Since before a pitch was thrown, Louisville has been the favorite to win the league this spring. Just past the season’s midpoint and with the Cardinals paying a visit to Disharoon Park this weekend, they have lived up to that preseason billing.
At 20-10 overall and 12-5 in conference play, the Cards have indeed been the ACC’s best team. After dropping two of three at Georgia Tech to open conference play, Louisville has lost just three games in five ACC weekends since. The team has spent all season among the top 10 in D1Baseball’s weekly nationally rankings, holding steady at No. 7 for the past month. Baseball America has the Cardinals at No. 2 in the country this week.
At the plate, they lead the league in team batting average (.296), on-base percentage (.392), and slugging percentage (.468). They have scored a league-high 215 runs and their 83 stolen bases are almost twice as many as the ACC’s closest team. Catcher Henry Davis, who enters the weekend as the ACC leader in on-base percentage and top five in the league in four other statistics, is on the midseason watch list for the Golden Spikes Award. Trey Leonard is hitting an ACC-best .412 while fellow outfielder Levi Usher leads the country with 23 stolen bases.
So, it’s safe to say Louisville will provide a stiff test for the Virginia pitching staff this weekend. UVa pitching coach Drew Dickinson is looking forward to it.
“It’s a challenge for us, but it’s an opportunity for us to take another huge step of getting back in that postseason picture,” he said on Thursday. “And how do we do that? We win series moving forward. That’s all it is, is playing well enough to win two games every weekend, and we’ll be right where we need to be.”
Two months ago, UVa was the No. 2 team in Baseball America’s national rankings. That was before the team’s 4-11 start in ACC play. A resurgent offense has helped the Cavaliers start to climb out of that early-season hole. They have won their last two series to claw back to 8-13 in the league and 16-15 overall.
The pitching staff, which Dickinson in now in his second season of overseeing, provided some of the few bright spots during those early-season struggles in ACC play. The Wahoos have held conference opponents to four runs or fewer in 12 of 21 games. Virginia’s 3.73 staff ERA is second in the league; the Cavaliers’ 323 strikeouts rank third.
“We’re second in pitching in the whole league. So you can’t be too mad about what’s going on,” Dickinson said. “The only thing I’ve had a problem with is I feel like we’ve walked too many people as a staff. I want us to clean that up as a group. And when we do that, we allow ourselves to be in a lot more games, and have a chance to win.”
UVa’s 135 walks as a staff rank 12th in the ACC. Only Boston College and the Cardinals have thrown more.
Virginia will again start lefty Andrew Abbott (3-5, 3.19 ERA) and right-hander Mike Vasil (5-2, 2.98 ERA) in the first two games of this weekend’s series. Both are among the ACC leaders in ERA and innings pitched. Vasil’s five wins are tied for most in the league; his five walks allowed are tied for fewest. Abbott’s 66 strikeouts rank second.
Sophomore lefty Nate Savino (1-1, 2.65 ERA) will make his fifth start of the season on Sunday. Savino entered the weekend rotation last week at Clemson, throwing 55 pitches and giving up a pair of runs on four hits over three innings. He began the year as UVa’s midweek starter but left the game against Richmond in March after just one inning because he wasn’t feeling well. Savino didn’t pitch for almost two weeks, then made three appearances out of the bullpen before getting the start last Sunday.
Dickinson said Savino had a strong bullpen session in practice on Thursday. He expects Savino to enter Sunday’s start with a pitch count around 75-80 pitches. According to Dickinson, the highly-touted left-hander— before enrolling early at UVa in January 2020, Savino was ranked the No. 4 prospect in the country by both Perfect Game and Baseball America—is still learning how to pitch effectively against college hitters.
“This isn’t high school anymore, where he can literally throw it down the middle and nothing’s going to happen to him. You can’t do that at this level,” Dickinson explained. “Yeah, you have a good fastball, but he has to pitch to the bottom of the strike zone. Yeah, his fastball has a lot of life, a lot of sink on it. You’ve got to live at the bottom of the knees in this league; at this level, period.
“And quite honestly, I feel like each start, each time he takes the mound, something happens. Like, there’s some type of situation or something happens, and you see that growth out of him,” he added. “Now it’s about just putting it all together and starting to give us that true, solid start on Sundays, and get going to the level of talent that he has. Now it’s about putting it all together when it matters, when the lights turn on. And I feel like we’re really close.”
Savino replaced right-hander Griff McGarry (0-4, 6.85 ERA) in the weekend rotation. The senior has made seven starts this season, failing to last five innings in all but one. He ran up high pitch counts in those short outings, striking out 38 while walking 27 hitters in 22.1 innings.
Dickinson, who is a former All-American at Illinois that pitched professionally for seven years before returning to his alma mater as pitching coach, said he relates to McGarry’s struggles.
“If you know, ‘all I have to do is this,’ it really magnifies the pressure of doing exactly that,” Dickinson said. “I liken it to a basketball player. It’s not a mechanical thing. It’s just, put the ball in the hole. It’s no different as a pitcher. Just put the ball in the strike zone, and your life would be so much better.”
McGarry hasn’t pitched since starting UVa’s series opener at Georgia Tech two weeks ago. He was scheduled to face Old Dominion on Wednesday but that game got rained out. UVa head coach Brian O’Connor said McGarry was available out of the bullpen last weekend at Clemson, but wasn’t used.
On Thursday, Dickinson stressed that McGarry will get more opportunities to help the Hoos during the season’s second half.
“We’re working on stuff right now to get back to, and get him to where everybody thinks that he can be effective,” Dickinson said. “Because man, you come watch a game, you see the stuff. The stuff is the best stuff in the ballpark, if not the country. It’s just about taking that stuff and having it work for you in a game setting.”
Wahoos’ Friday Blues
A 6-0 record and 1.58 ERA. Eight runs allowed in 45.2 innings, with 39 strikeouts and just seven walks. At least six innings in six of seven starts; three starts with no walks or runs allowed.
That looks like the mid-April stat line of an ACC pitcher of the year contender. But those aren’t the numbers of a single pitcher; they’re the combined statistics of the starters UVa has faced in its seven ACC series-opening games this spring.
Last Friday, it was Clemson’s Mack Anglin who pitched six innings of scoreless ball and didn’t allow a UVa hit until there were two outs in the fifth. The previous week, Brant Hurter threw seven shutout innings in Georgia Tech’s series-opening win against the Hoos. Pitt’s Mitch Myers threw a three-hit, one-run complete game in last month’s series opener at Disharoon. Park. Anglin and Myers both beat Abbott; Hurter faced McGarry.
Back in early March, Florida State’s Parker Messick earned ACC pitcher of the week after giving up just three hits and striking out 11 in eight scoreless innings against the Cavaliers in Tallahassee. That was a week after North Carolina’s Austin Love opened ACC play by taking a shutout into the eighth inning against UVa. Abbott was outdueled in both of those losses as well.
Virginia enters this weekend still winless in ACC series openers. They Cavaliers will face Louisville left-hander Michael Kirian (5-0, 2.41 ERA), the league’s ERA leader, later today.
“What it comes down to is, do you execute. It’s a very, very fine line,” O’Connor said this week. “You think about how good Andrew Abbott has pitched this year. You look at his statistics, compared to his peers in the league, they’re really elite. But his record doesn’t reflect that. He’s 3-5.
“Not only does (Abbott) have to be excellent,” O’Connor added, “we also have to be on-spot offensively, too.”
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