OK, I guess it's safe to panic and run around screaming now. If the coaches and players are willing to admit publicly that the hitting is a concern, then I'm pretty sure the Fan Constitution allows us to go completely apeshit. I'm sure that's in there somewhere. Let's commence.
Or maybe there's a corollary that says when you're the #1 team in the country, you don't get to complain. I like that better, in fact. But it's still likely going to be necessary to color our perceptions for a while; in fact, I believe I got a head start on that in predicting a 2-1 series win over UNC instead of a sweep, though I did think Sunday would be much less of an issue.
Brian O'Connor bemoaned lost opportunities on Sunday, such as failing to score with runners at the corners in the first inning. Without a healthy dose of moxie from Josh Sborz, he might've been doing the same on Saturday; you probably lose 19 out of 20 games where you get outhit 10-3. Sborz wasn't stingy in giving out hits, as every Tar Heel in the lineup got one off him. But you talk about scattering hits, and Sborz laid them out almost perfectly so as to escape nearly unscathed..... and then Connor Jones and Nick Howard slammed the door.
It goes to show the value of a good bullpen. That's something that fans never think about until it blows enough leads. Well, consider it thought. Sborz did a nice job wiggling out of his jams, but life is much easier when you don't create any in the first place. Combine all this with Friday's performance from Nathan Kirby, who outdueled UNC's Trent Thornton by fanning 12 hitters and, most importantly and unlike Thornton, not giving up any home runs ... and you have another virtuoso weekend from the moundsmen.
Perhaps one of these days the batsmen will follow suit. The Hoos won two games mainly on the strength of two mistake pitches from the Carolina starters; a flat Thornton fastball that ended up who knows where and a hanging curve from Moss that snuck over the fence in just about the same place. The fun part, though, is this: UVA is the near-consensus #1 team in the country and the #120 team in batting average. Who's going to stop UVA if the pitching stays just as good and the bats fire up?
More baseball in brief:
-- Notre Dame did UVA a big favor yesterday by beating Miami. If it happens again I'd be awfully surprised, but for now the best Miami can do is keep the tie. It gets harder for the Canes next week as they visit Clemson, but UVA has Florida State so it's not like it's any easier for us.
-- The reason UVA is only near-consensus as #1 is because Collegiate Baseball is of the strange opinion that Cal Poly's sweep of Cal State-Fullerton (that's "18-16 Cal State-Fullerton" to you) is more impressive than whatever UVA did. Their previous #1, Louisiana-Lafayette, didn't sweep whatever Sun Belt cupcake they had this week, so they fell to 3rd and UVA stayed at 2nd. Everyone else puts the Hoos up top.
-- Derek Fisher is back! That's excellent because he was hitting .333 before he went down. The guy who moved into the lineup on the regular when that happened, stayed in - that'd be John LaPrise, since he's also hitting over .300.
-- Florida State next week - by far the biggest three games of the remaining regular season.
**************************************************
-- I opted to watch baseball over lacrosse on Saturday; they were at the same time, which is always a conundrum, and I figured I'd better get my chance to watch a halfway decent production of baseball for once. The box score says everything I probably would've said anyway, though. Namely, Ryan Lukacovic still should not be losing minutes to Owen Van Arsdale (1 goal, 1 assist, 1 turnover against goose eggs, 2 TOs, and a penalty... hm.) I'm not gonna lie, when the program announced the hiring of Dom's son as an assistant coach, "Mike Groh" was one of the initial thoughts that popped into my head. Now, Marc Van Arsdale has been a productive offensive coordinator in his time, and OVA has 24 assists so he's definitely had his moments too... but will Dad have the stones to bench his son if he continues to be outplayed?
-- I'm getting awfully fed up with Cavaliers Live. I'm not the only one. This was a much better production two, three years ago. I'm not really jonesing for HD coverage, because I'm mindful that simply being able to watch UVA baseball (and lax, and soccer, and stuff) is a major upgrade from the inaccessibility of past years. Give it time. But I'm also mindful that I'm paying far more than I am for any cable channel and getting the most amateurish production imaginable.
The scorebug looks like it was created by the freshman TV class at the local high school, has less than the bare minimum of useful info, and is sometimes not updated for a full inning, leaving the impression that the visitors are batting in the bottom half. You've got the patented Earthquake-o-Vision from the third-base camera - surely it can be set up anywhere else, because I assume what's happening is that fans are moving around and rattling the stand. Cutting from the side view to the plate view in the middle of the pitch is incredibly disconcerting and would probably get a producer fired at a real cable station. (According to the explanation from the VSTV folks, we can't have a center field view because the coaches don't want the signs broadcasted, and therefore at risk of being stolen. Fine. You still can't see them from behind the plate, and you can still have the guy hitting the button for the switch learn when pitchers are ready to throw, and not wait for the middle of the windup.)
Then of course we have the cardinal sin: chopping off the end of games. It happened during the Loyola game in lacrosse; I suspect because the feed was coming in slower than live, so that when the game ended, fans were watching the middle of the fourth quarter but the production people just shut off the feed and went home. This weekend the feed just cut off before the end of the game. If those were the only two times I'd be surprised, but they're the two I remember. The first time, they promised that, "The error will be corrected to ensure the Cavaliers Live viewing experience meets our production expectations for future webcasts." Uh-huh.
There's one more home baseball series, after which that subscription is coming to a merciful end. Whether I re-subscribe next year depends on the work they put in during the offseason to unfuck the presentation.
-- There are new uniforms in the world of ACC football. Florida State's are fine, more or less, but Syracuse's are A) godawful, B) largely a copy of Boise State's, right down to the unnecessary Trendy Gray**, and C) living proof that college football players would "get hype" about playing in a pink tutu if it was brand new and you presented it with enough I'M-A-WARRIOR flair. Make sure the CG models hold their arms out like their lats are the size of elephants.
**The gray is funny because Syracuse fans already got up in arms over Trendy Gray basketball jerseys a couple years back - remarkably, they didn't really like having their team look just like the one they considered their biggest Big East rival. Georgetown's school colors are gray and blue. Let's hope Trendy Maroon is never a thing.
-- It was announced today that UVA will play a basketball home-and-home with George Washington, which is just exactly the kind of team we should be scheduling home-and-home. You can play 28 games, so, ACC teams get 10 non-conference ones, and a tournament of up to four can count as one. In my ideal world no more than six of these 10 would be cupcakes. The other four would be the yearly tournament, the B1G Challenge, and two teams from conferences like the SEC, A-10, Big East, etc.
Showing posts with label fisher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fisher. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2014
Monday, April 7, 2014
weekend review
I still hate faceoffs, but it'd be utterly inappropriate to start off with anything but Nathan Kirby here. There was plenty of legitimate concern about Kirby last year; he came in with such hype and fell flatter than his very hittable fastball. I'm not the sharpest bulb in the shed, but I think it's safe to say that Kirby, already having put those doubts in the past for the most part, blew away their final shreds with a vengeance.
On Friday night I was debating with myself: should I write a lacrosse game preview or take the path of least resistance and watch the baseball game? As you might've guessed, there was no Friday post, and I'm not even a little bit sorry. Kirby's 18-K no-hitter makes a strong case for the single most dominant pitching performance in UVA history; he was an error and a walk away from a perfect game, and eight strikeouts ahead of Will Roberts's performance in his perfecto from 2011.
(The case for Roberts states that exactly one ball left the infield, which is two fewer flyballs than Kirby allowed, and furthermore the left side of the infield was almost totally unemployed. Second baseman Keith Werman had seven assists, but Chris Taylor and Steven Proscia on the other side only combined for one - Proscia's.)
In fact, the closest thing to a hit all day was probably the very last batter. #9 hitter Manny Pazos, leading off the ninth, hit a fly ball that looked like trouble live, but on replay from a different angle it was clear that Joe McCarthy had a bead on it all the way and didn't need to expend much effort to snag it. Really, it was Dylan Wolsonovich's grounder to short that looked like the toughest play of the evening, and Daniel Pinero made easy work of it. Good thing, because if I'd had to pick the kind of batter I'd least want at the plate with one out to go in a no-hitter, it'd be the scrappy, speedy little bugger of the kind that populates so many middle infields on ball teams everywhere. You know he's not gonna strike out, he's gonna make you work for it, and he's gonna chug as fast as he can down the basepath. Kirby struck out everyone at least once - but Wolsonovich only once.
Kirby was quoted afterwards as saying, "I wanted to let the hitters hit it and let our defense play," which is funny because 18 strikeouts. Nice plan, looks like you really stuck to that one. Better theory: he watched his infield make a rare error in the first inning and decided, fine, I'll do this myself; he stepped out for the second inning and didn't stop striking people out til the fifth. The end of the 10-man strikeout streak (a Jordan Frabasilio groundout) was the first time the idea of a potential no-hitter popped into my head; prior, I was too busy laughing in disbelief as the path from home plate back to the Pitt dugout turned into a five-lane superhighway.
Kirby's performance drew comparisons - from me, basically - to a left-handed Max Scherzer. When Scherzer's mowing people down, his pitches don't look, at first glance, like anything special. He has a slight tail to his fastball, which isn't otherwise overpowering like a Randy Johnson bullet train, but it lands heavy on the bat thanks to that little sinking action, if hitters hit it at all. His breaking ball isn't brilliant-looking either, but he has two of them and changes speeds with them at will. And his changeup is devastating. But none of them look like the kind of filthy stuff that wins you a Cy Young. He just misses all the bats. That was Kirby - no second breaking ball, but he still changed speeds beautifully, hit his spots, and put just a hint of a tailing motion on his fastball, and threw pitches that looked so tantalizingly hittable. Only four or five of his strikeouts were K's looking.
The rest of the weekend was little better for Pitt batters; UVA's pitchers recorded a 0.66 ERA for the three-game series. Sadly, they got no support on Saturday and Pitt lived up perfectly to the prediction that said they could steal one if our bats were cold, so Brandon Waddell decided to hell with run support and shut them out for eight innings on Sunday, polished off by a no-sweat inning from Nick Howard.
The real work starts this coming weekend. The combined ACC records of the remaining teams on the schedule: 47-26. This is where that super-regional hosting duty will be won or lost.
*********************************************************
More bullet-point news.
-- Lacrosse lost. Did I mention argh faceoffs? I actually thought the crucial one was the one after we scored to go up 10-9, rather than the one on which UVA rolled over and graciously allowed R.G. Keenan a leisurely stroll to the net. That was a true team non-effort, that was, right from the utterly rotten effort at the X to the not-my-job approach to defending the ballcarrier. But it was really the previous faceoff where the game could've been won, and wasn't.
UVA is now eliminated from the ACC tournament, a major black mark on the season's record, and though I expect they'll find themselves back in the NCAAs, I also expect they'll find themselves back out of them sharpish.
-- Plenty of Tweetery news today and this week; the most obviously relevant is Teven Jones's decision to transfer out. The hardest part of any roster to fill is the very fringe of the rotation - in an ideal world you could have a veteran to lean back on in the event of injuries like UVA suffered in 2011-2012, but that never happens anymore. It's hard to ask a guy to do that, though, when he knows he could be playing somewhere else instead of being best known for his dancing.
Ross Metheny left with a ton of love and gratitude for UVA, but he wasn't oblivious to the signs that pointed to a career as a backup. Jones is plainly the same. UVA loses one backcourt player to graduation (Joe Harris) and brings in two (B.J. Stith as a freshman and Devon Hall off his redshirt.) Jones was already in no-man's land between the rotation and the walk-ons, and his minutes situation wasn't going to be improved by that numbers game.
Jones's decision means two instead of three scholarships are open for the recruiting class of 2015, and I would expect Tony Bennett to move quickly to fill them all. Jones was part of that enormous sophomore class that was going to leave a huge crater in the roster when they graduated in 2016; if Tony nabs a combination of transfers and 2015 recruits to fill every last slot for 2015, it reduces the need to bring in a monster-sized class in 2016 to fill the holes, and spreads things out a little better for the long term.
-- Other ACC transfers include Tyler Lewis (from NC State to Butler) and BC's Ryan Anderson, easily their top offensive player after Olivier Hanlan. That, plus BC's decision to aim nice and low in their coaching search (Jim Christian took John Groce's Ohio Bobcats and finished second in the MAC his first year and fifth in his second) should ensure the Eagles will fill out the bottom of the ACC standings for years to come.
-- Derek Fisher's return to the baseball lineup appears semi-imminent; he'll miss Clemson this weekend but may return the week after, and the FSU series that Brian O'Connor all but guaranteed Fisher would play is the one right after that. This is great news but also not very surprising: the bone that Fisher broke is utterly pointless and the surgeons don't fix it, they just yank it like a bothersome appendix. So his recovery is less about bone healing, because he doesn't have any broken ones left, and more about getting his hand strengthened again after being sliced open.
-- Finally, I have sad, sad news: the empty trophy case is no more. VT's famous WE DON'T HAVE ANY NATIONAL TITLES neon sign is replaced by a big, life-sized Hurkey Turkey or whateva. Most likely it was moved to the bass fishing locker room where it can finally serve its intended purpose, but that doesn't mean it has to stop being a metaphor when we need a handy one for the natty goose egg.
On Friday night I was debating with myself: should I write a lacrosse game preview or take the path of least resistance and watch the baseball game? As you might've guessed, there was no Friday post, and I'm not even a little bit sorry. Kirby's 18-K no-hitter makes a strong case for the single most dominant pitching performance in UVA history; he was an error and a walk away from a perfect game, and eight strikeouts ahead of Will Roberts's performance in his perfecto from 2011.
(The case for Roberts states that exactly one ball left the infield, which is two fewer flyballs than Kirby allowed, and furthermore the left side of the infield was almost totally unemployed. Second baseman Keith Werman had seven assists, but Chris Taylor and Steven Proscia on the other side only combined for one - Proscia's.)
