But things only got crazier the following year when he came up with the uncharted, almost inconceivable idea of remaining a full-time Harvard student while also living back home in Texas and becoming a full-time Alvin Community College student so he could play junior college baseball while COVID precautions cancelled the second straight Crimson season.
He needed to build his pitching resume if he hoped to draw real interest from pro scouts and, as his mom put it, he “had to be creative.”
And creativity is one thing Holt seems to have in abundance.
In this case it paid off. It’s why you now see him — sans mullet — in the Dayton Dragons’ bullpen.
That ability to design his own destiny showed itself after he spent those two seasons — one derailed by a thumb injury that required surgery — as a big-armed, but little-used quarterback at Harvard.
He then decided to switch to baseball.
Although he’d been a standout in both football and baseball at Lamar High School in Houston, it had been two years since he took the mound.
It helped that the captain of the Harvard baseball team was also a Lamar grad – Holt had played football with his younger brother – and he vouched for Owen.
“And I’m no expert, but I think being a quarterback and just throwing the ball all the time, it just makes your arm stronger,” said Maynard Holt, Owen’s dad.
Holt did well enough in intrasquad games before the 2020 season to earn a starter’s job.
He made his college debut in the second game of the season, starting against then 10-0 Alabama.
Although he had a growing repertoire of pitches, he said he figured he needed a little something extra to give him “an edge” against hitters.
“I had grown out that mullet the summer before and I wanted that persona on the mound,” he said with a laugh. “I thought maybe that would give me an edge.”
A tonsorial statement in the 1980s, the mullet was a cut that came with some fastidiousness up top, but had a cascading party down the back. Over the years it became a signature for athletes as varied as the WWE’s The Undertaker and Wild Thing golfer John Daly to football’s Brian “The Boz” Bosworth and, of course, hockey legend Jaromir Jagr.
A generation past, it was sported by baseball players like Jose Canseco, Randy Johnson, Rod Beck — who added a dark Fu Manchu — and John Kruk.
Holt also grew a scruffy goatee and the look — especially when his cap kept flying off during the follow through of his pitches — drew some pointed needling from the vocal Alabama fans that day he first stepped onto a college mound.
“Yeah, my hat kept flying off and I was rockin’ that mullet and their fans really gave it to me,” he said with a laugh. “They were yelling, ‘Put your (expletive) hat back on, Nerd!’”
That’s what Maynard Holt — who was there with his wife Kathleen, Owen’s two younger siblings, Eliza and Chico and other family members — meant by the “hair experience,” which he said was amplified by a competing high-decibel soundtrack:
“It was crazy. They were just blaring ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ And I figured they thought the Harvard guys were going to be intimidated.
But what they didn’t know was that the Texas kid on the mound probably liked the song more than they did.
“And he ended up having a great outing.”
Holt pitched five scoreless innings, struck out three and gave up just four hits.
His next outing against Ohio State was a little rougher. In a game played at Stetson, the Buckeyes – who also rode him about his flying hat and throwback hair – hit him hard and scored seven runs in three innings.
Soon after that the COVID pandemic shut down all of college sports and, in fact, Ivy League baseball would be shelved for two seasons in a row because of it.
After that first aborted season in 2020, Holt returned to Houston, took his Harvard classes remotely — he was an economics major — and said he pitched wherever he could find hitters taking live batting practice. And that’s when he really got creative.
With just two games and eight innings of college experience on his resume, he needed exposure.
Before the 2021 season, he talked to Ryan Farney, the baseball coach at Alvin Community College, which is about 40 miles south of Houston.
The JUCO program has quite a history of its own. It produced big leaguers Nolan Ryan, Mike Stanton, Chris Herman, Benny Distefano and over the years has had three dozen players drafted by Major League Baseball.
Farney suggested it might be possible for Holt to enroll at Alvin and play baseball for the school while also remaining a Harvard student if he took a full class load from both places simultaneously.
That was a big ask.
Holt would need approval from several people and, if that happened, he then would have to pull off the herculean feat on his own, all while travelling with a team, often on long bus rides, that would play a 52-game schedule in just over three months.
“It was a crazy idea,” said Kathleen Holt.
‘I guess this was a great idea’
“I was on the line when Owen called Harvard’s (NCAA) compliance with the idea,” Maynard said. “And they were like, ‘Aaah, we’ll have to get back to you. No one has ever asked about this before.’”
Once he got the OK from both the NCAA and a Harvard dean, Holt put together his academic load for the semester. He would take four classes at Alvin — though none of the credits would transfer later toward his four-year degree — and he had three courses, including an economics course that requited a lengthy written essay, at Harvard.
He got an apartment in Alvin so he wouldn’t be making the commute every day and spent most of his time off the ball diamond buried in his books.
“Junior college baseball has so many characters and that was especially the case at Alvin (and many other Texas teams) during COVID,” Maynard said. “California junior colleges and other places were shut down, so a lot of the players came here. It was like a refugee camp for baseball.”
Holt’s first game for Alvin was against McLennan Community College, which would go on to win NJCAA national championship that year. He pitched four innings, struck out six, walked none and gave up just two runs. He was credited with the 11-6 victory.
