The storylines surrounding Virginia’s baseball team entering this season all revolved around who the Wahoos had back. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were able to retain all nine everyday players in their lineup, their three top starters on the mound, and everyone from the back end of their bullpen.
That depth allowed the Hoos to convert reliever Andrew Abbott to a starter and slot the senior lefty at the top of their rotation and kept highly-regarded freshman Kyle Teel out of the lineup to start the year.
Virtually everyone was back from the 2020 team that had gotten off to a 14-4 start in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly stopped the season.
Virtually everyone, that is, but veteran pitchers Evan Sperling and Chesdin Harrington.
A pair of fifth-year seniors in 2020, the two right-handers were the last remaining Virginia players who had appeared in an NCAA Tournament prior to this postseason. Both had completed their master’s degrees by the end of the semester last spring and decided to hang up their cleats.
Both admit to feeling some mixed emotions over the past few weekends while watching their former teammates make the UVa’s latest run to the College World Series.
“You know that’s where the program needs to be, and you just feel some pull in your heartstrings that you never got to go and you didn’t get to experience that,” Harrington said during a recent group conversation. “But you’re so happy for the guys you played with, and even the guys you don’t know.”
“Obviously it’s a little bittersweet,” added Sperling. “We both went to Virginia to go to Omaha. When we both went to summer school, it was two weeks off of us winning the national championship.”
The two pitchers were part of a 2015 UVa recruiting class that also included, among others, outfielders Jake McCarthy and Cam Simmons, infielder Andy Weber, and lefty Daniel Lynch. That group arrived in Charlottesville in the aftermath of the first CWS title. They were part of NCAA regional teams in 2016 and 2017, though Sperling missed his freshman season while recovering from elbow surgery. Injury also kept Harrington out for all of 2018, the season that snapped Virginia’s run of 14-consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances. The Hoos again missed the postseason in 2019.
Because of their respective injury redshirt seasons, Harrington and Sperling were back last year as the only players left from that 2015 recruiting class. Harrington began the year in the weekend rotation before ceding his spot to first-year lefty Nate Savino; Sperling was working out of the bullpen.
The Wahoos were playing their best baseball in years to start, going 13-2 over a homestand that spilled from mid-February to early March before receiving word while stopped for lunch on the way to Pitt that the series was off because of COVID concerns. The remainder of the season was canceled shortly thereafter.
For Sperling and Harrington, that meant an abrupt end to their time with the Wahoos.
“I didn’t know that Tuesday against UMass Lowell was gonna be the last time I ever pitched in a baseball game,” Sperling said. “It just was an unexpected and emotional ending to a career, but also just being a baseball player, being a kid. The way it ended wasn’t fair, but that’s life.”
Harrington admits it took some time to come to terms with the circumstances that ended his final college season. He took a job with Capital One and has been working remotely since last summer from the house he grew up in near Richmond. The start of this season brought some of those emotions back, he said, and they’ve been in the back of his mind throughout UVa’s current postseason run.
“I think last year, leaving that stone unturned and just not knowing for sure what it could have been, and not ending it on your terms, or on the terms of just how the season plays out, it made it really difficult to accept,” Harrington explained. “Everyone had to accept it and move on, but certainly at this point now, I would have loved to have that season play out and see what happened.”
Sperling has also found himself pondering that same question “all the time” in recent weeks.
“I mean, last year we were rolling so it’s almost like, ‘What seed would we have been? Would we have been hosting?’” he pondered. “What that team could have been capable of, it’s kind of manifesting right now but we were on a roll from the beginning. Looking back, who knows where we would have gone.”
Harrington attended a few games during the regular season but admitted it was challenging to adjust to his new role as a fan, especially with COVID restrictions limiting his ability to interact with former teammates. Last month, he paid a visit to Sperling, who had been living in Massachusetts last summer before recently relocating to Connecticut. They both watched Abbott take a shutout into the seventh inning of a 7-1 win in the opener of UVa’s final regular season series at Boston College.
By that point, the Wahoos were rolling into the postseason. The Hoos had started just 4-12 in ACC play but rallied during the season’s second half to get back to 18-18 in the conference and play their way into the NCAA Tournament.
Harrington and Sperling kept in contact with their former teammates throughout the year, either through group texts or by checking in after big wins. At one point amid Virginia’s mid-March swoon, Sperling sent a message to the 2020 team’s group thread detailing how in 2017 the Wahoos overcame a slow start in ACC play to win 43 games.
“It takes one game to get hot. Go Hoos,” the message ended.
Two months later, the Cavaliers found themselves trailing by a run in the deciding game of Monday afternoon’s super regional against Dallas Baptist. Sitting at his parents’ kitchen table, Harrington was watching between work meetings when Teel came to the plate with the bases loaded and two outs in the seventh inning.
“I had my headphones on,” he recalled excitedly, “and when Teel hit that ball I was like, ‘It’s got a chance. It’s got a chance.’”
Harrington immediately grabbed his phone and texted Sperling, who now works for Nike and was unable to watch the game in real time.
“Chesdin and my mom texted me. Just like, ‘Holy crap, Teel hit a grand slam,’” Sperling recalled. “I immediately went to Twitter, watched the video that was posted and was just checking in every five minutes from there. Once that happened, we have all the momentum. It’s game over from there.”
Sure enough, Teel’s grand slam was the difference in Virginia’s 5-2 win. Harrington and Sperling spent Monday night texting with former teammates, plus their old coaches and other UVa staff members. It meant a lot to both to watch pitchers like Griff McGarry and Matt Wyatt emerge into key roles in the Cavaliers’ run.
But there will be no trips to Omaha this summer for the two former Cavaliers—especially without being able to rely on the team to fly them, Harrington joked.
“It’s a win for everyone,” he said. “I think it’s hard to feel that way when you’re on the outside kind of looking in, but you’re still connected to the program in a way that it’s still very special to you even though you’re not necessarily getting to experience it.”
“I know most people probably wrote them off a couple weekends in,” added Sperling. “But this is kind of what was expected the whole time, if you go back and look at how we ended last year, look at the preseason rankings. This was supposed to happen. This team was meant for this coming off last year into this year. Not much has changed.”
Well, maybe a couple of things…
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