In fact, the closest thing to a hit all day was probably the very last batter. #9 hitter Manny Pazos, leading off the ninth, hit a fly ball that looked like trouble live, but on replay from a different angle it was clear that Joe McCarthy had a bead on it all the way and didn't need to expend much effort to snag it. Really, it was Dylan Wolsonovich's grounder to short that looked like the toughest play of the evening, and Daniel Pinero made easy work of it. Good thing, because if I'd had to pick the kind of batter I'd least want at the plate with one out to go in a no-hitter, it'd be the scrappy, speedy little bugger of the kind that populates so many middle infields on ball teams everywhere. You know he's not gonna strike out, he's gonna make you work for it, and he's gonna chug as fast as he can down the basepath. Kirby struck out everyone at least once - but Wolsonovich only once.
Kirby was quoted afterwards as saying, "I wanted to let the hitters hit it and let our defense play," which is funny because 18 strikeouts. Nice plan, looks like you really stuck to that one. Better theory: he watched his infield make a rare error in the first inning and decided, fine, I'll do this myself; he stepped out for the second inning and didn't stop striking people out til the fifth. The end of the 10-man strikeout streak (a Jordan Frabasilio groundout) was the first time the idea of a potential no-hitter popped into my head; prior, I was too busy laughing in disbelief as the path from home plate back to the Pitt dugout turned into a five-lane superhighway.
Kirby's performance drew comparisons - from me, basically - to a left-handed Max Scherzer. When Scherzer's mowing people down, his pitches don't look, at first glance, like anything special. He has a slight tail to his fastball, which isn't otherwise overpowering like a Randy Johnson bullet train, but it lands heavy on the bat thanks to that little sinking action, if hitters hit it at all. His breaking ball isn't brilliant-looking either, but he has two of them and changes speeds with them at will. And his changeup is devastating. But none of them look like the kind of filthy stuff that wins you a Cy Young. He just misses all the bats. That was Kirby - no second breaking ball, but he still changed speeds beautifully, hit his spots, and put just a hint of a tailing motion on his fastball, and threw pitches that looked so tantalizingly hittable. Only four or five of his strikeouts were K's looking.
The rest of the weekend was little better for Pitt batters; UVA's pitchers recorded a 0.66 ERA for the three-game series. Sadly, they got no support on Saturday and Pitt lived up perfectly to the prediction that said they could steal one if our bats were cold, so Brandon Waddell decided to hell with run support and shut them out for eight innings on Sunday, polished off by a no-sweat inning from Nick Howard.
The real work starts this coming weekend. The combined ACC records of the remaining teams on the schedule: 47-26. This is where that super-regional hosting duty will be won or lost.
*********************************************************
More bullet-point news.
-- Lacrosse lost. Did I mention argh faceoffs? I actually thought the crucial one was the one after we scored to go up 10-9, rather than the one on which UVA rolled over and graciously allowed R.G. Keenan a leisurely stroll to the net. That was a true team non-effort, that was, right from the utterly rotten effort at the X to the not-my-job approach to defending the ballcarrier. But it was really the previous faceoff where the game could've been won, and wasn't.
UVA is now eliminated from the ACC tournament, a major black mark on the season's record, and though I expect they'll find themselves back in the NCAAs, I also expect they'll find themselves back out of them sharpish.
-- Plenty of Tweetery news today and this week; the most obviously relevant is Teven Jones's decision to transfer out. The hardest part of any roster to fill is the very fringe of the rotation - in an ideal world you could have a veteran to lean back on in the event of injuries like UVA suffered in 2011-2012, but that never happens anymore. It's hard to ask a guy to do that, though, when he knows he could be playing somewhere else instead of being best known for his dancing.
Ross Metheny left with a ton of love and gratitude for UVA, but he wasn't oblivious to the signs that pointed to a career as a backup. Jones is plainly the same. UVA loses one backcourt player to graduation (Joe Harris) and brings in two (B.J. Stith as a freshman and Devon Hall off his redshirt.) Jones was already in no-man's land between the rotation and the walk-ons, and his minutes situation wasn't going to be improved by that numbers game.
Jones's decision means two instead of three scholarships are open for the recruiting class of 2015, and I would expect Tony Bennett to move quickly to fill them all. Jones was part of that enormous sophomore class that was going to leave a huge crater in the roster when they graduated in 2016; if Tony nabs a combination of transfers and 2015 recruits to fill every last slot for 2015, it reduces the need to bring in a monster-sized class in 2016 to fill the holes, and spreads things out a little better for the long term.
-- Other ACC transfers include Tyler Lewis (from NC State to Butler) and BC's Ryan Anderson, easily their top offensive player after Olivier Hanlan. That, plus BC's decision to aim nice and low in their coaching search (Jim Christian took John Groce's Ohio Bobcats and finished second in the MAC his first year and fifth in his second) should ensure the Eagles will fill out the bottom of the ACC standings for years to come.
-- Derek Fisher's return to the baseball lineup appears semi-imminent; he'll miss Clemson this weekend but may return the week after, and the FSU series that Brian O'Connor all but guaranteed Fisher would play is the one right after that. This is great news but also not very surprising: the bone that Fisher broke is utterly pointless and the surgeons don't fix it, they just yank it like a bothersome appendix. So his recovery is less about bone healing, because he doesn't have any broken ones left, and more about getting his hand strengthened again after being sliced open.
-- Finally, I have sad, sad news: the empty trophy case is no more. VT's famous WE DON'T HAVE ANY NATIONAL TITLES neon sign is replaced by a big, life-sized Hurkey Turkey or whateva. Most likely it was moved to the bass fishing locker room where it can finally serve its intended purpose, but that doesn't mean it has to stop being a metaphor when we need a handy one for the natty goose egg.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
weekend review
For some reason, I can't quite put my finger on it, I'm not ready to stop talking basketball just yet. I think it rhymes with "flampionships." At the very least it's only fair if I do a postmortem kinda deal on the season, and I think I'll take and review every player the same as they were previewed in the beginning. It should also be interesting to take a look at the ACC once the draft deadline passes later this month.
For now, it's officially the spring season and only the spring season, and spring sports are springing. Lacrosse is trying to, anyway. The 9-6 loss this weekend would not be terribly upsetting if you pretend it wasn't Maryland. Maryland's defense is one of the best in the country, and Niko Amato is a top-flight goalie, so, you'd like to do better when the national title is an every-year goal, but the way things are set up this year it's not a huge surprise what happened. Actually, it wasn't even Maryland's defense that did UVA in; it was their ability to hold onto possession for really long stretches, and UVA's inability to win a faceoff once Maryland figured out the gimmick.
Some bulletized points in brief(ish):
-- I'd just been thinking we hadn't really seen the full Shocker effect this year when LaPierre absolutely leveled a dude while carrying the ball, which went totally unappreciated by the crowd because they might not have been rooting for us. They don't call him the Human Clear for nothing.
-- Despite taking the loss, Matt Barrett played another reasonably solid game. That makes two in a row. Progress. He saved 11 of 20, which is a .550 save percentage, and at least once I remember thinking, "he doesn't make that save a month ago." For the season, he stands at .470. That's still bad, but remember Adam Ghitelman's freshman year saw him land at .497. No, that's not good either, but still.
-- I know I wasn't the only one cheesed off by the announcers blatantly shilling for a shot clock, except doing it in the most passive-aggressive manner possible. What really bugged me was this: UVA spent too long for their tastes passing the ball around, and they practically begged the refs to put the timer on. The refs didn't, UVA shot, Amato saved, and Maryland cleared - and the first thing Eamon Mc-Inane-y said was, "I didn't like that shot. It was too rushed." Now you know why there isn't a shot clock in lacrosse, Eamon.
******************************************************
-- One thing I promise to start doing this week is giving a damn about baseball. Not that I haven't before, but for it being one of my favorite UVA sports, I've written damn near nothing about it. Well, there will be a series preview of Pittsburgh this week. And this past week, they swept up VT as is only fitting. I was about to say customary, but that really hasn't been the way things have gone lately. Despite the huge gap between our two programs, we'd only swept VT twice since 2008.
Joe McCarthy was the ACC player of the week, too; the third such honor for the third different Wahoo this year. Nick Howard won it the week before and Derek Fisher took one home before breaking his hand.
-- Here is an excellent rundown of the various UVA players populating the minor leagues. I used to do this myself at times but why duplicate the effort? And of course, don't forget the five Hoos wearing major league uniforms as of Opening Day: Ryan Zimmerman (Nats), Sean Doolittle (A's), Mark Reynolds (Brewers), Javier Lopez (Giants), and Brandon Guyer (Rays).
-- I was hoping that DeLoss Dodds's retirement at Texas would significantly decrease the douche quotient of the UT administration, but no such luck. Glad to know shipping the players off to Mexico City or Dubai to "grow the Texas brand" is a priority, more so than playing Texas A&M. I want to defend the NCAA in certain things they do but it is really friggin' hard to do when you claim that your purpose is educational, not business, but you won't play a hundred-year-old rivalry because it doesn't make "business sense." And you assholes wonder why the players are trying to unionize.
-- Marquette lost their coach to the ACC, so they went to the ACC for his replacement, luring Steve Wojcie-whatsit away from Duke. You know, Wojo. Let me be neither the first nor the last to make the joke about oh no who will do Coach K's sideline interviews for him now.
-- Boston College is not exactly aiming high in their own coaching search. The two names mentioned in that article coach the Atlantic Sun runner-up (FGCU) and MAC 5th seed (Ohio.) Yeah, both those schools won conference championships lately - and the coaches who did so are now at USC and Illinois. Would it be too much to ask of an ACC school to think a little bigger than a guy whose only foray out of MAC coaching peaked in one CBI bid in four years at TCU? I like Boston College, honestly I do, I've never known anything but good people out of Chestnut Hill, but if the Big Ten cares so much about media markets, maybe we can swap them for Penn State. Step it up, Eagles.
For now, it's officially the spring season and only the spring season, and spring sports are springing. Lacrosse is trying to, anyway. The 9-6 loss this weekend would not be terribly upsetting if you pretend it wasn't Maryland. Maryland's defense is one of the best in the country, and Niko Amato is a top-flight goalie, so, you'd like to do better when the national title is an every-year goal, but the way things are set up this year it's not a huge surprise what happened. Actually, it wasn't even Maryland's defense that did UVA in; it was their ability to hold onto possession for really long stretches, and UVA's inability to win a faceoff once Maryland figured out the gimmick.
Some bulletized points in brief(ish):
-- I'd just been thinking we hadn't really seen the full Shocker effect this year when LaPierre absolutely leveled a dude while carrying the ball, which went totally unappreciated by the crowd because they might not have been rooting for us. They don't call him the Human Clear for nothing.
-- Despite taking the loss, Matt Barrett played another reasonably solid game. That makes two in a row. Progress. He saved 11 of 20, which is a .550 save percentage, and at least once I remember thinking, "he doesn't make that save a month ago." For the season, he stands at .470. That's still bad, but remember Adam Ghitelman's freshman year saw him land at .497. No, that's not good either, but still.
-- I know I wasn't the only one cheesed off by the announcers blatantly shilling for a shot clock, except doing it in the most passive-aggressive manner possible. What really bugged me was this: UVA spent too long for their tastes passing the ball around, and they practically begged the refs to put the timer on. The refs didn't, UVA shot, Amato saved, and Maryland cleared - and the first thing Eamon Mc-Inane-y said was, "I didn't like that shot. It was too rushed." Now you know why there isn't a shot clock in lacrosse, Eamon.
******************************************************
-- One thing I promise to start doing this week is giving a damn about baseball. Not that I haven't before, but for it being one of my favorite UVA sports, I've written damn near nothing about it. Well, there will be a series preview of Pittsburgh this week. And this past week, they swept up VT as is only fitting. I was about to say customary, but that really hasn't been the way things have gone lately. Despite the huge gap between our two programs, we'd only swept VT twice since 2008.
Joe McCarthy was the ACC player of the week, too; the third such honor for the third different Wahoo this year. Nick Howard won it the week before and Derek Fisher took one home before breaking his hand.
-- Here is an excellent rundown of the various UVA players populating the minor leagues. I used to do this myself at times but why duplicate the effort? And of course, don't forget the five Hoos wearing major league uniforms as of Opening Day: Ryan Zimmerman (Nats), Sean Doolittle (A's), Mark Reynolds (Brewers), Javier Lopez (Giants), and Brandon Guyer (Rays).
-- I was hoping that DeLoss Dodds's retirement at Texas would significantly decrease the douche quotient of the UT administration, but no such luck. Glad to know shipping the players off to Mexico City or Dubai to "grow the Texas brand" is a priority, more so than playing Texas A&M. I want to defend the NCAA in certain things they do but it is really friggin' hard to do when you claim that your purpose is educational, not business, but you won't play a hundred-year-old rivalry because it doesn't make "business sense." And you assholes wonder why the players are trying to unionize.
-- Marquette lost their coach to the ACC, so they went to the ACC for his replacement, luring Steve Wojcie-whatsit away from Duke. You know, Wojo. Let me be neither the first nor the last to make the joke about oh no who will do Coach K's sideline interviews for him now.
-- Boston College is not exactly aiming high in their own coaching search. The two names mentioned in that article coach the Atlantic Sun runner-up (FGCU) and MAC 5th seed (Ohio.) Yeah, both those schools won conference championships lately - and the coaches who did so are now at USC and Illinois. Would it be too much to ask of an ACC school to think a little bigger than a guy whose only foray out of MAC coaching peaked in one CBI bid in four years at TCU? I like Boston College, honestly I do, I've never known anything but good people out of Chestnut Hill, but if the Big Ten cares so much about media markets, maybe we can swap them for Penn State. Step it up, Eagles.
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
weekend review
This is not the promised project. That is close. This is just to catch us up on a few things. Also, the "project" is not the recruiting board stuck in development hell. But I've got good news on that front. I've hired a guy to finish it up; he's got a lot of project management experience having opened up a local chain of bagel stores in Charlottesville. You've heard of Bodo's. So any day now.
