The recruit stayed in Cambridge but for a fleeting afternoon—time enough, in other words, for Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh’s brief glimpse of the future.

“He drove up from Jersey and was here for about three hours,” Walsh recounts of his first encounter with Frank Herrmann, then a junior at New Jersey’s Montclair Kimberly Academy, “and then Frankie drove back to football practice.”

The setting: Walsh’s camp for prospective Crimson ballplayers.

“We hit a couple of one-hoppers to him out in right field and he threw a couple of one-hoppers to the plate,” Walsh says. “And I said, ‘We’re going to get that boy on the mound some day.’”

Four years later, Walsh’s prescience came full circle.

Now a Harvard junior, Herrmann, the strapping 6’4, 220-pound bulldog of the Crimson pitching staff, blew Ivy League hitters away during his breakout 2005 campaign.

It wasn’t always so easy.

After two nondescript seasons as a spot starter and bat off the bench—until this season, his greatest collegiate accomplishment was pounding two home runs in a 2004 loss to Northeastern—Herrmann appeared to be set for a career as a useful two-way utility player, and not the indispensable star he became.

Key to his offseason metamorphosis was a summer stint in the 13-team New England Collegiate Baseball League.

Relying on steady control and improved velocity, Herrmann finished second on the Berkshire Dukes—the team run by former Red Sox GM Dan Duquette—with a 2.49 ERA. More importantly, he honed his approach on the advice of players from around the country.

“I learned,” Herrmann says. “I was just talking to different teammates and stuff. How they gripped the ball, how they through in the offseason, how often they did long-toss.

“I was getting different pieces from different places. It was the learning experience more than anything.”

Herrmann arrived in the fall with what he calls “a new perspective and new attitude.”

He watched how teammates Mike Morgalis, the staff veteran, and Shawn Haviland, the rookie, prepared to pitch. He primed himself for a regular spot in a weekend rotation that—with Morgalis’ injured foot and Haviland’s unproven track record as concerns—looked shaky at season’s onset.

“Everybody knew we could hit the ball,” he says. “Pitching was a void we needed to fill.”