The Stories of Harvard: Chase Aldridge

The Stories of Harvard: Chase Aldridge ’19, Baseball

The Stories of Harvard spotlights Harvard athletics alumni on their professional journey beyond their time in Cambridge and reflects on a specific game or event as a Crimson student-athlete from a first-person perspective.

An Introduction

I am Chase Aldridge from Los Angeles, California, graduated class of 2019, major in economics, secondary in statistics and received a citation in Spanish. I'm entering my eighth season with the Los Angeles Dodgers. I've done a few different roles. I was a development coach at first in Ogden, Utah. Spent a couple years in the Dominican Republic as a hitting coach. And then in the last four years, under different titles in player development, focused on facilitating learning for coaches and staff in our minor league system.

There's a big emphasis on staff development, on hiring, and overseeing some of the things that we do in the minor leagues, especially on the position player side. But really a big focus on trying to help get the best coaches in and create a good environment for them to improve and get better.

Game Preview

Harvard entered the series 14-6 overall with wins in each of its first two Ivy League series. Yale was just 10-14, but the rival Bulldogs had played for the Ivy League Championship in each of the last three seasons, including a win in 2017 as the final champion of the Red Rolfe Division.

Harvard plated the first run of the game on a Patrick McColl RBI-single (more from McColl later) in the bottom of the first. In the third inning, Yale went in front by scratching across two runs on a hit, an error, three walks and a sac-fly. The Bulldogs went on to score eight straight runs when the Crimson came up for its final turn at-bat down 8-1 in the ninth.

As mentioned, Patrick McColl is here. The senior first baseman collected three of his single-season, program-record 73 hits on the day. Aldridge, a utility infielder and outfielder, got the nod to start in left field and went 2-for-3 at the plate before being subbed out in a seven-run game. Aldridge’s two singles accounted for two of Harvard’s five hits against Yale ace Scott Politz, a three-time All-Ivy first-team pitcher, who was ultimately lifted before the bottom of the ninth.

Chase Aldridge’s Harvard-Yale Story

Not Today

Harvard versus Yale is obviously a big rivalry. And so for us coming into that year and that series, Yale had been probably the best team in the Ivy League for the past few years. They'd gone to a regional and won a game there a couple of years prior. And I think us going into that series was a big opportunity for us to try to make a statement that we were going to be real contenders.

That year, specifically, we had a couple of different phrases that went along with pop culture stuff. So we would say, like, ‘not today’ from Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. And during that game, we kept saying, ‘not today, we're not going to die’.

It's kind of magical how it happened, being down by seven runs in the ninth inning. A comeback isn't really possible, but I think the team kind of believed that we could do cool things. There's a banner in our locker room that has all the Ivy League championships on it, and in the fall we had written, in Sharpie, ‘2019’ on that banner, just as a show of belief. I think there were a lot of different moments that led to us coming closer together as a team and a large senior class and a lot of talented underclassmen as well.

The Match-Up

The starting pitcher for Yale that game was their ace and he kind of dominated us for eight innings. Once he came out, as much as we were down by a lot, it certainly led to a little bit of belief, like, ‘hey we can score some runs’. And then it kind of just built piece by piece. When Pat McColl came up, everyone knew the game was over.

Both McColl and Jake Suddleson were just insane the whole year, but especially at that point of the year, it really felt like they were just going to do it. Like when a big situation came up, it felt like they were going to come through and Pat did it in the biggest way possible.

The Comeback

Early in the ninth inning I'm not going to say we fully believed, but once it started rolling, that shifted. I'm a superstitious person and so I definitely was going to stay in the same spot every single at-bat.

What I remember most is it felt like Yale was scrambling a little bit more than our dugout. Their arms in the bullpen are now up and guys are getting hot. They started off with a reliever that was probably a little lower on the totem pole and then started getting their better guys hot because the game got closer.

Putting in the Work

Pat's story is pretty cool. It’s the traditional story of a player that gets better over time. He played all four years, but he started as an extremely skinny lefty from California, dealing with cold weather for the first time. By the time he got to his senior year, he had matured a lot as a player. I think we started to see it click that year. 

Every single Monday after a series, we would go hit in the cages together. No matter what, on what would be a typical off day. We just flipped to each other every week and that kind of showed Pat was locked into hitting and getting his swing to feel good and to be in a good spot, which is testament to him and I think even the team culture broadly. We had a large group of people that would go do extra lifts at Murr during the season or off-season. I feel like there was a large sense of doing what we needed to do to get it done.

Harvard Walks Off in Grand Fashion

In that moment against Yale, we saw all that extra work pay off. Even when we started the year down in South Carolina, Pat was already off to a great start. And that Yale series, which was a little earlier in the Ivy League season, it felt like we were just building momentum at that point. Even later in the year, with different moments against Columbia or throughout the Ivy league championship series, we saw that he kept doing it, but this grand slam was the first big stamp of Pat and the team doing some pretty cool stuff.

The Recap

McColl’s ninth-inning, grand slam capped a nine-run ninth inning for the Crimson in a 10-8, walk-off victory in the series opener over Yale. Harvard swept the doubleheader with a 3-0 shutout to claim the series and went on to go 27-16 overall, 14-7 in the Ivy League and win the Ivy League Championship in two games over Columbia. The Crimson landed as the four-seed in the Oklahoma City Regional, hosted by Oklahoma State and hung tough with the Cowboys in the opener before being eliminated by Connecticut a day later.

