charlottesville regional preview

Tomorrow it's fer reals.  The lacrosse team having achieved Mission Accomplished, it's now the baseball team's turn to take a run at a national title.  For the second year in a row, UVA will host a regional of their very own at Davenport Field as the regional 1 seed, and being nationally seeded (the top national seed, in fact) is in line to host a super-regional if they advance.

East Carolina, St. John's, and Navy are the teams trekking to Charlottesville for regional play; UVA will play Navy on Friday at 1 PM and the other two will play at 6.  The format for the weekend is double elimination, and all games will luckily be on quasi-TV with video streaming at NCAA.com.  That's not all that cool but it's better than nothing, which is what you get with 11 or 12 of the 16 regionals.

Here's what you get when these teams come to town:

Navy Midshipmen

Starters:

C - Jeff Bland (.264-3-33)
1B - Kash Manzelli (.196-0-6)
2B - Nick Driscoll (.272-2-29)
SS - Dylan Wheeler (.194-0-11)
3B - Greg Dupell (.332-7-35)
LF - Brandon Beans (.263-0-21)
CF - Alex Azor (.332-0-33)
RF - Taylor Cato (.342-0-14)
DH - Dave Milanes (.304-3-48)

SP - Ben Nelson (6-5, 4.64)
SP - Sam Long (5-5, 4.34)
SP - Johnny Schoberl (5-1, 4.73)

RP - Wes Olson (7-1, 2.57)
RP - Preston Gainey (2-0, 2.40)
RP - Jordan Heller (1-3, 6.57)
CL - Joel Rinehart (2-2, 1.88)

Record: 33-23, 12-8
RPI rank: 189

Common opponents:

Maryland: UVA 3-0 (14-1, 4-2, 4-2), Navy 0-1 (3-8)
Georgetown: UVA 1-0 (4-0); Navy 1-1 (9-2, 2-17)
Towson: UVA 2-0 (6-0, 5-0); Navy tied 8-8

Your Patriot League champ is the mighty USNA, and their reward is this trip just up the road to Charlottesville.  No, it doesn't make Navy the worst seed in the tournament - travel rather than seeding dictates where the hapless regional 4 seeds go - but they're close.

UVA will pitch Will Roberts tomorrow against Navy, and the Middies counter with right-hander Ben Nelson.  Nelson is a three-pitch guy who's going to try and get his change-up working on Friday on the theory that UVA hasn't seen much of that in the ACC.  (Um, ok.)

For the most part, Navy's lineup is way crappier than anything the ACC has ever presented our pitchers.  This is basically a weekday game.  There are decent hitters in the middle but Navy probably won't be able to touch Roberts with anything after the #5 hitter.  Greg Dupell is the only threat to hit one over the longish Davenport fences, so UVA will see a very poor man's version of itself as Navy will try to advance its runners via solid baserunning and the old-fashioned chess game rather than hacking their way around the bases.  As best I can tell, some of the troubles at the plate come from trading hitting for fielding with some midseason position switches.  Giving Patriot League ROY Taylor Cato more playing time as the season progressed shored up the hitting, but they may choose to put speed on the bases and a better glove in the field by playing junior Andrew Hahn over Cato.

Usual caveats about anything-can-happen aside, this is not a troublesome matchup.  Being the 1 seed gives you the luxury of throwing your #3 pitcher and having him still be better than the opponent's ace.  That's what's going on here, allowing Danny Hultzen to be saved for the all-important second game.

St. John's Red Storm

Starters:

C - Joe Witkowski (.255-0-22)
1B - Paul Karmas (.319-5-40)
2B - Matt Weissinger (.274-6-42)
SS - Joe Panik (.402-9-56)
3B - Pat Talbut (.279-1-9)
LF - Jeremy Baltz (.312-6-58)
CF - Jimmy Brennan (.281-3-19)
RF - Kevin Grove (.325-4-19)
DH - Robert Case (.264-0-12)

SP - Kyle Hansen (8-6, 2.70)
SP - Sean Hagan (6-2, 4.55)
SP - Kevin Kilpatrick (4-3, 4.44)
SP - Brendan Lobban (6-2, 4.04)

RP - Stephen Rivera (4-2, 2.68)
RP - Eddie Medina (3-1, 3.73)
CL - Matt Carasiti (2-2, 2.52)

Record: 35-20, 18-8
RPI rank: 53

Common opponents:

Georgia Tech: UVA 2-1 (6-2, 12-9, 8-10); SJU 1-2 (0-13, 0-5, 13-3)
North Carolina: UVA 1-3 (0-6, 1-2, 2-3, 3-2); SJU 0-1 (1-8)
Boston College: UVA 2-1 (17-0, 4-5, 4-0); SJU 1-0 (5-4)
Georgetown: UVA 1-0 (4-0); SJU 3-0 (7-3, 25-7, 12-2)

When last we met, last year right at this time, St. John's was giving UVA fits.  UVA jumped out to a 5-2 lead in what would have been the regional's final game, but couldn't hold on to it, and Kevin Kilpatrick pitched 5 1/3 absolutely baffling innings in relief.  UVA won the next day, but that wasn't easy, either.

