Saturday’s ACC semifinals in Charlotte gave Virginia a first-hand look at why Duke is currently one of the hottest college baseball teams in the country.
Freshman lefty Luke Fox pitched a career high seven innings on the bump while senior center fielder Joey Loperfido had a four-hit day at the plate that started with opposite-field home runs in his first two at-bats.
Those two led the Blue Devils to a 4-2 victory at Truist Field that extended their winning streak to 11 straight— the third-longest active streak in the country—and put them in Sunday’s championship game for the first time in program history.
The loss, meanwhile, brought UVa’s first run beyond pool play at the ACC tournament in a decade to an end. The Wahoos had won seven of their last eight games before Saturday’s loss and now await Monday’s reveal of the 64-team field for this year’s NCAA Tournament.
“I thought that we played really well this week,” UVa coach Brian O’Connor said. “Just ran into a great starting pitcher and a really, really hot team. What Duke has done down this stretch, as impressive as what we’ve done, it’s even more impressive what they’ve done.”
Loperfido wasted no time getting the Blue Devils started, taking the third pitch of the game the other way to left for a solo home run. His next time up, this time leading off the third, Loperfido again took a Mike Vasil (7-5) fastball off the tent beyond the left field fence. Ethan Murray followed with his own long ball, this one to dead center field. Those back-to-back homers gave Duke a 3-0 cushion.
Fox (2-2) made that lead stick, mixing up his pitches and challenging Virginia’s right-handed hitters while giving up two runs on eight hits in his seven innings. He struck out seven and didn’t issue a walk. Alex Tappen got the Hoos on the board with a leadoff homer in the bottom of the third, then Logan Michaels cut Duke’s lead to a single run with an RBI single in the fourth. The Cavaliers put just one runner in scoring position the rest of the way, with Fox and relievers Jimmy Loper and Marcus Johnson retiring the last eight UVa hitters in order.
UVa had previously seen Fox last month when he made a pair of scoreless appearances out of the Duke bullpen at Disharoon Park. O’Connor credited the freshman for his poise in Saturday’s semifinal.
“We knew when he pitched against us at our place in relief that he had a good arm and his pitchability was very, very good,” he said. “He rose to the occasion in a critical point, so you tip your cap to the kid. He did a terrific job.”
Virginia got 4.2 scoreless innings out of its bullpen on Saturday, with Duke’s final run coming on a two-out error by UVa shortstop Nic Kent in the fifth inning. Loperfido led off the sixth with a double but wound up stranded at third when the Cavaliers’ Kyle Whitten struck out R.J. Schrock and Peter Matt, the No. 3 and No. 4 hitters in the Duke lineup, to escape that threat. Sunday starter Nate Savino pitched the final two scoreless frames, and was the only UVa pitcher to retire Loperfido with a strikeout in the eighth.
But the Hoos were unable to get anything going against Duke in the game’s final innings. Tappen was their final baserunner after a leadoff single in the seventh, but that was quickly erased when Jake Gelof grounded into a double play. Loper and Johnson needed just seven pitches apiece to post scoreless frames in the eighth and ninth, with Johnson overpowering pinch-hitter Christian Hlinka for a strikeout to end the ballgame.
“We’ve got to be better to win a championship next weekend than we were today,” O’Connor said. “We just didn’t have guys rise up. They did. At this time of the year everybody needs to play consistent, but you need certain guys to have big days and we didn’t do that.”
“We knew the result was going to be determined by who stepped up and who executed more,” said Tappen. “At the end of the day I think we were really close. There were a couple more things we could have done to take this home, but at the end of the day we take this as a learning opportunity, and we move on to next week.”
Despite Saturday’s loss, the Wahoos remained confident that their 2-1 week in Charlotte had answered any questions about their NCAA Tournament qualifications. O’Connor indicated after Tuesday’s 3-2 win against Virginia Tech that he had no doubt UVa was a tournament team. That was before the Hoos hammered ACC regular-season champion Notre Dame 14-1 on Friday to win Pool A.
That Notre Dame win bumped UVa up two spots to No. 39 in the NCAA’s RPI. Both D1Baseball.com and Baseball America projected the Cavaliers to be safely in the 64-team field as a No. 3 seed in their Saturday morning updates.
Projected to be out of the field at midseason, UVa rallied to finish the regular season 16-9 after April 1st, with a 14-7 record in ACC play. Including their three games this week in Charlotte, the Wahoos are 20-19 against conference opponents. In O’Connor’s first 17 seasons, no Virginia team that arrived at Memorial Day with a winning ACC record has failed to make an NCAA regional.
“We’re pretty much showing everybody what type of team we are,” said Tappen. “We’re going to stay confident. We’re going to learn from what happened here in the semifinals, and we’re going to take advantage of it for the future.”
“We obviously wanted to win the game and have a chance at the championship tomorrow. So I’m disappointed in that,” said O’Connor. “But that said, this team will be ready to go and play really great baseball next week.”