Over the weekend, the lacrosse team lost, the baseball team won three times, and I watched none of it because Tony Bennett. The hitting is not greatly improved, and it really is not helping that weekday games keep getting cancelled because of weather. You are authorized to continue feeling slight concern over this, but also keeping in mind two things: it is improving, and it is much easier to flip a hitting switch than a pitching switch. The latter has been stellar, as has the defense; UVA has allowed two or fewer runs in 13 of 18 games and if you remove the numbers of a couple garbage-time relief appearances, has a 1.83 ERA. Even the actual staff ERA of 2.03 is pretty nice.
-- Not helping in the hitting department will be the loss of Derek Fisher for about a month, month and a half due to a broken hand bone. Fisher had been hitting .333 and playing errorless ball. The Boston College series saw a couple different ways to replace him; for two of three games, Mike Papi played left field and John LaPrise DHed; in the middle game, Robert Bennie started in left but was lifted for a lefty-hitting PH when the Eagles sent in the bullpen.
-- It's carnage week in the basketball coaching ranks as ADs observe the ongoing dance party, reflect on their lack of invitation, and do something about it. Two ACC coaches - VT's James Johnson and BC's Steve Donahue - are gone, and there's a watch on for GT's Brian Gregory and Wake's Jeff Bzdelik, despite John Feinstein's assertion that Bzdelik is safe.
If Bzdelik is safe, it's criminal mismanagement and nepotism on the part of Wake Forest AD Ron Wellman. This is a guy who fired Dino Gaudio for lack of postseason success. I guess the logic at Wake (besides "I don't want to fire my BFF from childhood") goes something along the lines of, if you never make the postseason, you can't lose there, and we're cool with that.
Donahue walked into one of the worst situations a coach ever could have, but by now was supposed to have the program back on its feet. Instead BC took a big ol' backwards step and stunk up the joint.
As for Johnson, this one's interesting. VT's new AD Whit Babcock gave a press conference that didn't exactly put to bed swirling rumors that Johnson was let go just as much for off-the-court stuff as on-court results. A Hokie twitter guy wrote that, per a source, basically Johnson was kind of an asshole to people and ran his players into the ground, causing three of them to quit. This last was corroborated by the TechSideline guys, naming Cadarian Raines as one of the walk-outs.
That would certainly explain why Raines's playing time disappeared into the ether, something even I picked up on when writing game previews of the Hokies. Fortunately, nobody will ever use the words "donkey anus" to describe Tony Bennett's behavior, as a TSL poster did for Johnson. At any rate, various names have popped up, as they tend to do, most of them hilariously unrealistic. There are Hokies who think Gregg Marshall would leave Wichita State for Blacksburg, and the funny part is they mean it. One candidate who might've actually been a serious name - Bruce Pearl - already got hired at Auburn. Marquette's Buzz Williams is another name you might hear and not set your bullshit meter to 100%. Other than that, the Hokies are probably looking at someone from the A-10 at best - no, not Shaka Smart - or a reasonably-achieving mid-major. Depends on what they'll pay, really.
The other notable name to be let go is Ken Bone - Tony Bennett's replacement at Wazzu. The coaching carousel will be worth keeping an eye on this season, as the dominos may eventually fall in the direction of Charlottesville and pick off one or more of our assistant coaches. For example, George Washington's Mike Lonergan is a fast riser and a strong candidate for an open ACC job - and Ritchie McKay could easily be at least a candidate to replace him in DC.
-- Speaking of DC, the ACC tournament moves there in 2016 after one more year in Greensboro, and after that.... New York? Barclay's Center, Brooklyn? How you feel about that probably depends on how likely you are to go to the tourney in any given year - since it's not realistic for me, all basketball courts look the same on TV and a couple of years in NYC could be good for the conference. I'm not nuts about the idea that being there will somehow "raise the profile" of the conference - it's not like people who wouldn't ordinarily watch a 12/13 game between two crappy teams will go, "oh, it's in New York? Well, that's interesting, I guess I'll tune in after all." Still, if your tournament banners are all over town and you sell a little advertising to go along with it, maybe you scrounge an extra half million or so, and the players would certainly appreciate a trip to New York more than Greensboro.
(This, by the way, makes you a hypocrite, if you ever said "but the players like it" to argue for whizbang uniformzz but bitch about not being able to go to the tournament if they move it somewhere the players like better.)
There are plenty of obstacles along the way, one of which is the A-10, which has a Barclay's Center contract through 2017, and plus the Barclay's folks ain't kicking the Nets out of town for 2 weeks. This may involve a scheduling series with A-10 teams, which, hey, bonus, because those tend to be reasonably worthwhile matchups.
Truthfully, there are all kinds of different and worthwhile places to hold this tournament, and DC and Atlanta ought to be in a regular rotation too. I don't buy that just because Maryland is gone, it makes no sense to hold the tournament there. Plenty of ACC alums live in the area. I mean, it's not like St. John's is an ACC school, but we're going to New York regardless.
Over the weekend, the lacrosse team lost, the baseball team won three times, and I watched none of it because Tony Bennett. The hitting is not greatly improved, and it really is not helping that weekday games keep getting cancelled because of weather. You are authorized to continue feeling slight concern over this, but also keeping in mind two things: it is improving, and it is much easier to flip a hitting switch than a pitching switch. The latter has been stellar, as has the defense; UVA has allowed two or fewer runs in 13 of 18 games and if you remove the numbers of a couple garbage-time relief appearances, has a 1.83 ERA. Even the actual staff ERA of 2.03 is pretty nice.
-- Not helping in the hitting department will be the loss of Derek Fisher for about a month, month and a half due to a broken hand bone. Fisher had been hitting .333 and playing errorless ball. The Boston College series saw a couple different ways to replace him; for two of three games, Mike Papi played left field and John LaPrise DHed; in the middle game, Robert Bennie started in left but was lifted for a lefty-hitting PH when the Eagles sent in the bullpen.
-- It's carnage week in the basketball coaching ranks as ADs observe the ongoing dance party, reflect on their lack of invitation, and do something about it. Two ACC coaches - VT's James Johnson and BC's Steve Donahue - are gone, and there's a watch on for GT's Brian Gregory and Wake's Jeff Bzdelik, despite John Feinstein's assertion that Bzdelik is safe.
If Bzdelik is safe, it's criminal mismanagement and nepotism on the part of Wake Forest AD Ron Wellman. This is a guy who fired Dino Gaudio for lack of postseason success. I guess the logic at Wake (besides "I don't want to fire my BFF from childhood") goes something along the lines of, if you never make the postseason, you can't lose there, and we're cool with that.
Donahue walked into one of the worst situations a coach ever could have, but by now was supposed to have the program back on its feet. Instead BC took a big ol' backwards step and stunk up the joint.
As for Johnson, this one's interesting. VT's new AD Whit Babcock gave a press conference that didn't exactly put to bed swirling rumors that Johnson was let go just as much for off-the-court stuff as on-court results. A Hokie twitter guy wrote that, per a source, basically Johnson was kind of an asshole to people and ran his players into the ground, causing three of them to quit. This last was corroborated by the TechSideline guys, naming Cadarian Raines as one of the walk-outs.
That would certainly explain why Raines's playing time disappeared into the ether, something even I picked up on when writing game previews of the Hokies. Fortunately, nobody will ever use the words "donkey anus" to describe Tony Bennett's behavior, as a TSL poster did for Johnson. At any rate, various names have popped up, as they tend to do, most of them hilariously unrealistic. There are Hokies who think Gregg Marshall would leave Wichita State for Blacksburg, and the funny part is they mean it. One candidate who might've actually been a serious name - Bruce Pearl - already got hired at Auburn. Marquette's Buzz Williams is another name you might hear and not set your bullshit meter to 100%. Other than that, the Hokies are probably looking at someone from the A-10 at best - no, not Shaka Smart - or a reasonably-achieving mid-major. Depends on what they'll pay, really.
The other notable name to be let go is Ken Bone - Tony Bennett's replacement at Wazzu. The coaching carousel will be worth keeping an eye on this season, as the dominos may eventually fall in the direction of Charlottesville and pick off one or more of our assistant coaches. For example, George Washington's Mike Lonergan is a fast riser and a strong candidate for an open ACC job - and Ritchie McKay could easily be at least a candidate to replace him in DC.
-- Speaking of DC, the ACC tournament moves there in 2016 after one more year in Greensboro, and after that.... New York? Barclay's Center, Brooklyn? How you feel about that probably depends on how likely you are to go to the tourney in any given year - since it's not realistic for me, all basketball courts look the same on TV and a couple of years in NYC could be good for the conference. I'm not nuts about the idea that being there will somehow "raise the profile" of the conference - it's not like people who wouldn't ordinarily watch a 12/13 game between two crappy teams will go, "oh, it's in New York? Well, that's interesting, I guess I'll tune in after all." Still, if your tournament banners are all over town and you sell a little advertising to go along with it, maybe you scrounge an extra half million or so, and the players would certainly appreciate a trip to New York more than Greensboro.
(This, by the way, makes you a hypocrite, if you ever said "but the players like it" to argue for whizbang uniformzz but bitch about not being able to go to the tournament if they move it somewhere the players like better.)
There are plenty of obstacles along the way, one of which is the A-10, which has a Barclay's Center contract through 2017, and plus the Barclay's folks ain't kicking the Nets out of town for 2 weeks. This may involve a scheduling series with A-10 teams, which, hey, bonus, because those tend to be reasonably worthwhile matchups.
Truthfully, there are all kinds of different and worthwhile places to hold this tournament, and DC and Atlanta ought to be in a regular rotation too. I don't buy that just because Maryland is gone, it makes no sense to hold the tournament there. Plenty of ACC alums live in the area. I mean, it's not like St. John's is an ACC school, but we're going to New York regardless.
Friday, July 19, 2013
2013 baseball recruiting class, part 1
I guess I usually do this closer to baseball season when the thought is still fresh in everyone's mind, but I didn't. So we'll do it now. It's our annual series in getting acquainted with the prospects that will grace UVA's roster as freshmen next season. "Acquainted" is not an accidental choice of words; this can be an awfully imprecise exercise. Probably the worst prediction I've ever made in five years of writing this blog is that Brandon Waddell would be "probably a future LOOGY or one-inning specialist." That's about as far from "Friday starter" as it gets. Sometimes I don't include everyone, because lists found on the Internet aren't up to the level of the comprehensive coverage of football recruiting, and sometimes guys leave unexpectedly before the season or the semester begin. It's the sort of imprecision that every year makes me strongly consider not doing this, and every year deciding that I at least want to have it as a reference for when the season begins in seven or eight months. On the plus side, the signing deadline is earlier than it was, so we don't have to stretch to August to find out if our signees are skipping school.
The class is a little smaller this year, which is unsurprising because of the small number of players lost to graduation/the draft. BOC knows how to manage a roster. Last year I had to make this a three-parter, but we're back to two this year and the entries are shorter than usual as well.
Tyler Allen - OF
Powhatan HS (VA)
Undrafted
The road to playing time next year for a freshman outfielder is nigh-impossible, so Tyler Allen is a name that'll have to be stashed in the long-term memory banks. He's the only outfielder in the class, which is not too surprising; we have at least five legitimate candidates for playing time and even if Mike Papi moves to first base, the rest of the field is crowded with ouststanding hitters. It'd be a huge surprise to see him in the lineup in 2014.
That said, though, Allen is a good all-around outfield prospect. I wouldn't go so far as to call him "five-tool" because that carries some connotations of sky-high expectations, but Allen can hit, run, field, and throw, all with the skills to do so competitively in college. He's fairly tall with good speed and a left-handed bat, and he could probably at least compete for time in center field when it's his turn. Left field otherwise. Like most college prospects, he's a .400 hitter, and he was player of the year in his district. About half the class made a Rawlings all-region first team; Allen was one who did. He's got great timing, too; in a 15-3 win this season, Allen hit two grand slams. Nice display of power for his future coach; Brian O'Connor was in the stands for that one.
Allen will see the field sparingly, if at all, in 2014. You'd expect that Brandon Downes and Derek Fisher will leave after next year, though, which opens the door. Both left and center field will be open for competition in 2015, which is when Allen's time will come.
Alec Bettinger - RHP
CD Hylton HS (VA)
Undrafted
Bettinger is a summer-ball teammate of UVA's best-known prospect in this class, Connor Jones. He's got a fastball that tops out around 90 and a good breaking ball. Different coaches of his seem to have different ideas as to the effectiveness of his off-speed stuff and which is his better pitch and so on, so they sound like something that'll need honing before they're college-ready. If Bettinger is eventually destined for the rotation, a stop in the bullpen on the way seems highly likely. One possible obstacle for him will be his size; other than Whit Mayberry there aren't any heavily-used righties on UVA's staff shorter than 6'3; Bettinger stands just 6'0". Lefties get more of a pass than righties on height and Bettinger will have to work hard to separate from the pack.
Adam Bleday - LHP
Titusville Area HS (PA)
Undrafted
Bleday is an interesting prospect; he's not big or super-athletic and as a pitcher, he's not by any means a hard thrower. But he's a very good hitter (.429 batting average) who played center field as well as pitched for his high school team, and as a pitcher, his senior season saw him finish with an 0.18 ERA. That means in the 38 innings he pitched, only one earned run crossed the plate. He struck out 72 against only 12 walks. In his junior year, he pitched a full 9 innings in one game (which qualifies as extra innings in high school) and struck out 23(!!) hitters.
Stuff-wise, he's sort of a typical lefty; fastball in the mid-80s at best, but with obviously excellent command and two other pitches that work well for him. He's also small, even for a lefty. With three good pitches, Bleday could get at least a look as a starter and might have that in his long-term future. The competition for the 2014 starting rotation looks as wide open as it's ever been, and the field is stocked with veterans like Whit Mayberry and Artie Lewicki, so if a freshman can crack it, that freshman would have to be very impressive. Mental makeup means a lot to BOC and Karl Kuhn, and we've got no way of knowing how that will go (which is why I make occasionally awful predictions like the Waddell one) but the fact is that the competition both in the rotation and among bullpen lefties is going to be strong in 2014. It might be tough for a guy like Bleday to have a major role early, but long-term he should be in the thick of the race. (Kind of the story of this freshman class, really.)
