An error bounces Rallis’ way
Baseball player Trey Rallis never expected to be named Ivy League Player of the Year his senior season at Yale University.
“I am a player that doesn’t check his numbers,” said Rallis, a former La Cañada resident and 2006 Loyola High graduate. “I don’t check my stats in the year because if I do I tend to focus on those and not on the team … I didn’t want to get my hopes up [for Player of the Year] and I just didn’t really think I was deserving of it. It never crossed my mind to be honest.”
When the results of the all-league awards were first released, Rallis’ name wasn’t at the top of the list as MVP. Instead, he was named a first-team selection. The Bulldogs’ first baseman and former La Cañada Junior Baseball Assn. player was happy to hear he was an All-Ivy League first-team pick. However, his teammates told him he deserved the MVP award.
“I was glad to get first team, and I just moved on,” Rallis said. “A week later, I got a call from my assistant coach, saying I owed him big time.”
Rallis’ assistant coach received an email with the voting tallies for the Ivy League Player of the Year, and noticed a tabulation error. He tallied up all of Rallis’ votes for the award and saw he had actually beat out Princeton catcher, Sam Mulroy, who was originally named the Ivy League MVP, by five or six points.
That whole “rollercoaster ride” led up to Rallis being officially named the Ivy League Player of the Year on May 17, after the error was fixed.
“I am so happy that Trey won this award,” Yale Coach John Stuper said in a press release. “He certainly deserved it.”
In the end, Rallis’ teammates and coaches acted “a little more ecstatic” than he did over the award.
“I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the award, but I personally try to not let it get to my head too much because that affects the way you think about yourself and your self image,” Rallis said.
There’s no doubt he put up impressive numbers during the season. Rallis finished the campaign hitting .365, the second highest batting average in the league. He put up team-highs in hits (54), doubles (12), home runs (four), runs batted in (30), on-base percentage (.444), slugging percentage (.527) and walks (19). He also finished the season with a .994 fielding percentage, committing two errors in 360 chances in the infield.
Rallis describes himself as a player who thinks a great deal about the game while he’s playing. He’d often become so focused on getting a hit or not making an error that he’d do the exact opposite.
“Baseball is a slow sport, so there’s a lot of time to think,” Rallis said. “I have realized in college the less I think the better I am.”
He has to earn the right to not think, though.
“In the fall, I work on perfecting my swing so in the season I don’t have to think about it, it just comes naturally,” Rallis said.
The end of Rallis’ college career most likely means the end of his days on the diamond, which is odd because less than a year ago he dreamed of playing baseball professionally. A few Major League Baseball teams showed interest in drafting him in the later rounds of this week’s draft, but he turned them down after he was offered an internship with UBS, a global financial services firm.
“I’ve always been realistic about it,” said Rallis, a political-science major. “I figured I would play baseball in the minors for a few years and then go into a career in finance. It didn’t seem very practical to go pro [with the internship offer].”