Aldridge’s Harvard Experience

Arriving in Cambridge

I think a lot of things are the same from when I got to Harvard. I loved sports my whole life. Obviously, I played baseball in college, but I played football as well in high school. I went to a really competitive high school. My sophomore year, I was not part of the team, but we were number one in the country. The team has produced some big-name big leaguers in Jack Flaherty, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Lucas Giolito and Max Fried. So I'd come from a really strong program and ended up playing with two of my teammates at Harvard in Jake Suddleson and Matt Thomas. And there were a lot of people that are from my high school at Harvard, which kind of helped make it a little bit more comfortable, including my classmate Anthony Ridgley, who played water polo.

Baseball Opportunities, On and Off the Diamond

I walked onto the baseball team. And not in the traditional sense of going to tryouts, but I still had to earn my way onto the team and so I think coming in I believed that I could compete with anyone partially based on just my high school background. I had a sense that I was going to want to try to work in sports as well and that kind of influenced a lot of the things I did on campus outside of baseball and school.

I was a part of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective and there have been a lot of awesome people in the statistics department that helped oversee it and then also some great students and grad students like Daniel Adler, who's currently assistant general manager with the Minnesota Twins. Everyone just talked about sports and got to do a lot of really cool stuff like help the Celtics with their player tracking.

We did different projects for other sports teams, including one for the Philadelphia Eagles. There are a lot of really cool opportunities through HSAC. I ended up getting my first internship for a German soccer club as a data analyst. And that came through connections made through HSAC.

Applying Classroom Learning to the Field

Honestly, if you asked me when I graduated, would I know that this is what I'm doing next? No. I kind of made up the job that I have right now. And so I do think that a lot of the classes I took at Harvard greatly impact the way I see the world. One of those classes was an economics course called game theory with applications to social behavior, taught by Moshe Hoffman and Ezra Yoeli. That class greatly changed the way that I see human interactions and just the way that our environment shapes our intentions and the way that we see the world.

Behavioral economics helped shape the way I see the world and there's a class on cities by Edward Glaeser and then classes by Raj Chetty that I think really affected the way I see the world and helped me zoom out and see how we can change environments to help people get better. That has been consistent throughout my entire career, even from coaching hitters directly to now thinking more about staff development and creating a positive system for our players in the minor leagues. I think that the classes I took at Harvard greatly impacted that.

A Career in Baseball

Player Development

There's the major league team in Los Angeles that everyone sees. Things are going good right now and for the last few years, but we have seven other teams below that in the minor leagues from two in the Dominican, one in Arizona, one in California, two in Oklahoma, and one in Michigan. Our job is to try to help get those guys to the major leagues and help the team in Los Angeles win a World Series. My job is, in a lot of ways, helping prepare our coaches and our staff for promotion as much as possible. In the off season that can look like hosting book clubs or podcast clubs, bringing in guest speakers and doing a TED Talk-style series for starting conversations, or even doing peer-to-peer learning. We have very smart people in a lot of different verticals whether it's pitching or hitting or performance science, biomechanics and so kind of facilitating conversations between people to share insights whether someone's a new coach or maybe there's just a new piece of research that we found could be helpful.

That transitions into the season to a bit more oversight of just how our players are doing. We talk a lot about where our players have been, where they are and where they're going. And so our job is to be really aspirational about their careers and hopefully help them achieve success, focusing on 99th-percentile outcomes. If there's anything that I'm noticing as I travel around to our different affiliates, I’ll nudge or give reminders or just even listen for ideas on how we can help our players get better.

Harvard Alums in the Pros

I'm very fortunate. One of the people that works with the Dodgers, Morgan Brown, was class of 2006. So I get to interact with him a decent amount, but there are a ton of Harvard people in baseball.

I think it was my sophomore or junior year, we had an event where there were Harvard baseball executives that came back to the school to talk and it was David Forst, Jeff Bridich, Peter Woodfork and a ton of people that are GMs or high-level, high-ranking MLB executives. I think it shows there's a lot of people that have been through similar experiences that are working in baseball and at winter meetings every year there are always times I run into people that I didn't even know went to Harvard.

There's just a ton of alums that are around baseball. Even Brendan Connolly who works for the Red Sox and was our student manager at Harvard. Ben Sestanovich helped me get my first job in baseball. He’s now assistant GM with the Atlanta Braves, but was working for the Padres at the time.

Alumnus Reflections

A Harvard Graduate

There's a lot of pride in the school. I really think Harvard is the best place to learn in the world. Just being surrounded by so many amazing and smart people. I think, as a graduate, it gives you confidence that you can deal with intellectually-challenging problems and also interact with a ton of people from different backgrounds. I think that's probably one of the best parts about the school is we get people from all over the world that you're able to interact with through classes, through extracurricular activities, through sports. It’s a really special place. I am super thankful that I was able to attend school there.

To Go Back and Do It Again

Winning is the best thing ever. Especially winning with a group of people that you've spent a lot of time with. So when you're on the team bus ride to Penn and we're playing mafia together or we're on our spring break trip and we get to just hang out for a week together, I think those are the times you remember. Obviously winning helped, but it's more the feeling of working together and doing something really difficult and then winning at the end is the best high that you can ever feel. So for me, that’s what I’m thinking about. It’s not even the actual games, but the moments leading up to games where you feel like you're really a part of a group. More than the actual playing, it's spending time with people that you've put in a lot of work and time with and getting to enjoy the simple things. My personal motto is ‘find the fun’. So there's a lot of moments on the buses and during spring breaks that I'll remember forever.