Tony Butler - INF
Sun Prairie HS (WI)
Undrafted
I wish there were more on Tony Butler, but he's been unfortunately injury-prone in his high school career. He's had two surgeries already; one on his hand after his sophomore year and one this spring, on his shoulder after suffering a dislocation and torn labrum. That injury cost him his senior year.
A shame, because he did some gaudy things as a junior. He batted .521 as a shortstop, had an 0.78 ERA (three ER in 28 IP) as a pitcher, and tossed a no-hitter as well. At least one publication, during the preseason, called him the best player in Wisconsin, and he played for the best team, too; his team was state champs in both 2012 and 2013. This year, instead of playing, he coached.
Butler is one of the members of this class to make Rawlings's all-region first teams, and one of two infielders in the class. The amount of playing time available for infielders will depend partly on what the coaches decide to do with Nick Howard; does he continue to play third base (where he's a little bit of a butcher with the glove) or does he focus on pitching full time? John LaPrise may have the inside track on the vacated second base job, and we'll also be interested to see what we get out of George Ragsdale. By virtue of being an infielder, though, and also by virtue of being pretty good, Butler stands to be one of the few freshmen with a solid path to some playing time in 2014.
Ben Carraway - RHP
Creekview HS (GA)
Undrafted
Yes, this is the year for younger brothers of former Hoo pitchers. Ben's older brother is Andrew, one-time standout starter for UVA and current Seattle Mariners minor leaguer. Carraway is otherwise somewhat overshadowed in this class; his fastball currently tops out around 88, low for a righty, and beyond that there's precious little information on him. I would guess just based on that fastball that Carraway would have an uphill climb for innings, but with so little to go on, predictions are even dicier than usual.
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For future reference, next week I go offline for three days and then return with the second half of this series and then the first of the preseason ACC football previews. I feel like it's way too early for that shit but I have two more of them to do now and if I don't get an early start I'll never finish. Even with just 11 to do (on top of, you know, actually focusing on our own team) they had a way of making August race past at the speed of sound. The fall roster is out, so tomorrow there will be depth chart discussion as part of the previously-promised big recruiting picture post.
The class is a little smaller this year, which is unsurprising because of the small number of players lost to graduation/the draft. BOC knows how to manage a roster. Last year I had to make this a three-parter, but we're back to two this year and the entries are shorter than usual as well.
Tyler Allen - OF
Powhatan HS (VA)
Undrafted
The road to playing time next year for a freshman outfielder is nigh-impossible, so Tyler Allen is a name that'll have to be stashed in the long-term memory banks. He's the only outfielder in the class, which is not too surprising; we have at least five legitimate candidates for playing time and even if Mike Papi moves to first base, the rest of the field is crowded with ouststanding hitters. It'd be a huge surprise to see him in the lineup in 2014.
That said, though, Allen is a good all-around outfield prospect. I wouldn't go so far as to call him "five-tool" because that carries some connotations of sky-high expectations, but Allen can hit, run, field, and throw, all with the skills to do so competitively in college. He's fairly tall with good speed and a left-handed bat, and he could probably at least compete for time in center field when it's his turn. Left field otherwise. Like most college prospects, he's a .400 hitter, and he was player of the year in his district. About half the class made a Rawlings all-region first team; Allen was one who did. He's got great timing, too; in a 15-3 win this season, Allen hit two grand slams. Nice display of power for his future coach; Brian O'Connor was in the stands for that one.
Allen will see the field sparingly, if at all, in 2014. You'd expect that Brandon Downes and Derek Fisher will leave after next year, though, which opens the door. Both left and center field will be open for competition in 2015, which is when Allen's time will come.
Alec Bettinger - RHP
CD Hylton HS (VA)
Undrafted
Bettinger is a summer-ball teammate of UVA's best-known prospect in this class, Connor Jones. He's got a fastball that tops out around 90 and a good breaking ball. Different coaches of his seem to have different ideas as to the effectiveness of his off-speed stuff and which is his better pitch and so on, so they sound like something that'll need honing before they're college-ready. If Bettinger is eventually destined for the rotation, a stop in the bullpen on the way seems highly likely. One possible obstacle for him will be his size; other than Whit Mayberry there aren't any heavily-used righties on UVA's staff shorter than 6'3; Bettinger stands just 6'0". Lefties get more of a pass than righties on height and Bettinger will have to work hard to separate from the pack.
Adam Bleday - LHP
Titusville Area HS (PA)
Undrafted
Bleday is an interesting prospect; he's not big or super-athletic and as a pitcher, he's not by any means a hard thrower. But he's a very good hitter (.429 batting average) who played center field as well as pitched for his high school team, and as a pitcher, his senior season saw him finish with an 0.18 ERA. That means in the 38 innings he pitched, only one earned run crossed the plate. He struck out 72 against only 12 walks. In his junior year, he pitched a full 9 innings in one game (which qualifies as extra innings in high school) and struck out 23(!!) hitters.
Stuff-wise, he's sort of a typical lefty; fastball in the mid-80s at best, but with obviously excellent command and two other pitches that work well for him. He's also small, even for a lefty. With three good pitches, Bleday could get at least a look as a starter and might have that in his long-term future. The competition for the 2014 starting rotation looks as wide open as it's ever been, and the field is stocked with veterans like Whit Mayberry and Artie Lewicki, so if a freshman can crack it, that freshman would have to be very impressive. Mental makeup means a lot to BOC and Karl Kuhn, and we've got no way of knowing how that will go (which is why I make occasionally awful predictions like the Waddell one) but the fact is that the competition both in the rotation and among bullpen lefties is going to be strong in 2014. It might be tough for a guy like Bleday to have a major role early, but long-term he should be in the thick of the race. (Kind of the story of this freshman class, really.)
Tony Butler - INF
Sun Prairie HS (WI)
Undrafted
I wish there were more on Tony Butler, but he's been unfortunately injury-prone in his high school career. He's had two surgeries already; one on his hand after his sophomore year and one this spring, on his shoulder after suffering a dislocation and torn labrum. That injury cost him his senior year.
A shame, because he did some gaudy things as a junior. He batted .521 as a shortstop, had an 0.78 ERA (three ER in 28 IP) as a pitcher, and tossed a no-hitter as well. At least one publication, during the preseason, called him the best player in Wisconsin, and he played for the best team, too; his team was state champs in both 2012 and 2013. This year, instead of playing, he coached.
Butler is one of the members of this class to make Rawlings's all-region first teams, and one of two infielders in the class. The amount of playing time available for infielders will depend partly on what the coaches decide to do with Nick Howard; does he continue to play third base (where he's a little bit of a butcher with the glove) or does he focus on pitching full time? John LaPrise may have the inside track on the vacated second base job, and we'll also be interested to see what we get out of George Ragsdale. By virtue of being an infielder, though, and also by virtue of being pretty good, Butler stands to be one of the few freshmen with a solid path to some playing time in 2014.
Ben Carraway - RHP
Creekview HS (GA)
Undrafted
Yes, this is the year for younger brothers of former Hoo pitchers. Ben's older brother is Andrew, one-time standout starter for UVA and current Seattle Mariners minor leaguer. Carraway is otherwise somewhat overshadowed in this class; his fastball currently tops out around 88, low for a righty, and beyond that there's precious little information on him. I would guess just based on that fastball that Carraway would have an uphill climb for innings, but with so little to go on, predictions are even dicier than usual.
***************************************************
For future reference, next week I go offline for three days and then return with the second half of this series and then the first of the preseason ACC football previews. I feel like it's way too early for that shit but I have two more of them to do now and if I don't get an early start I'll never finish. Even with just 11 to do (on top of, you know, actually focusing on our own team) they had a way of making August race past at the speed of sound. The fall roster is out, so tomorrow there will be depth chart discussion as part of the previously-promised big recruiting picture post.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
weekend review
So it's been kind of a crap spring so far, relatively speaking. It's much colder than last year's, I've had all this damn work to do, and worst of all from the actual perspective of the blog, the lacrosse team has stunk up the joint. We've been spoiled, man - I've gotten used to spring being the season when being a UVA fan is at its peak. Weekend reviews speak of glorious triumphs on two fields at once.
So this weekend was pretty refreshing. Even if the lacrosse game ultimately meant very little in the grand scheme, hey, at least it was a Senior Day win, and it was nice to watch the ball go in the net for once. Nobody's scored 12 goals on Bellarmine all year, not even likely #1 seed Denver. A few bullets on that game:
-- Mark Cockerton scored four goals, but the game's MVP is Tyler German, who won two out of every three of his faceoffs. Mick Parks was absent for personal (not disciplinary) reasons, and might find his seat taken when he gets back. German was only 5-for-14 coming in, but certainly deserves a few shots against Maryland next weekend.
-- Also, while we're on the subject of faceoffs, anyone who didn't enjoy watching Thompson Brown truck his opponent on the garbage-time faceoff he took must not actually like lacrosse.
-- I'll touch on this more when the season's over and I write a seasonal postmortem, but one thing I've gotten tired of is watching our shooters try the same shot over and over with the same result, which is usually a save. I lost track of how many times our guys were on the doorstep and tried to lob the ball into the net as if there were no goalie, which was a failed strategy every time.
-- I was incredibly surprised to see UVA credited with 23-of-24 on clearing attempts. We had to be worse than that. Had to be.
-- Maybe the best thing of all was scoring a goal with three seconds left in the third quarter after watching every team all year do that to us.
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Baseball brought the brooms to Davenport this weekend and knocked Florida State off their top-5 perch. Before the series I wrote a Sabre post that said something to the effect of: if the team could simply go .500 in the rest of their ACC games and win all the nonconference ones, they'd be in the conversation for a top-8 national seed in the tournament and a near-certain regional host. That'd have put them at 41-14 plus whatever happened in the ACC tourney. Now they've swept a team that they could've easily dropped two games to. It's not a stretch to say they could win their next ten in a row and be 45-6 going into the Carolina series.
That said, finals break is before the Duke series. At the moment, Duke is in the 9th slot overall in the ACC, with VT in the 8th slot, a mere one game ahead. Duke has Maryland this coming weekend, so the odds are decent that they'll pull ahead of the Hokies. So just to be dicks I think we should sweep VT and then activate our secret powers of post-finals suckery to get swept by Duke. Just for a laugh at the Hokies' expense. And as a public service - to spare ACC tournament viewers the agony of the eyes.
Yet more bullets from the weekend:
-- It's pretty amazing how we're 36-5 and we don't even have any good players. The ACC media has not yet seen fit to award even one single player of the week honor (or pitcher) to a Cavalier.
-- It's time to put some padding on the wall next to the right-field bullpen. Past time, really. Joe McCarthy jammed his finger (that's not, like, Kevin Ware-gruesome, but you click on that link, you'll see a finger going a direction it weren't ever meant to) catching a foul ball, and slammed his elbow on the cement top in the process. And later, FSU's right fielder Jameis Winston nearly broke his kneecap sliding into it in another foul ball attempt. Winston happens to be FSU's selection for starting quarterback in the fall - we'd have looked like a bunch of assholes if he missed the year because of our brick wall. I seem to recall an Irvine player taking a hard run at that wall as well, and coming out rather the worse for the encounter. Let's get some padding there before someone breaks their skull open.
-- Winston, by the way, is one of the least comfortable-looking players I've ever seen patrol an outfield. When Derek Fisher hit his three-run triple, I swear Winston ran right past the spot where the ball eventually landed.
-- Pretty much every pitcher we ran out to the mound had themselves a really nice weekend. Scott Silverstein pitched seven innings of shutout ball and FSU was held to one hit in a game for the first time since 1998. Nick Howard was wild for two innings and then got himself together - and that's the kind of thing pitching coaches love. They know you'll be off your game sometimes. If you can get back on, mid-contest, that's the mental makeup they're looking for. I'm awfully surprised at the impotence of FSU's bats, though. Much credit goes to our pitchers, but you have to cast an eye at the FSU bats as well, who might've hit two or three balls hard all weekend. So many of their hits were Texas Leaguers or choppers that slithered just past the infielders.
-- Kyle Crockett's instructions for his trip to the plate on Sunday (necessitated by the lineup shifts following McCarthy's injury removal) basically boiled down to this: Just keep the bat on your shoulder unless they're all fastballs, in which case I guess sure why not try a swing just for giggles. He will probably never let his teammates forget the resulting base hit.
-- The following batter was Brandon Downes, and the strategy looked awfully odd. Downes was still bunting with two strikes. My guess: The coaches decided that even a foul-bunt strikeout or allowing the out at third was preferable to the possibility of Crockett having to try and slide to break up a double play. As it turned out, the out at third is what happened, and at that point, Crockett was moved up a base and he wasn't going to be caught up in any double plays. Good thing he didn't have to slide into home, though.
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I'll do a recruiting board update later, but yes, J.J. Jackson committed to basically take Chris Nelson's spot - which, assuming we can land Andrew Brown, is a good positional tradeoff because Jackson plays a position of much greater need. The coaches were dead serious about trying to land Jackson even though his offer list sucks, so they must like something.
Even more interesting, really, are these two Monday developments: the post-spring depth chart and the ACC's media rights thingy. The depth chart doesn't change too many of my post-spring impressions, but does leave a few surprises. The list of position switches that I can see:
-- Pablo Alvarez from the bottom of the secondary depth chart to the bottom of the WR depth chart. This is a likely indication that Alvarez isn't to be counted on for contributions. Injuries played a major role in that.
-- Luke Bowanko to LG and walk-on Jackson Matteo to center. That's the top surprise right there, and somewhat related is Sean Cascarano sticking at RG while Conner Davis moves to the second string and Jay Whitmire has the RT job. (And Cody Wallace now backs up Whitmire instead of a guard.) This Matteo thing could either be really good or really bad. A walk-on freshman beats out a senior for one of the most important positions on the line. I could see that turning out very badly, as Matteo hasn't played a single down of college football. It's just as possible that Matteo is a minor prodigy with a talent for the nuances of the center position that Bowanko never had; center is a tricky thing to master. This brings us the potential to have four years of the same center, which is the kind of continuity that coaches salivate over.