The Storm aren't Big East champs, but the committee thinks well enough of the Big East to give them three bids to the tourney, so second-place St. John's - which did make it to the championship game before losing to surprise champ Seton Hall - is in Charlottesville, probably as one of the last at-large teams chosen.

Last year the story was that they could hit but only had one decent pitching arm.  (At least, going in. They almost used those not-very-good arms to pull off a colossal upset.)  It's about the same this year, but with a little more bullpen added in.  Jeremy Baltz had some of the gaudiest numbers in the country last year and smacked four more homers in the regional; he's a little down this year but still leads his team in RBIs.  The real deal, though, is Golden Spikes semifinalist Joe Panik, one of 19 .400 hitters in the country.

St. John's is going with Sean Hagan in their Friday game against East Carolina, meaning that 1) they subscribe to the same theory I do, which is that the Saturday game is the most important and your best pitcher should pitch it, and 2) we'll probably see Kyle Hansen on Saturday if St. John's is the opponent.  Hansen is a big frickin' dude at 6-foot-8, and he's the only pitcher on the roster who's a major threat to strike out the side.  SJU will try to wring a lot of innings out of their starters because there are only three reliable pitchers in the bullpen.  If they have to use Johnny Wholestaff in a game it could get ugly.

This might be the matchup to hope for, if only because Joe Panik vs. Danny Hultzen would be the best possible pitcher-batter duel of the weekend.  The new bats sapped SJU of a lot of their power, but it's still a dangerous-hitting lineup.

East Carolina Pirates

Starters:

C - Zach Wright (.278-13-39)
1B - John Wooten (.284-1-27)
2B - Mike Ussery (.282-0-17)
SS - Jack Reinheimer (.323-0-21)
3B - Corey Thompson (.330-5-45)
LF - Ben Fultz (.301-4-26)
CF- Trent Whitehead (.332-4-29)
RF - Philip Clark (.329-3-27)
DH - Chase McDonald (.302-3-26)

SP - Seth Maness (9-3, 1.88)
SP - Mike Wright (6-3, 2.84)
SP - Kevin Brandt (7-3, 2.26)

RP - Brad Mincey (5-4, 1.55)
RP - Joseph Hughes (0-0, 3.32)
CL - Seth Simmons (6-2, 2.56)

Record: 39-19, 14-10
RPI rank: #26

Common opponents:

NC State: UVA 2-1 (2-6, 3-1, 7-6); ECU 0-1 (2-4)
North Carolina: UVA 1-3 (0-6, 1-2, 2-3, 3-2); ECU 0-2 (3-5, 4-5)
Wake Forest: UVA 1-0 (13-1); ECU 1-0 (9-0)

Speaking of familiar opponents.  UVA is 5-1 against ECU in the past two seasons, sweeping last year's series in Greenville and then taking 2 of 3 this year.  The Pirates were the 3rd seed in the C-USA tournament, and their conference ultimately produced four tourney bids.

This is a strong team with a well-rounded lineup, and especially a good, well-rounded group of starting pitchers.  St. John's is taking a little bit of a risk, since they'll be outmatched on the mound with Mike Wright going for the Pirates on Friday.  This means that, again, should UVA face ECU on Saturday, we'll get their ace, in this case, Seth Maness.

However, our pitchers were able to keep ECU well in check in the early-season series.  A Hultzen-Maness matchup would be the second of the year; Hultzen blew Maness away in the first, striking out 15 ECU batters in seven innings.  Maness only lasted 3 1/3 and gave up nine runs.  By throwing Wright on Friday, they're using the one pitcher who truly shut down UVA's batters - one of only nine to earn a win against the Hoos.  The difference in that game was one bad inning by Cody Winiarski, who was otherwise solid.  If UVA sees ECU on Saturday, it'll be Hultzen, but Winiarski might be the guy on Monday if necessary.

Don't look for any weak spots in the Pirate lineup.  The guy with the lowest average is also the guy with 13 home runs.  Zach Wright is kind of a classic free-swinger, with nearly as many strikeouts as hits, but don't let him get a hold of one.  This is a lineup without a definite stand-out hitter, but partly that's because there are no easy outs at all and several players who'd be stars elsewhere.

Prediction for the weekend:

Well, for starters, we'd better beat Navy.  That's a prediction.  I think ECU will beat St. John's in the nightcap, giving us the Hultzen-Maness rematch.  And you never feel like we'll lose with RoboDanny on the mound.  If I were St. John's in that situation, I'd hold Kyle Hansen back one more day and hope my 3rd pitcher can beat Navy, and then with Hansen on the mound on Sunday against ECU, it turns into a tossup.  If all goes well UVA will await that game's winner with Tyler Wilson against whoever they can scrape.

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One of the happy problems about winning a national title is the general inadequacy of anything you write about it.  It's a terrifically awesome thing, but words are not terrifically awesome things except in the hands of the true-greats, so there's a disconnect.  (Sure, you can get on a message board and write WAHOOWA!!!!!!  CHAMPIONS WOOO!!! FHOGSIRFGSSDOYVCXEHG!!!!! but does that do anything for your desire to chug a celebratory pitcher of beer?)

