Franklin Regional grad Jake Williams lends veteran presence, skill to young Yale baseball team
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To say Jake Williams has had an unusual journey in baseball would be an understatement. Ultimately, however, the Franklin Regional grad believes he is exactly where he is supposed to be.
That would be in the middle of Yale’s infield and batting order. The senior second baseman is hoping to point the young Bulldogs toward the Ivy League tournament, which takes place in mid-May.
Williams, through 28 games, was hitting .276 with a homer, 10 RBIs and 18 runs. He also is a reliable defender, committing only two errors in 98 chances (.980). Last season, he helped the Bulldogs compile a team fielding percentage of .978, 43rd out of nearly 300 in the nation.
“He’s such an empathetic guy and really humble,” said Bulldogs second-year coach Brian Hamm. “He does a lot of his talking on the field, but he’s so driven in terms of his dedication to the game that our guys see how hard he works to continue to improve, and, ultimately, he has the results to show for it.”
Getting to that point has been an adventure.
A high school athlete’s recruiting generally ramps up during junior year. But for Williams, that didn’t happen. He suffered an injury that forced him to miss his 11th-grade season. When he came back, he used his senior year as sort of a do-over junior year to allow himself to be seen by recruiters.
Additionally, he decided to take a gap year between high school and college to allow more time for the recruiting process to play out.
“I didn’t love the idea of the gap year, and it was kind of out of the circumstances of getting hurt,” Williams said. “But looking back on it, it kind of turned out to be a blessing because that year, what would have been my freshman year, was the covid year, and the whole NCAA canceled the college baseball season. So I kind of lucked out in a sense.”
Williams entered Yale in fall 2020, only to be, figuratively, thrown a curveball. He would face no literal curveballs because the Ivy League, with the pandemic lingering, canceled all of its spring sports in 2021, so Williams’ freshman baseball season was lost anyway.
To further complicate matters, in the Ivy League, students must graduate in four years. That includes the athletes.
No redshirts. No grad students. Not even a “bonus” covid year. An Ivy League student has eight semesters in which to graduate. Period.
The coaching staff at Yale, however, introduced Williams to a loophole. Ivy League students are permitted to take leaves of absence, so this past fall, Williams didn’t take classes, instead taking his leave to do an internship at an investment bank in Stamford, Conn., about 40 miles from Yale’s New Haven campus.
To keep in baseball shape, he and three teammates who chose the same option would work out together after finishing their internships for the day.
Williams also will take the upcoming fall off so he can finish his eighth and final semester in spring 2025 and be eligible to play a fourth baseball season.
“It was a rule that I had no idea existed in the Ivy League,” he said.
Williams’ circuitous path has been beneficial for him as well as the Bulldogs, particularly this season. Hamm often has had four and, sometimes, five freshmen in his lineup, so a seasoned, mature player such as Williams has been a boon.
That doesn’t mean the season has been without challenges. The young Bulldogs dropped their first eight games, and for Williams, he rarely got good pitches to hit.
“Pitchers could pitch around him because we didn’t really have a lot of guys to hit behind him,” Hamm said. “So not only was he having to face pitchers who weren’t going to give him a lot of pitches to hit but also there was a little bit more pressure on him to produce with runners in scoring position.”
Said Williams: “It definitely put an extra burden on myself and the other upperclassmen in the lineup. Teams could try to key on the guys who were more established players. The fact that a lot of those (young) guys have been picking it up, it has been putting more pressure on the opposing pitching staff. … So I’ve definitely noticed the quality of pitches I have seen in the past few weeks.”
But whatever burden Williams felt in the batter’s box is nothing compared to the load he carries in the field. Yale has only 11 healthy position players on its roster, so Williams is the lone option at second base.
He has played every inning of every game at second base from Game 1 in 2023 to the present.
Williams said he has to be conscious about his health. Not only is he playing every inning of every game, he takes every rep in practice with few breaks. He said he has learned how to protect his arm from overwork and is judicious with when he goes all out in practice, preferring to save his best for games.
Hamm said he has been impressed with the way Williams has handled all of his responsibilities on both sides of the ball.
“It speaks very much to his strengths in terms of resiliency and ability to stay healthy without getting a day off,” Hamm said. “He’s hitting in the middle of the lineup, which it just takes a physical toll in terms of the pitches you are seeing and the high-leverage situations you are in.
“Then he goes and plays the middle infield. … There’s wear and tear on your body, and there’s high-leverage situations that you’re always part of. That’s just mentally draining as well.”
For his part, Williams wouldn’t have it any other way. Now he hopes the improvements he and the team have made are enough to boost them into the postseason.
Entering the week of April 15, the Bulldogs were in a three-way tie for third place in the Ivy League (6-6) with Penn and Princeton. The top four teams make the league tournament.
“I’ve had to carry a bigger load than I have had to in my earlier years at Yale,” he said, “but it’s been going really well. The team is really just starting to put everything together.”