-- Kelvin Rainey at safety is also interesting. As is Wil Wahee at second string corner. After Matteo, the next thing people are talking about - in this case putting up a whiny fuss about, more than anything else - is Maurice Canady backing up Drequan Hoskey. Even if the crowd that thinks he's the second coming are correct, being the third cornerback is like being the third wide receiver. He'll have plenty of time on the field.
Part two of the weekend review runs tomorrow, as the brave new ACC - which includes the first wave of Notre Dame games - deserves its own post.
So this weekend was pretty refreshing. Even if the lacrosse game ultimately meant very little in the grand scheme, hey, at least it was a Senior Day win, and it was nice to watch the ball go in the net for once. Nobody's scored 12 goals on Bellarmine all year, not even likely #1 seed Denver. A few bullets on that game:
-- Mark Cockerton scored four goals, but the game's MVP is Tyler German, who won two out of every three of his faceoffs. Mick Parks was absent for personal (not disciplinary) reasons, and might find his seat taken when he gets back. German was only 5-for-14 coming in, but certainly deserves a few shots against Maryland next weekend.
-- Also, while we're on the subject of faceoffs, anyone who didn't enjoy watching Thompson Brown truck his opponent on the garbage-time faceoff he took must not actually like lacrosse.
-- I'll touch on this more when the season's over and I write a seasonal postmortem, but one thing I've gotten tired of is watching our shooters try the same shot over and over with the same result, which is usually a save. I lost track of how many times our guys were on the doorstep and tried to lob the ball into the net as if there were no goalie, which was a failed strategy every time.
-- I was incredibly surprised to see UVA credited with 23-of-24 on clearing attempts. We had to be worse than that. Had to be.
-- Maybe the best thing of all was scoring a goal with three seconds left in the third quarter after watching every team all year do that to us.
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Baseball brought the brooms to Davenport this weekend and knocked Florida State off their top-5 perch. Before the series I wrote a Sabre post that said something to the effect of: if the team could simply go .500 in the rest of their ACC games and win all the nonconference ones, they'd be in the conversation for a top-8 national seed in the tournament and a near-certain regional host. That'd have put them at 41-14 plus whatever happened in the ACC tourney. Now they've swept a team that they could've easily dropped two games to. It's not a stretch to say they could win their next ten in a row and be 45-6 going into the Carolina series.
That said, finals break is before the Duke series. At the moment, Duke is in the 9th slot overall in the ACC, with VT in the 8th slot, a mere one game ahead. Duke has Maryland this coming weekend, so the odds are decent that they'll pull ahead of the Hokies. So just to be dicks I think we should sweep VT and then activate our secret powers of post-finals suckery to get swept by Duke. Just for a laugh at the Hokies' expense. And as a public service - to spare ACC tournament viewers the agony of the eyes.
Yet more bullets from the weekend:
-- It's pretty amazing how we're 36-5 and we don't even have any good players. The ACC media has not yet seen fit to award even one single player of the week honor (or pitcher) to a Cavalier.
-- It's time to put some padding on the wall next to the right-field bullpen. Past time, really. Joe McCarthy jammed his finger (that's not, like, Kevin Ware-gruesome, but you click on that link, you'll see a finger going a direction it weren't ever meant to) catching a foul ball, and slammed his elbow on the cement top in the process. And later, FSU's right fielder Jameis Winston nearly broke his kneecap sliding into it in another foul ball attempt. Winston happens to be FSU's selection for starting quarterback in the fall - we'd have looked like a bunch of assholes if he missed the year because of our brick wall. I seem to recall an Irvine player taking a hard run at that wall as well, and coming out rather the worse for the encounter. Let's get some padding there before someone breaks their skull open.
-- Winston, by the way, is one of the least comfortable-looking players I've ever seen patrol an outfield. When Derek Fisher hit his three-run triple, I swear Winston ran right past the spot where the ball eventually landed.
-- Pretty much every pitcher we ran out to the mound had themselves a really nice weekend. Scott Silverstein pitched seven innings of shutout ball and FSU was held to one hit in a game for the first time since 1998. Nick Howard was wild for two innings and then got himself together - and that's the kind of thing pitching coaches love. They know you'll be off your game sometimes. If you can get back on, mid-contest, that's the mental makeup they're looking for. I'm awfully surprised at the impotence of FSU's bats, though. Much credit goes to our pitchers, but you have to cast an eye at the FSU bats as well, who might've hit two or three balls hard all weekend. So many of their hits were Texas Leaguers or choppers that slithered just past the infielders.
-- Kyle Crockett's instructions for his trip to the plate on Sunday (necessitated by the lineup shifts following McCarthy's injury removal) basically boiled down to this: Just keep the bat on your shoulder unless they're all fastballs, in which case I guess sure why not try a swing just for giggles. He will probably never let his teammates forget the resulting base hit.
-- The following batter was Brandon Downes, and the strategy looked awfully odd. Downes was still bunting with two strikes. My guess: The coaches decided that even a foul-bunt strikeout or allowing the out at third was preferable to the possibility of Crockett having to try and slide to break up a double play. As it turned out, the out at third is what happened, and at that point, Crockett was moved up a base and he wasn't going to be caught up in any double plays. Good thing he didn't have to slide into home, though.
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I'll do a recruiting board update later, but yes, J.J. Jackson committed to basically take Chris Nelson's spot - which, assuming we can land Andrew Brown, is a good positional tradeoff because Jackson plays a position of much greater need. The coaches were dead serious about trying to land Jackson even though his offer list sucks, so they must like something.
Even more interesting, really, are these two Monday developments: the post-spring depth chart and the ACC's media rights thingy. The depth chart doesn't change too many of my post-spring impressions, but does leave a few surprises. The list of position switches that I can see:
-- Pablo Alvarez from the bottom of the secondary depth chart to the bottom of the WR depth chart. This is a likely indication that Alvarez isn't to be counted on for contributions. Injuries played a major role in that.
-- Luke Bowanko to LG and walk-on Jackson Matteo to center. That's the top surprise right there, and somewhat related is Sean Cascarano sticking at RG while Conner Davis moves to the second string and Jay Whitmire has the RT job. (And Cody Wallace now backs up Whitmire instead of a guard.) This Matteo thing could either be really good or really bad. A walk-on freshman beats out a senior for one of the most important positions on the line. I could see that turning out very badly, as Matteo hasn't played a single down of college football. It's just as possible that Matteo is a minor prodigy with a talent for the nuances of the center position that Bowanko never had; center is a tricky thing to master. This brings us the potential to have four years of the same center, which is the kind of continuity that coaches salivate over.
-- Kelvin Rainey at safety is also interesting. As is Wil Wahee at second string corner. After Matteo, the next thing people are talking about - in this case putting up a whiny fuss about, more than anything else - is Maurice Canady backing up Drequan Hoskey. Even if the crowd that thinks he's the second coming are correct, being the third cornerback is like being the third wide receiver. He'll have plenty of time on the field.
Part two of the weekend review runs tomorrow, as the brave new ACC - which includes the first wave of Notre Dame games - deserves its own post.
Monday, April 15, 2013
weekend review
I didn't preview the Duke lacrosse game, but an astute comment on the GT post predicted it better than I would have:
This was a game of runs, with the pendulum making several swings between delivering and receiving the ass-beating. UVA's 13-9 lead ended up being a rather false hope, as Duke scored 10 of the next 11 goals. Truthfully, the game wasn't as close as the score: UVA was beaten in the shots-on-goal category 35-24, at faceoffs 23-15, total shots 55-40, and cleared only 75% of their opportunities. I'm beginning to think the only way to find out why Duke always brings out the worst in our defense is to kidnap an assistant coach and torture the answers out of him, but then again I've been reading Game of Thrones lately so my ideas might be a little darker than normal.
UVA has now left itself only one thread of hope for making the NCAA tournament: win all of the next three games. That's the only way to earn the.500-or-better record the NCAA requires for at-large teams. And I don't even think that would do it, really. Of course, at this point if you're still thinking NCAA tournament, there's nothing I can say to shoot down your very misplaced optimism except that your efforts might be better spent finding a team with a golden horseshoe jammed up its ass, like Ohio State football.
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That golden horseshoe team certainly isn't UVA baseball, at least not this weekend. UVA dominated the Saturday game behind some ridiculously good pitching from Scott Silverstein, who gave up two hits - one of them of the extremely cheap variety - in seven innings, and struck out nine. I don't trust Silverstein's reconstructed shoulder enough to think that we can always get that kind of performance, but that was one of the better lineups UVA will face or has faced in ACC play. If he can dominate them he can certainly work some magic on the rest of the conference too. Given the reputation Silverstein had coming out of high school, file that one under "what could've been" and repeat the UVA mantra, which as always is: "we can't have nice things."
This is not to say that the rest of the pitching was poor, of course: that GT lineup only scored seven runs in the three games. Brandon Waddell had a nervous-looking start on Friday but then settled down beautifully, and UVA lost 2-1. Truthfully, I think third-base coach Kevin McMullen ran us right out of that one by sending Derek Fisher home from second on a single to left, whereupon he was cut down at the plate.
My usual philosophy on sending runners is that coaches should be hyper-aggressive with two outs, and send all 50/50 or even 40/60 chances (because your chances of scoring if you hold the runner are essentially equal to the batting average of the next hitter) but exercise a great deal of caution with less than two outs. Which was the case with Fisher. Holding a runner on a grounder (which is what the single was) isn't even cautious, it's just smart: a grounder can and will be charged and the outfielder can come up firing. It's different if the OF has to go side-to-side to get the ball, and if he's going glove side then you send him without hesitation, but a grounder straight at him is going to get you nailed. With one out and runners at the corners you have a lot of tools in your toolbox to get that runner home, and Reed Gragnani (the next hitter) is a senior who can be counted on to know the value of a fly ball. Since the score was 2-1 at that time and the rest of the game saw mostly quiet bats, it turned out to be one of the key plays in the loss.
On Sunday....well, GT basically tossed the dice and won, letting the rain finish up their 3-2 win. Not a bad strategy when you know your bullpen is just about cashed. Everyone knew going in that UVA had the deeper pen than GT, which I'm sure played no part whatsoever in the decision not to fit in a doubleheader on Saturday. The point that UVA certainly had the chance not to let in three runs and the chance to score more than two is stipulated to. That said, sometimes you lose a series and you're glad to have pulled one win out of it and you hope that team ends up in the opposite bracket of the ACC tournament. This series left no reason to fear the Jackets should we see them again sometime.
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-- UVA says goodbye today to Paul Jesperson, who made known his intent to transfer out. Flash back to a couple weeks ago when I projected that Malcolm Brogdon's return to the rotation would almost certainly take a huge chunk out of Jesperson's minutes; a transfer is not all that surprising. And Jesperson surely has a better idea than you or I about Brogdon's readiness. We were set to have a full complement of 13 scholarship players next year, but being one short won't kill us until "we can't have nice things" starts to take hold.
The real scholarship logjam is next year's sophomore contingent, which runs seven deep and which Jesperson was not part of. This is kind of a problem. It's one that'll probably sort itself out in some fashion, since there's three seasons before they all graduate, but it's still worth keeping an eye on. There are now three open spots for the year when that group will be seniors (2015-2016) which, if you fill them all up, means you only return six players the next year, plus your recruiting class. As it would be unwise (not to mention awfully damn tough) to take a seven-man class and repeat the cycle, you see the issue. I usually scoff at the idea of a mid-career redshirt for a non-injured, non-just-transferred player, because it's exceedingly rare in football and even more so in hoops, but you can see where such a thing would be useful if we could pull it off. A transfer is the more likely result of that logjam.
At any rate, we do wish Jesperson the best. Dude made some sacrifices and did everything the right way, and the silver lining for him is that the redshirt year he couldn't take will now come in handy.
-- Very interesting potential development today in the suggestion of an ACC Network that would be announced before next football season. Whether that means it would actually start right up broadcasting ACC football in 2013, I'm not sure, and I rather doubt it because it takes a while to get it onto all of the potential carriers. Presumably also they mean a real ACC Network patterned after the BTN and other copycats, and not just a Raycom-like entity calling itself the ACC Network only when it's broadcasting an ACC contest.
The potential benefit to the ACC covers a wide range of possibilities. I doubt that the foreseeable future would see such a network turn into the money tree that the BTN has been. For one thing, Big Ten schools are ginormous and have a much larger potential viewership base. For another, this appears to be in concert with ESPN, which owns ACC broadcast rights from top to bottom. The BTN is in concert with Fox instead, which means the B1G can play the two entities off against each other. Having ESPN running the show simply means having the same entity stretching its own reach, and potentially monopolizing content. How much money would actually flow into ACC coffers is anyone's guess.
However. Consider Florida State and Clemson, which some people seem to think have half a foot in either the Big 12 or SEC. The SEC is out of the question for now and the foreseeable future thanks to the blockading efforts of UF, UGA, and USCe, and the only network in the Big 12 is the Longhorn Network. Which doesn't send a dime anywhere but Austin, Texas. Say what you will but when one conference has a conference network and one has nothing but a special arrangement for the most arrogant school in the conference, the appeal of one vs. the other is plain to see.
Plus, as one of the posters in that thread points out, an ACC Network might not match the BTN but is likely to be considerably better than any SEC Network. An SEC network would never get the premier football matchups, and the SEC, relative to the other power conferences, is a basketball wasteland. And doesn't play lacrosse. An SEC network could broadcast baseball and have some success there....but outside of that and Mississippi State/Kentucky football games, wouldn't have a lot of interesting programming. The ACC network would have ten times the appeal in the winter season, and lacrosse in the spring.
I can't vouch one bit for the past veracity of the Syracuse message board poster that that links to, but the folks there seem to take what he says at face value and the Sabre poster who put it there (which is where I found it) swears the guy's legit. It has very believable vibes, and I'm nothing if not a sucker for believable people telling me everything will be ok in re: the ACC. It'll be interesting to see the reaction when (or, I suppose, if) it becomes official.
