It may feel like Virginia has been playing playoff baseball for the last two months. But in reality, it’s been two years since the Cavaliers have faced actual postseason elimination.
That will change when the Wahoos take the field in Charlotte this week at the 12-team ACC Tournament. And thanks to his club’s second-half surge during the regular season, Brian O’Connor believes his team has earned a spot in an NCAA regional next week as well.
The Cavaliers’ head coach can’t wait to get back on the field.
“This is postseason baseball,” he told reporters Sunday evening. “Whether it’s this weekend or next weekend, everybody you play from here on out has earned the right to be playing in whatever tournament it is. So it’s simple: Either you play really good baseball and clutch up at the right times and win, or if you don’t, you lose, and that tournament is over for you.
“This is the best time of the year, for sure,” O’Connor added.
The Wahoos clinched the No. 8 seed in Charlotte by taking two of three this past weekend at Boston College. It was the sixth series win in their final seven conference weekends, a run that pushed them back to 18-18 in the league (27-22 overall) to finish the regular season. Once 4-12 in ACC play, UVa’s 14 conference wins since April 1st were one behind Notre Dame and NC State for most in the ACC.
In O’Connor’s first 17 years as head coach, no team that finished the regular season with at least a .500 record in the ACC failed to play in an NCAA Tournament. Regardless of what happens this week in Charlotte, he believes this team also deserves to play baseball in June.
“We need to go out and earn it,” O’Connor said yesterday. “That said, I think what we have done, we have been one of the hottest teams in this league the last six weeks, and our guys deserve the opportunity to be playing next weekend no matter what.
“I have told the team that ‘Listen, people are going to write and do different things based off their projections and things like that,” he added. “We can control our own destiny by playing good baseball.’”
Virginia can first boost its NCAA resume at the ACC Tournament in pool play, where the Cavaliers are matched up with the tournament’s low seed, Virginia Tech, at 3 p.m. Tuesday, and top seed Notre Dame at 11 a.m. on Friday. With seeding used as the tie-breaker if all three teams go 1-1 in the pool, the Wahoos would need to win both games to advance to Saturday’s semifinals.
Notre Dame and the Hokies play at 3 p.m Wednesday.
It’s been a decade since UVa got past pool play. After the 2011 team went 4-0 to win the title, the Cavaliers are just 9-13 in pool play at the ACC Tournament, including a 2-4 record since the event switched to its current four-pools-of-three-teams format in 2017. The Wahoos last won multiple games at in 2013, as that team failed to advance out of its pool but ended the weekend with a 7-4 12-inning victory over Florida State that ended with a walk-off three-run home run by Kenny Towns…off a little-known FSU reliever named Jameis Winston.
O’Connor has often said that winning the ACC Tournament is more difficult than winning an NCAA regional. That’s certainly the case this week, he indicated on Sunday, given what he called the conference’s unprecedented depth this spring.
“In our case, because of our seeding you’ve got to win four in a row,” he explained. “Next weekend if you’re hot, you only win three in a row. There’s no question this is really, really challenging.”
Adding to that challenge is the format of the six-day schedule. As the top seed, Notre Dame got first choice of which days to be off during pool play. The Fighting Irish don’t play until Thursday, giving them two extra days of rest before lining up their pitching for the tournament. Other teams, like UVa, don’t have that luxury.
“There will be some huge decisions that will be made in the next 24 hours on all of these clubs, on the Tuesday and Wednesday games,” O’Connor noted. “On who you pitch.”
O’Connor said he expects to make a decision on Virginia’s starting pitcher against the Hokies on Monday, after the team travels and then practices in Charlotte. The options are lefty Andrew Abbott on short rest—something the coaching staff has strived to avoid all season—or someone not in the team’s weekend rotation. Abbott threw 107 pitches in Thursday’s win at Boston College. Mike Vasil and Nate Savino, who started the final two games against the Eagles, will not be available on Tuesday against the Hokies.
“We’re in the process of analyzing that and mapping that out,” O’Connor said. “Sometimes it comes down to how certain guys feel.”
Like a lot of pitchers in the league, Abbott struggled against Notre Dame in March, taking a home loss after giving up six runs (four earned) on nine hits and throwing 102 pitches in just 4.2 innings. In a win against the Hokies in Blacksburg last month, he gave up just one unearned run on four hits in seven innings, with eight strikeouts and no walks. He then received the first of his two ACC Pitcher of the Week nods for that performance.
Beyond that starting pitching decision, O’Connor is a fan of how this week’s schedule fell for his team. It’s set up like a typical week during the regular season, with a Tuesday game followed by potentially three on the weekend. Any relievers who face the Hokies will get two days rest before the Notre Dame game.
“You do everything you can, you find a way to win on Tuesday,” he said. “And then everything is kind of lined up for you Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So I kind of like it.”
UVa is a combined 0-2 all-time against Tech and Notre Dame in ACC Tournament play, with both losses coming in pool play: Against the Hokies in 2013 and the Irish in 2015. During this year’s regular season, the Wahoos went a combined 2-4 against this week’s opponents.
In their final weekend series before final exams, the Hoos took two of three from Tech in Blacksburg. Powered by an 18-1 win on that Friday night, UVa outscored Tech 27-8 and gave up just four earned runs on the weekend. Once 14-7 in the conference in mid-April, that series loss was part of a 2-13 finish for the Hokies in conference play. They dropped their last seven ACC games after taking the Saturday game against the Wahoos on May 1st.
Notre Dame steamrolled its way through the entire league during the regular season, finishing 25-10 in the ACC and losing just one conference series all spring. That run ended with a three-game sweep of the Hokies in Blacksburg last weekend and also included three straight wins against the Wahoos in Charlottesville in mid-March. The Irish “beat us up in every way possible,” O’Connor said at the time, hitting .365 with seven home runs and scoring 30 runs in those three road wins at Virginia.
Suffice to say there will be plenty of storylines for the Cavaliers to focus on as they head to Charlotte this week.
“You’ve got your rival down the road in Game 1 and then you’ve got somebody that really took you behind the woodshed for an entire weekend,” O’Connor said. “There’s no question that our players and coaches, with those two games that we know we have, have serious motivation.”
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