Twice in the NCAA Tournament when the Wahoos have needed a win, they’ve given the ball to winless starter Griff McGarry. In both spots, McGarry has been able to rewrite the narrative of his Virginia baseball career.
The senior right-hander has been on the bump for the Hoos on Opening Day twice in his college career, in 2019 and 2020, and he began this season slotted behind lefty Andrew Abbott in the weekend rotation. But control issues cost McGarry that spot by early April and his senior year bottomed out when he failed to record an out in a midweek start at VCU.
Going into last Sunday’s elimination game against Old Dominion—UVa’s fourth game in the first three days of the regional weekend—McGarry was one of the few fresh options left on the pitching staff. A week later, he was an unlikely choice as the Cavaliers faced elimination again, this time against Dallas Baptist in Game 2 of the Columbia Super Regional.
His performance against the Patriots on Sunday will go down in Virginia postseason lore as the Griff McGarry Game: No runs on two hits with 10 strikeouts and three walks. He matched his career long with seven complete innings and became the first UVa starter to pitch into the eighth inning of an NCAA Tournament game since Brandon Waddell against Florida at the 2015 College World Series.
Behind McGarry’s career day, the Wahoos beat DBU 4-0 to force a deciding Game 3 at 1 p.m. Monday.
Afterward, UVa coach Brian O’Connor opened his postgame remarks by talking for more than two minutes about the performance of his starting pitcher.
“It’s amazing what he’s done,” O’Connor said. “I can tell you, I haven’t seen it in my 18 years in this uniform, a kid do what he did this year, and hopefully he gets another opportunity…The kid’s had some good outings in his career but none of them quite like that, when his team needed him the most.”
McGarry was 0-4 with a 6.85 ERA in seven starts when O’Connor made the decision to remove the right-hander from the weekend rotation at the end of March. McGarry hadn’t made it through four innings in any of his last five starts, or gone more than two in any of his final three. He’d struck out 38 hitters in 22.1 innings, but also walked 27 batters and hit two more.
His first scheduled midweek start against ODU on April 14th got rained out. After giving up a run in an inning of relief against Louisville on April 17th, McGarry took the mound against VCU at The Diamond three days later.
Despite not giving up a hit, he was charged with three runs against the Rams. McGarry walked three and hit another batter, throwing just seven of his 21 pitches for strikes. The loss dropped his record to 0-5 and his ERA ballooned to 8.10. McGarry didn’t pitch in a game for almost a month.
But pitching coach Drew Dickinson remained McGarry’s most vocal fan. Publicly, he often praised McGarry’s stuff as possibly the best not just on the UVa staff but in the entire country. They worked on some mechanical tweaks to the right-hander’s delivery. With less effort came better control. And according to Dickinson, following that night at VCU he was able to convince McGarry to buy in to some mental changes he’d also been pushing.
“He always told me, ‘It’s just a matter of time before it really clicks,’” McGarry said on Sunday.
Dickinson also continued to tout McGarry to the Cavaliers’ head coach.
“I don’t know how many times in a week he would say to me, ‘Coach, I’m telling you, Griff McGarry is going to be huge for us,” O’Connor recalled. “’He’s better. He’s figuring it out.’ Fortunately Griff put in the work and hung in there.”
O’Connor started to see those improvements first hand in UVa’s intrasquad scrimmages in which, according to third baseman Zack Gelof, McGarry “made a bunch of us, including myself, look pretty silly at times.” In his first outing after that start at VCU, McGarry recorded the final three outs of UVa’s combined no-hitter against Wake Forest. A week later, he threw another shutout inning out of the bullpen at Boston College. His fastball sat in the mid- to high-90s in both outings.
That fastball was on full display last weekend against the Monarchs. McGarry was hitting 99 mph regularly as he struck out ODU’s first six hitters in succession, and eight across his 3.1 innings. Dickinson was convinced that, had McGarry not rubbed his thumb raw and bloody by the fourth inning, the right-hander would give the Cavaliers seven innings in that start. That overpowering performance in UVa’s 8-3 win was what convinced O’Connor to give McGarry the ball again on Sunday.
“I believed in him because of the transformation he went through this year, and what he did last weekend. He earned it,” O’Connor explained. “We talk a lot in our program that you earn everything you get, and he stepped up for his team last weekend, and he earned this opportunity.”
McGarry was able to consistently get in front of DBU hitters on Sunday, throwing first-pitch strikes to 17 of the 26 batters he faced. He even recorded a rare four-strikeout frame in the second inning, successfully working around a wild pitch on strike three that allowed Ryan Wrobleski to reach base with one out. After a leadoff walk and a one-out hit batter in the third prompted a visit from Dickinson, McGarry retired the next 11 batters he faced.
The Patriots’ first hit didn’t come until Andrew Benefield led off the seventh with a double that UVa’s Chris Newell couldn’t quite hang onto at the center field wall. But Wrobleski failed to get the next pitch down for a bunt, and UVa catcher Logan Michaels fired a strike to second base to pick Benefield off. After a Wrobleski single, McGarry rattled off two more strikeouts, the most all-time for a UVa pitcher in a Super Regional game. The inning ended when Christian Boulware couldn’t catch up to a 97-m.p.h. fastball.
More blister problems got the better of McGarry in the eighth inning, this time on the ring finger on his pitching hand. He left to a standing ovation following a leadoff walk, with blood dripping off his hand and stained on his uniform pants. Afterward, McGarry said his parents, a pair of “pretty die-hard Red Sox fans,” jokingly compared it to Curt Schilling’s ‘bloody sock game’ in the 2004 American League Championship Series.
The game was still scoreless when McGarry gave way to lefty Brandon Neeck, who stranded that leadoff walk at first base.
UVa again did all of its damage in a single inning on Sunday. This time it was the bottom of the eighth, which began with a solo home run from Gelof and was capped by an Alex Tappen three-run shot. Kyle Whitten got the last three outs for the Hoos, escaping a bases loaded jam in the process.
That win improved Virginia’s record to 5-0 when facing elimination this postseason. McGarry may not have factored in either decision—he’s still winless on the season, though his seven shutout innings lowered his ERA from 7.53 to 6.06—but he’s been on the mound to start two of those elimination games. Prior to the NCAA Tournament, UVa had lost all eight games he had started this season.
McGarry watched most of Virginia’s second-half turnaround during the regular season from the dugout. With his performance on Sunday, the Wahoos are now a win on Monday away from the program’s fifth trip to Omaha and the College World Series.
He’ll be back on the top perch of the dugout cheering his teammates on.
“The Hoos have heart,” he said. “I’m so proud and excited to be a part of this team. It’s definitely a special group of guys that want to go through the finish line.”
“His spirit never changed,” added O’Connor. “He was excited for his teammates that got the opportunity in front of him and that’s really hard to do. It’s a really unselfish thing to do when you’re an elite-level prospect like he is. It’s just amazing what you can do as a person if you just hang in there and you keep believing in yourself and you’re willing to make some adjustments.”
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