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A recruiting board update is necessary.
-- Added DE J.J. Jackson to blue. Not highly recruited at the moment but it seems the UVA coaches are dead serious.
-- Added S Kiy Hester to yellow. Even within the various strata on the recruiting board there are layers of optimism (Connor Strachan, for example, is more of a bluish-green while Bentley Spain is more of a yellowish-green) and Hester is sort of a reddish-yellow. Still, taking the time to visit Charlottesville is a notable indicator of interest.
-- Moved CB Christopher Murphy from yellow to red. Getting too much interest to be higher until he does something like visit UVA.
-- Removed QB Caleb Henderson (UNC) and OT Sam Mustipher (ND) from red.
I see UVa plays Duke today in lacrosse. I have no doubt we'll beat them, because I have years of experience as a Virginia fan to draw on. It's like in 2002 when the basketball team was totally sucking, then had the nerve to beat Duke just to remind you how badly they were underachieving.That's the sort of thing that it really does take years of watching UVA sports to think of. There was only one problem with it: the laxing Hoos found an even more ridiculously Virginia way to let the game play out. Fail at scoring goals all season, then wait until we play the one team we can't beat to score an enormous flood of them, and still lose by three. Absolutely fascinating. Insert the appropriate Anchorman quote here, you know the one. I really think that has to stand close to "beat top-five Florida State and then score five points at North Carolina" in the Stupid Losses Zone.
This was a game of runs, with the pendulum making several swings between delivering and receiving the ass-beating. UVA's 13-9 lead ended up being a rather false hope, as Duke scored 10 of the next 11 goals. Truthfully, the game wasn't as close as the score: UVA was beaten in the shots-on-goal category 35-24, at faceoffs 23-15, total shots 55-40, and cleared only 75% of their opportunities. I'm beginning to think the only way to find out why Duke always brings out the worst in our defense is to kidnap an assistant coach and torture the answers out of him, but then again I've been reading Game of Thrones lately so my ideas might be a little darker than normal.
UVA has now left itself only one thread of hope for making the NCAA tournament: win all of the next three games. That's the only way to earn the.500-or-better record the NCAA requires for at-large teams. And I don't even think that would do it, really. Of course, at this point if you're still thinking NCAA tournament, there's nothing I can say to shoot down your very misplaced optimism except that your efforts might be better spent finding a team with a golden horseshoe jammed up its ass, like Ohio State football.
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That golden horseshoe team certainly isn't UVA baseball, at least not this weekend. UVA dominated the Saturday game behind some ridiculously good pitching from Scott Silverstein, who gave up two hits - one of them of the extremely cheap variety - in seven innings, and struck out nine. I don't trust Silverstein's reconstructed shoulder enough to think that we can always get that kind of performance, but that was one of the better lineups UVA will face or has faced in ACC play. If he can dominate them he can certainly work some magic on the rest of the conference too. Given the reputation Silverstein had coming out of high school, file that one under "what could've been" and repeat the UVA mantra, which as always is: "we can't have nice things."
This is not to say that the rest of the pitching was poor, of course: that GT lineup only scored seven runs in the three games. Brandon Waddell had a nervous-looking start on Friday but then settled down beautifully, and UVA lost 2-1. Truthfully, I think third-base coach Kevin McMullen ran us right out of that one by sending Derek Fisher home from second on a single to left, whereupon he was cut down at the plate.
My usual philosophy on sending runners is that coaches should be hyper-aggressive with two outs, and send all 50/50 or even 40/60 chances (because your chances of scoring if you hold the runner are essentially equal to the batting average of the next hitter) but exercise a great deal of caution with less than two outs. Which was the case with Fisher. Holding a runner on a grounder (which is what the single was) isn't even cautious, it's just smart: a grounder can and will be charged and the outfielder can come up firing. It's different if the OF has to go side-to-side to get the ball, and if he's going glove side then you send him without hesitation, but a grounder straight at him is going to get you nailed. With one out and runners at the corners you have a lot of tools in your toolbox to get that runner home, and Reed Gragnani (the next hitter) is a senior who can be counted on to know the value of a fly ball. Since the score was 2-1 at that time and the rest of the game saw mostly quiet bats, it turned out to be one of the key plays in the loss.
On Sunday....well, GT basically tossed the dice and won, letting the rain finish up their 3-2 win. Not a bad strategy when you know your bullpen is just about cashed. Everyone knew going in that UVA had the deeper pen than GT, which I'm sure played no part whatsoever in the decision not to fit in a doubleheader on Saturday. The point that UVA certainly had the chance not to let in three runs and the chance to score more than two is stipulated to. That said, sometimes you lose a series and you're glad to have pulled one win out of it and you hope that team ends up in the opposite bracket of the ACC tournament. This series left no reason to fear the Jackets should we see them again sometime.
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-- UVA says goodbye today to Paul Jesperson, who made known his intent to transfer out. Flash back to a couple weeks ago when I projected that Malcolm Brogdon's return to the rotation would almost certainly take a huge chunk out of Jesperson's minutes; a transfer is not all that surprising. And Jesperson surely has a better idea than you or I about Brogdon's readiness. We were set to have a full complement of 13 scholarship players next year, but being one short won't kill us until "we can't have nice things" starts to take hold.
The real scholarship logjam is next year's sophomore contingent, which runs seven deep and which Jesperson was not part of. This is kind of a problem. It's one that'll probably sort itself out in some fashion, since there's three seasons before they all graduate, but it's still worth keeping an eye on. There are now three open spots for the year when that group will be seniors (2015-2016) which, if you fill them all up, means you only return six players the next year, plus your recruiting class. As it would be unwise (not to mention awfully damn tough) to take a seven-man class and repeat the cycle, you see the issue. I usually scoff at the idea of a mid-career redshirt for a non-injured, non-just-transferred player, because it's exceedingly rare in football and even more so in hoops, but you can see where such a thing would be useful if we could pull it off. A transfer is the more likely result of that logjam.
At any rate, we do wish Jesperson the best. Dude made some sacrifices and did everything the right way, and the silver lining for him is that the redshirt year he couldn't take will now come in handy.
-- Very interesting potential development today in the suggestion of an ACC Network that would be announced before next football season. Whether that means it would actually start right up broadcasting ACC football in 2013, I'm not sure, and I rather doubt it because it takes a while to get it onto all of the potential carriers. Presumably also they mean a real ACC Network patterned after the BTN and other copycats, and not just a Raycom-like entity calling itself the ACC Network only when it's broadcasting an ACC contest.
The potential benefit to the ACC covers a wide range of possibilities. I doubt that the foreseeable future would see such a network turn into the money tree that the BTN has been. For one thing, Big Ten schools are ginormous and have a much larger potential viewership base. For another, this appears to be in concert with ESPN, which owns ACC broadcast rights from top to bottom. The BTN is in concert with Fox instead, which means the B1G can play the two entities off against each other. Having ESPN running the show simply means having the same entity stretching its own reach, and potentially monopolizing content. How much money would actually flow into ACC coffers is anyone's guess.
However. Consider Florida State and Clemson, which some people seem to think have half a foot in either the Big 12 or SEC. The SEC is out of the question for now and the foreseeable future thanks to the blockading efforts of UF, UGA, and USCe, and the only network in the Big 12 is the Longhorn Network. Which doesn't send a dime anywhere but Austin, Texas. Say what you will but when one conference has a conference network and one has nothing but a special arrangement for the most arrogant school in the conference, the appeal of one vs. the other is plain to see.
Plus, as one of the posters in that thread points out, an ACC Network might not match the BTN but is likely to be considerably better than any SEC Network. An SEC network would never get the premier football matchups, and the SEC, relative to the other power conferences, is a basketball wasteland. And doesn't play lacrosse. An SEC network could broadcast baseball and have some success there....but outside of that and Mississippi State/Kentucky football games, wouldn't have a lot of interesting programming. The ACC network would have ten times the appeal in the winter season, and lacrosse in the spring.
I can't vouch one bit for the past veracity of the Syracuse message board poster that that links to, but the folks there seem to take what he says at face value and the Sabre poster who put it there (which is where I found it) swears the guy's legit. It has very believable vibes, and I'm nothing if not a sucker for believable people telling me everything will be ok in re: the ACC. It'll be interesting to see the reaction when (or, I suppose, if) it becomes official.
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A recruiting board update is necessary.
-- Added DE J.J. Jackson to blue. Not highly recruited at the moment but it seems the UVA coaches are dead serious.
-- Added S Kiy Hester to yellow. Even within the various strata on the recruiting board there are layers of optimism (Connor Strachan, for example, is more of a bluish-green while Bentley Spain is more of a yellowish-green) and Hester is sort of a reddish-yellow. Still, taking the time to visit Charlottesville is a notable indicator of interest.
-- Moved CB Christopher Murphy from yellow to red. Getting too much interest to be higher until he does something like visit UVA.
-- Removed QB Caleb Henderson (UNC) and OT Sam Mustipher (ND) from red.
Friday, April 12, 2013
series preview: Georgia Tech
Date/Time: Fri/Sat/Sun, April 12-14; 7:00, 1:00, 1:00
TV: ESPN3
Record against the Jackets: 44-66-2
Last meeting: GT 17, UVA 5; 5/25/12, Greensboro, NC (ACC tournament)
Last game: RU 9, UVA 8 (4/10); GT 7, UGA 5 (4/9)
Last weekend: UVA 3-0 over WF (7-6, 8-6, 9-7); Duke 2-1 over GT (0-2, 2-1, 0-3)
National rankings:
Baseball America: UVA #5, GT #20
Collegiate Baseball: UVA #4, GT #18
NCBWA: UVA #5, GT #19
Perfect Game: UVA #5, GT #19
Coaches: UVA #5, GT #17
Consensus: UVA #5, GT #17
Georgia Tech lineup:
C: Zane Evans (.347-10-41)
1B: A.J. Murray (.288-3-25)
2B: Matt Gonzalez (.371-2-31)
SS: Mott Hyde (.250-0-16)
3B: Sam Dove (.290-2-20)
LF: Dylan Dore (.303-0-4)
CF: Kyle Wren (.387-2-19)
RF: Daniel Palka (.372-8-36)
DH: Brandon Thomas (.439-1-18)
Pitching probables:
Friday: LHP Brandon Waddell (2-0, 3.71, 52 K) vs. RHP Buck Farmer (6-1, 1.47, 64 K)
Saturday: LHP Scott Silverstein (5-0, 3.77, 33 K) vs. RHP Dusty Isaacs (4-2, 3.57, 40 K)
Sunday: RHP Nick Howard (4-2, 2.03, 38 K) vs. RHP Cole Pitts (4-3, 3.43, 26 K)
I promised sporadic updates and boy am I coming through. I currently have no fewer than six major obligations coming due in the next two weeks for school, one of which is a 15-page, single-spaced paper, of which a little under four are complete thanks to today's efforts. So we're getting somewhere. I do crave your indulgence for a little bit here.
Anyway, kind of a big weekend coming up with a three-game series against Georgia Tech. We have a tough opponent in the Jackets, and on the road too. GT is three games back of UVA, but with a tougher schedule under their belt so far. Major tournament positioning is at stake against a team that traditionally hits very well.
-- UVA at bat
Georgia Tech will send a parade of right-handed starters to the hill this weekend, which means we got Derek Fisher back just in time (he had two hits in the Radford game) as it never hurts to have extra left-handed pop in the lineup in such a circumstance. Especially at Georgia Tech's ballpark, which is a launching pad. A short right-field foul pole gives way to a very deep power alley in right-center, but left-center only measures 353 feet.
Friday, UVA will face Buck Farmer, a big guy with a good, powerful fastball. Farmer's been pitching ace-quality stuff this year, and is allowing only a .195 BA against. Saturday hurler Dusty Isaacs is a junior who's rebounded well from a poor showing last season when his ERA was north of 6. Much better this year, although he's already plunked seven batters. Cole Pitts, on Sunday, is more of a contact pitcher who throws a cut fastball and makes use of the fielders behind him rather than trying to overpower hitters.
As with the last time I did a baseball preview (Miami) we face an opponent with a short bullpen. The top reliever is lefty Jonathan King, with a 4.13 ERA, and they have one more southpaw in Sam Clay. Occasionally GT will have catcher Zane Evans head to the mound to finish off a game; Evans actually leads the Jackets in saves with three. Righty Jonathan Roberts is another main option. Make no mistake, though: the quality of pitching drops considerably when the starters leave the game. UVA's lineup has been the kind to attack when they smell blood, and big games and innings tend to only get bigger. A guy like Farmer could give them trouble, so I wouldn't be surprised to see UVA shut down in one game and then explode the next.
-- GT at bat
The potent GT lineup got a major boost this week when Brandon Thomas returned after missing nine games with mono. Duke is a better team than usual this year, but GT still has no business getting shut out twice and scoring two runs in three games against the Blue Devils; that miserable showing illustrates better than anything else how much they might've missed Thomas. Hitting .439 is a great way to set the table for the powerful bats behind him.
Which they have plenty of. The prototypical GT batter is a mashing galoot. Catcher Zane Evans and right fielder Daniel Palka are each slugging over .600, and have 10 and 8 home runs this year, respectively. Not bad when the season's only half over. Both are miles over the .300 mark as well. Matt Gonzalez and Kyle Wren are .370+ hitters in their own right, and I have to imagine all these numbers were even scarier before the Duke series. Those two are liable to take off running as well, especially Wren, who attempts a steal roughly one out of every three times he gets on base.
The only platoon is in left field, where Dylan Dore and Daniel Spingola split time. Since UVA throws two left-handers, we'll probably see Dore twice and Spingola once. Both are solid if unspectacular hitters; of course, if either were awe-inspiring, there'd be no platoon. But the only weak point in the lineup, if you can call it that, is shortstop Mott Hyde. Hyde is only hitting .250, but he did hit seven homers last year, too, so the truth is that he's underachieving this year rather than that he's simply a light-hitting shortstop.