“That first game, there must have been 30 scouts in the stands,” Maynard said. “They had nowhere else to go. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, I guess this was a great idea! Owen knew what he was doing.’”
Holt, though, is quick to spread the credit: “Most importantly, I just think I had some really good people in my corner.”
Along with his parents, the people at Harvard and Farney and his staff at Alvin, Holt singled out Jim Gott – the former Major League pitcher and later the Philadelphia Phillies bullpen coach – who was the pitching coach of the MLB Draft League in Williamsport that he entered after Alvin to further up his visibility.
Like Holt, Gott had once committed to play football at BYU, only to jettison that for 14 years on big league mounds.
“He still texts me today,” the 24-year-old Holt said.
And now the two really have something to talk about.
Holt was taken by the Cincinnati Reds in the 16th round of the 2021 draft and today he’s a much-used reliever in the Dragons bullpen.
And last December he graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics.
‘It became a big party’
The dual-sport DNA goes back to his grandfather, Maynard Holt Sr., who played football at Vanderbilt and then switched to golf, where he became captain of the Commodores team.
“He was quite an athlete,” his son Maynard said. “He was the kind of guy, who, when he was in his 60s, could still go into the backyard and do backflips on the trampoline. And he wasn’t a small guy. He was like 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds.”
After growing up in Nashville, Maynard went to Rice University and then got his masters at the Harvard Kennedy School. Today he’s in investment banking and is the CEO of Veriten, an energy consulting firm.
Owen’s mom, Kathleen grew up in Syracuse, got her undergrad degree at Colgate and then got her masters at Harvard, as well. She retired from the Moody’s Investor Service.
The couple’s two youngest children are both making their own mark. Eliza is a senior math major at Duke and Chico is headed to Northwestern to play football.
Owen captained both the football and baseball teams at Lamar and chose Harvard because it offered the best of both worlds. It was the football power in the Ivy League and its academic history is storied.
“They were coming off three Ivy League championships and were kind of like the crown bull of the league,” Holt said. “And, of course, they had the whole Ryan Fitzpatrick thing in the NFL.”
As the Crimson quarterback, Fitzpatrick was the Ivy League Player of the Year in 2004 and then played 17 years in the NFL.
Holt’s QB days in Cambridge were a little different. After losing his first season to injury, he returned the following year to a full depth chart of quarterbacks and mostly was relegated to scout-team work, though he did play against Yale in a game at Fenway Park.
He talked about the good friends he made at Harvard, especially on the football team, and how they — along with some family members — all gathered in Boston for the MLB draft.
“Once my name was called it became a big party,” he said.
‘A great place for Owen to play’
When Holt was drafted by the Reds, no one was happier than his mom.
“I grew up just loving the Reds,” Kathleen said. “My older brother was a massive Reds fan. How could you not be in that era? They had this great historic name in baseball and this famous team – The Big Red Machine.
“When the Reds took Owen, we were just thrilled.”
Maynard especially has been impressed by the current Reds’ organization:
“I listened to Owen, how when he got into the Reds’ system, they had these organizational meetings. He told me some of the things they talked about – the principles of things – and I thought, ‘That sounds great.’ It seemed like very empowering stuff.”
Since he’s been drafted, Holt has played in 52 minor league games – in Rookie League in Arizona, mostly at lower-level Daytona last season and now Dayton – and has come out of the bullpen in all but one game.
“I think I always was a reliever at heart,” he said.
He picked up the victory in the Dragons’ 6-2 win over Wisconsin Friday night at Day Air Ballpark, giving up two runs on two hits and striking out two in two innings. He’s 4-4 on the season with a 4.23 earned run average.
His parents visited earlier this month, catching five games sandwiched around the Fourth of July.
“It’s a great place for Owen to play,” Kathleen said. “Dayton has such great fans. They know all the players.”
“We just loved it there,” Maynard said.
“The end game for all of us (relievers) is to be in the Cincinnati Reds bullpen,” Holt said. “They are building something really special there and we all want to be a part of that. But I know for that to happen, a lot of things have to go right for you.
“Regardless, one day I want to be able to look back at my career and say I went out every day and tried my (butt) off. And then, even if I never step foot on a Major League mound, I can truthfully tell myself I gave it my all.
“Only then do I think you could be content. You have to know you tried everything.”
And he has done that with his arm and his look.
Although the mullet and goatee are long gone, he’s not exactly made himself milquetoast.
When we sat and talked the other day just outside the Dragons’ clubhouse, he was wearing Cody James python boots.
During pregame warm-ups, he often wears a cowboy hat with his Dragons uniform and gets “juiced up” to the AC/DC song. “Thunderstruck.”
“It puts me in the right frame of mind,” he said. “Sometimes I go out (to the mound) like William Wallace in Braveheart, where he’s completely lost himself and he’s so obsessed with defeating the English that he doesn’t care about anything. He’s like: ‘I’m gonna attack them! I’m gonna invade them! It doesn’t matter.’”
And Kathleen appreciates her son’s new look and that familiar old passion.
“I’m glad the mullet phase is over,” she laughed. “But I think you see he still has some flair.”
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