Aggressive approach has led to Wahoos' power surge at plate
Alex Tappen flashed a wide smile and glanced beyond the children running the bases and to the scoreboard at Disharoon Park.
Tappen is hitting in the middle of a lineup more prolific than any the Virginia baseball program has ever fielded for a full season. He had just finished one of the most productive days at the plate in his five-year career. He’d been asked if he ever lets himself look at the numbers the Wahoos have been putting up as a group.
“It’s kind of hard not to,” admitted Tappen, who was named the ACC’s player of the week on Monday.
“It’s fun to look up and see 16 runs, 18 runs in back-to-back games in an ACC series,” he added. “It means you’re doing something right.”
UVa, up to No. 10 in the country in the latest D1Baseball.com Top 25, put up 16 runs on 18 hits on Sunday to complete a three-game sweep of Boston College and improve to 5-1 in the ACC and 19-1 overall through the season’s first month. That matches the 2009 Hoos for the best 20-game start in program history, and it’s the fourth time in 19 seasons under head coach Brian O’Connor that the Cavaliers have won five of their first six conference games.
Those video game stats have become the norm for this UVa team. The Wahoos have scored in double figures in 14 of their first 20 games, including 13 of 14 at home. Sunday’s game marked the fourth time they racked up 18 hits. They posted 16 hits in Saturday’s 18-1 win over the Eagles. It was the fourth time UVa had won a game this spring by 15 or more runs.
The Cavaliers’ 41 total runs in the sweep were the most for Virginia in an ACC series since scoring 43 while taking all three at Maryland in 2010. Three weekends ago, they set a program record by scoring 60 runs in a three-game sweep of Cornell.
After that latest big weekend, the Wahoos woke up Monday morning leading the country in both scoring (11.8 runs per game) and total runs (236). Their .343 team batting average ranks second nationally, while their on-base percentage (.451) and slugging percentage (.586) both rank fourth.
UVa has never had a team post such prodigious slash lines for a full season. Nor has the program scored runs at such a rate. Only three times in program history has a Virginia team averaged more than eight runs per game, most recently the 2010 team that scored 8.08 per game. The school record is 8.65 runs per game in 1985.
Then there are the power numbers. If it seems like the Hoos have been hitting the ball out of the park with more regularity than usual, it’s because they are. The all-time best home run rate for a UVa team is 1.41 by the 1978 club; this year’s team is averaging an even 2.0 per game, with 40 in 20 games. The school record for homers in a season is 67, by the 1988 team. This year’s team still has 35 regular season games and, in all likelihood, some postseason baseball to play.
In the first five games of this current homestand alone, which concludes on Tuesday against Towson, the Hoos have gone deep 18 times. Freshman Casey Saucke homered in each of the first three games. Chris Newell homered in each of the first two, then hit a grand slam on Saturday—after coming up a few feet short of a walk-off grand slam in Friday’s 7-6 win in 10 innings. Kyle Teel hit three long balls in the first four games, including a pair of grand slams.
Only six of O’Connor’s previous 18 ball clubs have hit more than 40 long balls in a full season. Only once in his tenure has a UVa lineup averaged more than one home run per game: The 2017 team that finished averaged 1.03 (61 homers in 59 games), led by 14 from Adam Haseley and 13 from Pavin Smith. Those two juniors, who went back-to-back in the top 10 of the MLB Draft that summer, had been the last two players to hit 10 home runs in a season—until Gelof hit a pair in Saturday’s win.
His two-run shot on Sunday raised his season total to 12, most in the country. Gelof also has 45 RBI in 20 games, nine more than any other player in the country.
“He’s got a ferocious swing,” O’Connor said of the Cavaliers’ cleanup hitter.
The Virginia record for home runs in a season is 22 by Brian Buchanan in 1994. The most by an O’Connor-coached player is 16, by Joe Koshansky in 2004 and Jarrett Parker in 2009. Smith set the UVa single-season RBI record with 77 in 2017. Again, Gelof still has more than half the schedule to pursue those records.
But the sophomore third baseman said his lone concern at the plate is remaining disciplined and looking for pitches to hit.
“I’m just trying to put damage on the ball,” said Gelof. “Hit it hard and good things will happen, for sure.”
Gelof isn’t the only UVa player putting damage on the ball this spring. Newell has hit six home runs; Tappen, Teel and Saucke have five apiece. That’s already a career high for Newell, the third-year outfielder. Tappen hit six in 55 games last year; he hit four in 54 games as a freshman in 2018 and three in 46 games the following season. No one hit more than five home runs on either of those teams.
Last season, Teel and Zack Gelof led the Hoos with nine homers apiece; Nic Kent and Devin Ortiz each finished with eight. But much of that power production didn’t come until the Cavaliers’ final postseason push. Entering the final weekend of April, the Hoos had 20 home runs as a team through 39 games; they hit 15 in their final 13 regular season games, including the ACC tournament, then 16 more in 11 NCAA tournament games.
O’Connor believes a few factors have combined to produce this power surge at the plate. He pointed to the wind that was blowing out of Disharoon Park all weekend and the warm weather in Charlottesville this season—“The ball is flying out of this ballpark like it flies out in regional time, in June,” he said—plus the confidence of the Cavaliers’ hitters, led by veterans like Tappen, Gelof, Teel and Ortiz, who all contributed key hits during that run to the College World Series last June.
The head baseball coach also conceded that this year’s team has been taking a more aggressive, “get your money’s worth” and “don’t get cheated” approach into the batter’s box.
“And I love that,” O’Connor said on Sunday. “At least when you have that approach, you can go home at the end of each day feeling like, ‘Hey, I let it rip and if it didn’t happen for me, at least I can put my head on the pillow at night and know that I let it rip and gave it my best.’”
Gelof described that more aggressive mindset as “let the kids play.”
“We’ve been playing baseball forever, everyone probably all of our lives,” he said. “It’s the same thing. Just go out there, have fun, stick with what we’ve been doing our whole lives.”
Tappen compared this team’s approach at the plate to that of the 2020 team, which was averaging 9.0 runs and had slugged 22 home runs in 18 games before that season abruptly ended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He contrasted that performance and the early dominance of this year’s club to last spring, when the Wahoos got off to a slow start at the plate collectively while sliding into a 4-12 hole in the ACC.
No one illustrates the difference in the past two early seasons better than Tappen himself. A month into last year’s schedule, he had played his way out of the everyday lineup after starting just 1-for-27 (.037) with one RBI at the plate. This year, he’s got a .368 batting average, .433 on-base percentage and .658 slugging percentage, and his 31 RBI are five shy of his career high, set as a freshman.
“Last year, we didn’t really do any of the punching,” Tappen admitted after going 4-for-4 with a career-high six RBI on Sunday. “We kind of just took the punches from the pitchers and we didn’t really make adjustments when we needed to.”
This year’s team has jumped on pitches to hit earlier in counts. Even when the Hoos have fallen into two-strike counts, they’ve remained aggressive. Tappen’s home run on Sunday, a towering two-run shot off the light stanchion beyond the left field seats, came on a full count. Five of Gelof’s have come on two-strike counts, including both on Saturday.
It has all added up to the kind of prodigious offensive output that brings a big smile to a fifth-year outfielder’s face when asked how much attention he gives those numbers. The Wahoos have spent the season’s first month getting their money’s worth at the plate. No one in the lineup is going home feeling like he’s been cheated.
“We’ve got one through nine and even past that, with the guys that are coming in and out and getting pinch-hit at-bats,” Tappen said, “it’s all kind of working and everyone is bought in to being aggressive at the plate.”
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