I worry a little, because the pitching hasn't been exactly dominant in recent weeks. GT is always a test of your arms and they make you pay for mistakes. If they get through this lineup relatively unscathed, it would provide a lot of confidence for the upcoming tough stretch.
-- Outlook
Awfully hard to expect a sweep either way. These are two of the ACC six ranked teams. UVA did make one of them (NC State) look a little foolish, but the Jackets are a better team than the Pack. Coming out of Atlanta with a 2-1 series win would really be an outstanding thing, and it'd help put some distance between the top two in the division and the next four. But we shouldn't be terribly disappointed if one win is all we can scrape. Expect a high-scoring series either way.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
series preview: Wake Forest
Date/Time: Sat-Mon, 4/7-4/9; 4:00, 1:00, 7:00
TV: Monday on ESPNUVA; first two games on UVA live stream
Record against the Deacons: 71-84
Last matchup: UVA 13, WF 1 (5/25/11); Durham, NC (ACC tournament)
Last game: UVA 15, JMU 5 (4/4); UNC 4, WF 3 (4/1)
Last weekend: NCSt 2-1 over UVA (1-5, 5-2, 6-7); UNC 2-1 over WF (7-6, 3-7, 3-4)
National rankings:
Baseball America: UVA unranked; WF unranked
Collegiate Baseball: UVA unranked; WF unranked
NCBWA: UVA #29; WF unranked
Perfect Game: UVA #48; WF unranked
Coaches: UVA unranked; WF unranked
Opposing blogs: Blogger So Dear
Wake Forest lineup:
C: Brett Armour (.272-1-9)
1B: Carlos Lopez (.336-8-35)
2B: Conor Keniry (.344-0-12)
3B: Mark Rhine (.310-1-12)
LF: Evan Stephens (.333-1-14)
CF: Mac Williamson (.272-9-25)
RF: James Harris (.188-1-11)
DH: Charlie Morgan (.274-3-22)
Pitching probables:
Saturday: LHP Scott Silverstein (2-3, 2.68, 33 Ks) vs. LHP Tim Cooney (3-2, 4.06, 44 Ks)
Sunday: RHP Branden Kline (4-2, 3.09, 45 Ks) vs. RHP Justin Van Grouw (1-3, 5.35, 29 Ks)
Monday: RHP Artie Lewicki (1-1, 4.31, 25 Ks) vs. LHP Brian Holmes (5-0, 1.87, 44 Ks)
Happy Opening Day! It is for me, anyway, as this is being typed while watching the Tigers take on the Red Sox in (finally) a game that matters.
The end of the winter baseball drought is apropos; it's been a long time since the major leagues played games that matter, but it's been even longer since the last time UVA and Wake Forest got together for a baseball series. We did play them once last year in the ACC tournament, and the game ended via mercy rule (owing to the necessity of playing a lot of games on one day in one ballpark) and no doubt the Deacons remember that. Otherwise, it's been since 2009. March of '09, to be exact, when the Hoos swept the ACC opening series by a combined score of 47-13. But this is a much better Wake Forest team than you might remember.
This weekend, by the way, is one of those with the schedule bumped a day backwards for TV. It won't start til Saturday, and Monday's game is on ESPNU.
-- UVA at the plate
I suspect Wake Forest of being one of those teams that slides their ace to the back of the rotation in order to improve their chances of snagging a win. Evidence: Sunday (Monday) starter Brian Holmes has every statistic in his favor and tossed a no-hitter against Marshall earlier this year. I don't think they're bad enough anymore that they should have to do that, but whatever. The national TV audience will probably see Wake's best shot.
Saturday and Monday, UVA will see a couple of tough-to-hit lefties, each with 44 strikeouts. Both can be worked for a walk, though, too. Tim Cooney is considered to have the best stuff in the Wake rotation, with a four-pitch arsenal, and Holmes throws a heavy fastball that's been hard to hit. On Sunday, the only right-hander in the rotation takes the mound, and this is the day the Hoos have the best chance of teeing off; Justin Van Grouw has been maddeningly inconsistent this season.
So has the Wake bullpen. It's been very up and down. Closer Michael Dimock has eight saves but a 4.50 ERA. He's also struck out 26 in 24 innings.
From the UVA side of things, Reed Gragnani didn't play at all against JMU this week, and if it's anything to do with his nagging injuries he's been dealing with this year, then it's unlikely he'll play this weekend, too. With two southpaws on the hill, lefty Mike Papi also might not see much time. (Wake has practically nothing but righties in the pen, so even if Papi doesn't start, he'll get some PH chances.) This means basically that the outfield will again be Fisher-Shifflett-Harrington (and those corner guys have been swinging the bat very, very well lately) with a freshman DHing. Last week we saw a lot of Brandon Cogswell, but he's a lefty; Nick Howard might be the guy this week.
-- UVA in the field
The preseason book on Wake Forest was that their hitting amounted to a big pile of baked ass. Forget the book. Wake's hitters have been very solid, 1 through 8 - the exception being James Harris, batting .188.
The top guys are the same as the ones who did all the hitting last year: Carlos Lopez and Mac Williamson. Wake's hitting has been a rising tide lifting all their boats, and these two are no exception. Lopez is batting .336 and slugging .645; he and Williamson already have eight and nine home runs, respectively.
Last year, 2B Conor Keniry batted .196; this year, he's Wake's leading hitter at .344. Mark Rhine, who's taken over at third for Lopez (who's now at first) was a .170 hitter; he's at .310 now. In all, it's a solid, well-rounded lineup that's a far cry from the anemic piddlers that trotted to the plate last year, and the funny thing is, it's mostly the same guys.
UVA must also watch out for Wake on the basepaths; they've been successful on 44 of 56. With UVA's catchers allowing more than 70% of basestealers to succeed, that's not a good sign. Three players in particular are a concern: Williamson, Keniry, and Pat Blair. Blair, the Deacs' shortstop, leads the team with 21 walks. Hoos pitchers have gotten occasionally careless, at times forgetting about baserunners, and that can't happen this weekend.
-- Outlook
Sunday provides an interesting matchup, with perhaps our best pitcher against definitely Wake's worst. So that's "interesting" in the sense of "awesome." The actual interesting games will bookend the series, especially Monday. As in, it'll be interesting to see if Lewicki and the bullpen can match up against Wake's ace.
This makes Saturday's game absolutely vital. The Hoos must knock Cooney off the hill. UVA should be able to get the Sunday win, which means winning or losing on Saturday is the difference between trying for the sweep, or hoping for the series win against Wake's best pitcher. This is a much-improved Wake team from years past, but even so, it's not a series the Hoos can afford to lose and maintain the goal of earning a regional 2 seed.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
series preview: NC State
Date/Time: Fri-Sun, 3/30 - 4/1/12; 6:30, 6:30, 1:00
TV: ESPN3
Record against the Pack: 68-120-1
Last matchup: UVA won 2-1 (12-1, 2-6, 3-1); 4/23-4/24/11; Charlottesville
Last game: UVA 19, Towson 5 (3/28); NCSt. 4, ECU 3 (3/28)
Last weekend: UVA 3-0 over Clemson; UNC 2-1 over NCSt.
National rankings:
Baseball America: UVA unranked; NC State #20
Collegiate Baseball: UVA unranked; NC State #9
NCBWA: UVA #26, NC State #27
Perfect Game: UVA #47; NC State #19
Coaches: UVA unranked; NC State #22
Composite: UVA unranked; NC State #18
Opposing blogs: none really where you'll find any baseball info
NC State lineup:
C: Brett Austin (.318-0-16)
1B: Andrew Ciencin (.238-4-18)
2B: Matt Bergquist (.222-0-10)
3B: Trea Turner (.292-1-14)
SS: Chris Diaz (.372-1-26)
LF: Tarran Senay (.310-0-10)
CF: Jake Fincher (.236-0-9)
RF: Ryan Mathews (.329-4-16)
DH: Danny Canela (.282-1-12)
Pitching probables:
Friday: LHP Scott Silverstein (2-2, 2.10, 31 Ks) vs. RHP Ethan Ogburn (2-1, 1.73, 26 Ks)
Saturday: RHP Branden Kline (4-2, 3.10, 35 Ks) vs. LHP Carlos Rodon (4-0, 1.30, 47 Ks)
Sunday: RHP Artie Lewicki (1-1, 4.50, 21 Ks) vs. RHP Logan Jernigan (3-1, 4.03, 28 Ks)
We're pretty sure that teams like FSU, UNC, and Miami will finish ahead of the Hoos in the ACC standings. And we're pretty sure that teams like Wake Forest and Clemson, and maybe even GT, will finish behind. NC State is another story. There are better teams in the conference, but there aren't any bigger series than this one; the Wolfpack, fueled by a stellar recruiting class, are no longer a pest hovering in the bottom ranges of the ACC tournament. They were once capable of delivering the occasional surprise and little more; now they're a legit threat to win the whole thing. There is nothing better that UVA can do for its ACC tournament positioning than to go down to Raleigh and steal a series.
-- UVA at the plate
In the season preview I suggested (OK, more than suggested - outright averred) that NC State didn't have the pitching to be a threat in the ACC. Whoops. The Pack have an excellent Friday-Saturday combo in Ethan Ogburn - whose hurling is leaps and bounds ahead of previous years - and superfrosh Carlos Rodon. Rodon was a 16th-round pick last summer and would've gone higher but for signability issues, as he was well set on college. He was the prize of NC State's freshman class, and could very well be the staff ace by the end of the year; Rodon is allowing a .216 BA and striking out more than 10 per nine innings.
Ogburn's been no slouch either this year; his 1.73 ERA is almost four runs better than it was last year. There's a question about Sunday, where Logan Jernigan will get the ball, but doesn't have a strong grip on the job. Jernigan was knocked around last week by the Tar Heels and pulled in the 3rd inning. That said, Jernigan's allowed all of seven hits this year, in 22 1/3 innings, for an opponents' BA of .092. It's his walks - 18 of them - that have gotten him in trouble.
State's bullpen is pretty much outstanding too; it's very deep, and altogether, this staff leads the conference in a few pitching categories, notably opponents' BA, which is .213 overall. Are you gathering a theme here? That it's kind of tough to get a hit off these guys? They give up fewer than seven per game.
So it's the top-hitting team in the conference (UVA is hitting .324) vs. the stingiest pitching staff. In particular, Derek Fisher and Keith Werman have been on a tear lately. UVA will also have Reed Gragnani back after he missed last weekend with a minor leg injury, but Mitchell Shifflett is hitting well enough that Gragnani may have to fight Colin Harrington for a left field gig. (Not to mention, having Shifflett's wheels in the 8th spot ahead of Werman in the 9 hole makes for some interesting possibilities to make a defense sweat.) Gragnani, as a switch-hitter, might also end up in a super-sub role going forward. Guess we'll see.
At any rate, this is a weekend where we'll have to make every opportunity count. If UVA can string a few hits together in one inning, things might look good; NC State, however, is equally likely to scatter them and leave us with not much to work with. Could be interesting.
-- UVA in the field
Whit Mayberry didn't pitch at all against Towson this week, so I'm guessing he won't be available, even out of the pen, this weekend. Artie Lewicki is listed as the Sunday starter, of course. I don't expect Mayberry to be available on any weekend until he gets a little test drive in on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
So that thins out the pen a little, again. It'll be the same order as last weekend. They'll go against a respectable, if not quite fearsome, Wolfpack lineup. NC State starts three freshmen, beginning with leadoff hitter Trea Turner, a speed demon who's a perfect 25-for-25 on stolen base attempts. In other words, if he gets to first base, chances are about 2 in 3 that he'll get to second on his own. (It wouldn't surprise me if the only reason he doesn't go for second is because it's occupied. It's basically safe to assume that he will steal.)
So you've really got to keep Turner off the basepaths. The guaranteed steal puts a lot of pressure on the defense. NC State used to be something of a swing-for-the-fences kind of team, but they don't hit a lot of homers these days, and neither do they walk or strike out much. They'll make your fielders work, though they're not all that big on sacrifice bunting - at least not at Brian O'Connor levels.
There isn't a one-man-show in the lineup that hits for power and average, but they do have hitters. Chris Diaz is batting .372, generally from fifth in the order; Diaz only has one homer but does have good doubles power. If they could get Andrew Ciencin to hit better than .238, they might have a monster on their hands, but Ciencin - who hits from the three-hole thanks to his home-run power - has never been a guy to hit for average. Ryan Mathews is a solid all-around hitter, but almost never walks. Freshman catcher Brett Austin is the lineup's only switch-hitter. The bottom of the order will generally not be frightening, as Jake Fincher and Matt Bergquist are in for their defense. (Fincher, though, is the second-best base-stealing threat, on the rare occasion that he does get on base.)
Let's get back to base-stealing for a second. Turner is 25-for-25, but the rest of the team, minus his efforts, is also excellent. NC State minus Turner is 22-for-28, still a better percentage than UVA's 42-for-59 as a team. This will be a real test for Nate Irving, especially on Friday because Scott Silverstein has the worst lefty pickoff move ever.
Ultimately this is a good, not great, team at the plate. NC State doesn't have championship-level hitting, but they're solid. Keep Trea Turner the hell off the basepaths and you've taken the most important step. I don't worry too much about the bottom of the lineup, and the fact that they insist on batting a .238 hitter in the three spot is a bonus for opposing pitchers (and a waste of Turner's talents.) But by and large there aren't many slouches either, so the UVA pitching staff needs to pitch well, and it'd be impressive to limit the Pack the way they did Clemson last weekend.
-- Outlook
This is a huge series. So I wish I were more confident for it. If we can pull off a series win here it would be huge for the rest of the season, because the Pack are probably going to play right at our level or better all spring. Being on the road sucks, though, and State's pitching staff worries me. A sweep by either team would be a big surprise, but it would be the only surprise. A 2-1 series either way is almost guaranteed here, the teams are so closely matched. If you held a gun to my head, I'd pick NC State to take two, but I wouldn't have any confidence in the pick, either. I expect all three games to hinge on just a couple plays here and there and be almighty close.
