieve.
“No one brags about where they want to go with their lives, they realize they still have to achieve their goals and do the work. Everybody got in [to school], but now its about grinding and doing the work.
“As much as it’s competitive, I would say it’s just as much collaborative. Even if you have a homework assignment and you text a friend a question, you don’t get people saying “No, I can’t help you because that impacts my grade. You get “Oh, yeah sure, I’ll help you out with this.’ And that helps both people learn.”
And with Civic Field and WCL ballparks as a classroom this summer, Shaw is seeking out knowledge as he attempts to improve.
“[Pitching] coach Scott Anderson has been great with working both sides of the plate, developing a two-seam [fastball] that I can throw inside and maintaining consistency with off-speed pitches in the zone, something I definitely need to keep working on after this season,” Shaw said.
“I throw a two-seam, four-seam, a change, a slider, a curveball and a slurve. Every pitcher is always refining what they have, seeing how different pitches break.
“And that’s the great part about being a pitcher in the summer, you have so much time to play catch and see what works for you.”
Kieran Shaw pitches against Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Fla., in March for Harvard.