Monday, March 12, 2012
week-and-a-half review
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| If you go to Peru for more than a couple days, and you don't visit Machu Picchu, you're doing it wrong. It's like going to Egypt and not seeing the Pyramids. You could do that, but why? |
Time to find out just what I missed. And as a thank-you for sticking around, I'm peppering this week's posts with some of the better pictures from the trip. Let's get into what I missed. You saw it all, of course, while I was out gallivanting around Peru, but you don't know my opinion on it, and my opinion is what this place is for, so let's get started. We'll review both UVA's week - and mine.
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The city of Lima was built by the Spanish on the Rimac River; “rimaq” is the Quechua word for “talking,” and so the river is called the Talking River. “Lima” is simply a corruption of “Rimac,” making Lima a “talking city” if you’re willing to stretch the etymology a little. This is highly appropriate: in modern times, Lima is the City of the Honking Horns. Drivers in Lima, of which there are millions at any given time, beep their horns for any and every reason, with little respite, leading to the placement of signs in some areas that say “Silencio” with a “No Horns” graphic.
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FOOTBALL
-- Attrition. You know it's gonna happen, and last week it happened. Or at least, it was announced. Of the three that will leave (QB Ross Metheny, DE Thompson Brown, and WR Kevin Royal) the one that'll be most missed is Brown, but if things go downhill it'll be Metheny. Lemme explain: Brown got a lot of praise last year as a freshman and looked like a guy who, if everything panned out just right, could eventually live up to the #91 he was wearing. And pass-rushing could be a problem this year; Brown could've helped in that regard.
That said, we've got a lot of DEs, some of whom might just be even able to record a sack once in a while. Suddenly, though, we're thin at quarterback. There's Rocco, Watford, and two true freshmen. Metheny was a great insurance policy. I was telling people any chance I got that I didn't think Metheny would ever transfer, because he always came off as one of the truest-blue Hoos you'd ever find; oops. He'll play at South Alabama the next two years after getting his degree this spring in three. Not too shabby. You gotta tip your hat to that.
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People who go to Machu Picchu or see its pictures often believe it is one of the highest points in Peru. It’s easy to believe. The valley is thousands upon thousands of feet below, and a bus takes you on a long ride up every one of them. Tall, steep, godlike mountains surround the site, towering thousands of feet above you. It feels like the roof of the Inca world. In truth, it isn’t. Crane your neck up to the highest mountain you can see; the city of Cuzco is a couple thousand feet above it yet. The route the Incas used to get from Cuzco (where Machu Picchu actually got most of its food) was a descent.
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Royal was buried on the depth chart and didn't seem likely to emerge; a shame, I thought he had good potential as the kind of possession receiver that could give you the yards you needed plus three. But his UVA career never got off the ground.
That brings us to 85 exactly for next year, a number that we'll probably drop a little further beneath as time goes by this spring and summer. I've added Drequan Hoskey to the scholarship counters, since I've become almost positive he's getting a track scholarship and therefore counts.
-- Position switches. Going hand-in-hand with the attrition are the position changes laid out by Jeff White, as follows:
- SS Lovante' Battle to FB.
- OT Sean Cascarano to OG.
- C Cody Wallace to OG.
- OG Matt Mihalik to C.
- OG Jay Whitmire to OT.
- DE Marco Jones to DT.
- FS Darius Lee to OLB.
- LB Ausar Walcott to DE.
Whitmire and Jones come as no surprise; it's long been thought that their body types make them more natural for those new positions. But speaking of body types, Ausar Walcott was recruited as a bloody safety. Now he's moved all the way to DE, partly because he's grown and partly because of the shift in philosophy from the big NFL bodies Groh wanted to the speedsters favored by London. No longer do I think that "Walcott to DE" is a motivational tactic.
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Algarrobina is the Peruvian velvet hammer. It’s a sweet cocktail. It’s cake in a glass. The finest, sweetest White Russian pales in comparison to a drink of algarrobina. There is also pisco. If wine were booze, it would be pisco. It’s used to make pisco sours, a gray appetizer cocktail and sort of the national drink of Peru. Want to irritate a patriotic Peruvian? Insinuate that pisco sours – or any of the local cuisine, really – were invented in Chile.
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Battle essentially turns out to be the required fullback move. Someone had to do it; Zach Swanson was the only one on the roster. As for the OL shuffling, I think the main answer there is that Cody Wallace was getting beat out at center. Moving Mihalik there suggests that Wallace wasn't ready and Ross Burbank was eventually going to pass him, if he hadn't already. Mihalik will be the starting center in 2012, it appears.
Cascarano is probably the new starter at left guard in place of Austin Pasztor, but he'll sit the spring and give a couple others a chance to impress.
At the beginning of spring practice, which is next week (GET PUMPED) I'll post a revised depth chart that has all this crap on it, nice and updated and ready to go.
-- UNC. The saga concludes. They'll join Ohio State in postseason jail this year. This doesn't much affect UVA, really. My only take for now is that bowl bans really should wait a year, just to complicate recruiting a little bit. Did you see Ohio State suffer in the recruiting department? They did not.
-- Recruiting board update coming later this week. It gets its own separate post. I'm gonna wait because it looks like the first officially official commitment is on its way. (A handy tip for reading the free portion of pay articles: if a question is asked, like "Is Marshall ready to commit?" it's a hint. The answer is always yes.)
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Before going to Machu Picchu, it’s advisable to take a couple of the other Inca site tours that are offered. You end up on top of other high peaks – the Incas were of the opinion that civilization needed to be as close to the celestial gods as possible – and you stare into the deep valleys and at the high peaks and wonder if the majesty and beauty of these places will detract from the sight of Machu Picchu, at the end of the journey. Don’t worry; it doesn’t.
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BASKETBALL
Eh, I pretty much spoke my piece yesterday. Selection Sunday makes me forget about the ACC tournament. All I can say is I wish we weren't going into this Old West gunfight with three rounds in our six-shooter. What a number the basketball gods did on this team.
I will say that a season sweep over Maryland is a sweet and beautiful thing. It's nice to know that when a Maryland coach inevitably says "we don't lose to Virginia" you can chuckle and know it's the other way round. That said, I want to make some noise in the tournament so bad, because I hate that the legacy of the 2012 Virginia Cavaliers might be "lost every game against good competition through no fault of their own."
Even the writers are being twits. Tyler Zeller won ACC POY for wearing a UNC uniform. OK, OK.... Zeller is a legitimate winner. He's about as good as Mike Scott and dominated the two games against UVA, so it's easy to see why the writers chose him, even if we don't like it. (That said, Roy Williams freely admitted the game plan was to get Mike Scott in foul trouble. You start nothing but five-stars, we start nothing but three-stars, and even then you're scared you can't stop Mike Scott without pretending to be fouled? I think we know who Roy Williams thinks the POY is, even if he won't admit it.)
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You can’t drink the water in Peru. The 24-hour Consequences await those who do. You’re forced to carry bottled water around, but it’s not all bad; it offers an excuse to sample some of the many exotic fruit juices that Peru has to offer, like lucuma and tuna. Tuna juice sounds like a really bad idea until you remember that the Spanish word for tuna is “atun.” Tuna’s just another fruit. Tuna juice, when served con leche (with milk), is bright neon green and tastes a little like the banana milkshakes my dad used to make for us growing up.
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Scott did make all-ACC first team in the lock of the century; the only drama was whether he'd be unanimous, which he wasn't because Caulton Tudor and one other writer, probably also from the state of North Carolina, are trolling dillweeds. Tudor came in for a lot of flak from UVA fans for not voting Scott to the first team, but give him this; he had the sack to admit it. Whoever else is just a coward. That said, Tudor is part of the Old Media that thinks New Media - blogs and such - are "not up to journalistic standards" and therefore not worth anyone's time. Next time you see a print writer bagging on us Internet hobbyists, remind yourself: "Caulton Tudor voted Mike Scott to the second team literally because he doesn't wear a North Carolina jersey."
The dance show was going really well and everything was colorful, loud, and very impressive. Then these two came out and redefined the meaning of "take it to another level."
BASEBALL
Last weekend was a really good time to be in Peru with the team going 1-3 against the kind of competition we should be sweeping. That led to a change in the rotation; you now have Whit Mayberry pitching on Fridays, Scott Silverstein on Saturday, and sophomore Artie Lewicki on Sundays. For now. I got a feeling more shuffling is coming down the road. Man, did we get spoiled with last year's rotation.
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Machu Picchu looks small in pictures. It even looks small in person. It’s only when you actually walk the place – and climb it – do you become acutely aware of its size. But then, Machu Picchu isn’t even the actual name of the city. Nobody knows what the Incas called it. Machu Picchu means “old mountain” in Quechua, and since the place was entirely lost to history and posterity, when it was rediscovered, they decided to simply give it the same name as the mountain it was attached to.
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I was going to say that that puts the two best pitchers - Branden Kline and Kyle Crockett - in the bullpen, but man, has Kline had an ugly year. He didn't take to the closer's role very well, totally blowing the Friday game against Virginia Tech. Something is wrong. Either physically that he's not telling the coaches, or he's getting one of those pitchers' mental blocks, because his stuff is too good for the 5.12 ERA and 12 walks he's currently sporting.
Besides, Silverstein looks really good. This is the Scott Silverstein we were hoping for when he was a freshman. And the hitting is doing its thing nicely, too. If and when the pitching settles in and catches up, this'll be a dangerous team once again. The future looks bright with these freshmen - guys like Nate Irving and Derek Fisher have not had much growing pains to go through - and it's possible we won't have to wait til next year for the future to get here. It's hopefully reminiscent of 2009 when the team finished 6th in the ACC, caught fire, and made Omaha.
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Two bratty kids were on our tour bus. They were about seven. The boy was a little older than his sister. They spoke unaccented English to each other and unaccented Spanish to their frazzled and somewhat defeated parents. At a place with intricate carvings that still ran water, one of them exclaimed to the tour guide, “Es como un baño!” It’s a sacred Incan fountain inside what was once a temple. Un baño, indeed. The tour guide looked even more irritated than when the two gringoes on the bus were the only ones that raised their hand in response to the question about whether anyone needed the English translation of the spiel.
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Better get our shit together soon, though, because national TV is coming next weekend; a fully-televised series against Florida State. The bats pulled off some beautiful comebacks against VT this weekend to maintain instate superiority - wonder if we'll get that chance against FSU? Still, if we're to be the Cardiac Cavs again this year, I can get onboard with that.
LACROSSE
Woot.
I did make it back in time to see the Cornell game. And I was impressed with the Cornell defense. They were fast and athletic and really gave our guys trouble in attacking the net. That may be the only team to hold us in the single digits all year. Because I'm really impressed with our offense. Other years, we've been loaded, but it hasn't felt right. This year, we're loaded and it looks and feels great. Sustainable. This team passes the ball very well and you can be doing everything right on defense and oh well we scored anyway. I'm not in favor of a shot clock at all, but if one were instituted this year we'd probably score 25 a game.
You have to also love the play of Rob Fortunato yesterday. "Only" a .529 save percentage, but some of those saves were impressive. Fortunato is .624 on the season and has long since answered any questions about his abilities. He's a guy we can win the title with. .624 isn't likely to last, because the stiff competition is ahead, but still; this is good stuff here, and for at least one more season there are no issues in net.
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One of those things you don’t think about when you cross the equator, but seems obvious the moment you notice it: the moon is upside down.
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I mean, we even seem to have fixed the faceoff issue. Ryan Benincasa killed it against Syracuse, winning 20 of 28, and then struggled against Cornell but whatever because Mick Parks came in and won 9-of-16 against a team that's winning 63% on the season. Parks is a freshman, which is awesome news; dare I even say that the future looks really bright on faceoffs? If so, look out world. Letting UVA be a make-it-take-it team is a thrilling and deadly idea.
While UVA was beating Cuse and the Rumbling Bears (a name for a band if there ever was one) the rest of the ACC was making the conference look really, really bad. UNC lost to Lehigh and a down-year Pennsylvania. Duke got smoked by Loyola. Maryland lost to UMBC. Seriously, you guys? Bracketology comes out next week and it'll be interesting to see if these guys make it. It's a lot of fun that we still have the team that the rest of the world sees at the top - again - and is probably getting sick of it.
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The idea of an “Incan temple” sounds impressive, but in actuality they’re small and utilitarian, nothing like the soaring cathedrals of Christianity. For one thing, the masses weren’t allowed inside, and for another, they’re among the only buildings that actually employed the technique that the Incas are known for, of carving the stones so intricately they didn’t need mortar. That was a royal pain in the butt and couldn’t be done by the average Joe Inca, so they didn’t build massive edifices this way. More's the pity, really.
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It's time now to settle into the every-Saturday-is-lacrosse-day routine, like a mini-football season. Pity those who don't get that kind of chance in the spring and are reduced to making RV trips to the spring game and sit in the upper deck to get their fix. Maybe we can convert a few of the masses to be Virginia lacrosse fans since their schools don't have it.
Two more games - Ohio State and Johns Hopkins - and then the ACC schedule begins. I wonder what the ACC will look like by then? Duke has tests against Harvard, Duke, Georgetown and Syracuse, and UNC must play Hopkins and Maryland and Duke, and Maryland has UNC and Villanova, all before their games with UVA. Tough matchups, and these teams have all had some flaws exposed. It could turn out that our game with Hopkins is the determinant of the #1 seed.
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The next time I fly across country, coast to coast, I will give strong consideration to going via Panama City, even though it means going through international customs. Latin American airlines still serve inflight meals. Even the really cheap airlines. I’d never had an inflight meal. Almost all my airline experiences are post-9/11, when airlines tried like hell to contain exploding costs and did so by cutting all the perks. Not the ones way down south. Copa Airlines has something that puts excitement on the lips of every red-blooded, right-thinking male in the whole world and a lot of the ladies, too: Free Booze.
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