Anyway, I thought this did a very nice job of bridging the gap a little.  It's part sap and part advertising executive, but don't worry it's not a diamond ad.  It's a great way to hold up UVA (specifically, it's outstanding lacrosse team) as examples worth following.  The ultimate positive story to erase all the bad ones of the past 12+ months.

seriously the best weekend review ever

That was awesome and nobody can tell me different.  The best way to respond to an ACC championship by the baseball team is to one-up that sucker the next day and win a national title.  I doubted it could happen even up to the day before the Denver game.  You doubted it could happen.  Don't lie, you did.  19 goals to Duke will do that to you.

There's so much to be said about the fifth national title in UVA lacrosse history that it's hard to know which should come first.  How about we start with Dom Starsia, since his is the evaluation I seem to have screwed up the most?  Contrary to the idea that his career is tailing off, Coach Starsia pulled off what might well be his best season of coaching ever.  He changed up his whole philosophy.  This year he couldn't out-athlete the competition like he likes to do, so he shuffled players around, implemented a zone defense, and he and his crew of assistants got together and figured out how to change the offense from a one-man-at-a-time show to a working machine.  This season I've harped on the unsustainability of having more than half your goals be unassisted; Inside Lacrosse points out that in the four tournament games, 74% of UVA's goals had an assist attached to them.  This is more fun to watch by far, more successful, and ultimately the result of a focus by the coaching staff to make a concerted change in the way the offense attacks the net.  You could brush that off and claim it was forced upon them by the removal of the Brattons from the equation, but you and I both know that not every coach is savvy enough to know he needs to radically switch gears and talented enough to make it work.

And on top of it, Starsia, as evidenced by his interviews and the things the mike caught him saying to his team ("now go shake their hands, they deserve it") is as classy an individual as any that we have coaching here.

So there's one kind of leadership for you.  Then you have the players, especially captain Bray Malphrus, that got their teammates together and demanded accountability.  Malphrus is one of the team's captains, along with John Haldy, Adam Ghitelman, and Steele Stanwick.  Would this team be here without the leadership they brought?  I'd venture to say no.  The season would've ended early, probably in the first round, the team would have an unheard of six losses, and the only narrative would be about how the whole thing fell apart after last year's drama.  The laid-back Haldy is the perfect foil for the fiery and hyper-competitive Malphrus, and the combination was precisely the medicine this team needed after last year's troubles and another heartbreaking loss to nemesis Duke.  Malphrus plans to kick terrorist ass in the military after graduation and I'd say he'll do very, very well in the military environs.  Next year's team will have little trouble filling in the gaps on the field left when these seniors depart (and that's meant as a compliment to the rest of the team, not a knock on the seniors) but they'll need to make a very concerted effort to fill the leadership gaps.

If there's one on-field hole to fill next year, it'll be in net.  It seems like Ghitelman's been in there forever, and he took some real lumps early on from disapproving fans.  But he leaves UVA as the NCAA's third-winningest goalie of all time with 50 victories.  In a way I'm especially happy to see Ghitelman get this trophy because it'd be a shame to be that good for four years and come away empty-handed in the trophy department.

Other things I think:

- Steele Stanwick was held almost completely off the scoresheet, but with 20 points in the previous three games, he's made the Tewaaraton voting awfully interesting.  There's a school of thought that says no Final Four = no Tewaaraton for you, and Stanwick was the only candidate on the field in Baltimore.  That he got there by wildly outplaying the previous prohibitive favorite, Cornell's Rob Pannell, makes it even tougher to vote against him.  The trophy will be awarded Thursday.  If Stanwick doesn't win it won't be a travesty of justice, but if he does it won't be a shock any more.

- Crystal ball time: In February you learn that UVA will make it to the championship game in Baltimore.  (That would've saved a lot of gnashing of teeth in April.)  In that game:

• You'll see zero goals from Rhamel Bratton, Shamel Bratton, Steele Stanwick, or Chris Bocklet, and the only goal scorers at all will be Colin Briggs, Matt White, and Nick O'Reilly,
• UVA will lose the faceoff battle 12-7,
• UVA will also lose the groundballs battle and be outshot,
• Top defender Matt Lovejoy will be out from shoulder surgery,
• UVA will be shut out in the first quarter

And your prediction?  Yes, I think losing 16-4 sounds about right.  Actually winning instead is a real testament to the defense and the efficiency of the offense.

- I didn't hear any major horror stories from people in the overwhelmingly pro-Terp crowd in Baltimore.  John Tillman seems like a stand-up guy and the Maryland team doesn't seem to act too bad.  Admittedly the Terps probably had at least as good a reason for neutral fans to root for them as we did, maybe better.  And it was cool to have an all-ACC final.  Still, it never hurts to have the occasional reminder that Maryland fans can be the shittiest dickbags this earth has ever seen.

- I'll have a whole separate post on 2012 lax in the not-far-off future.  National championships have a way of brightening the future.

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It wasn't too bad a redemption story for the baseball team, either, erasing all memory of that final-week sweep by Carolina by winning the ACC title.  And not the cheap way, either: a 4-0 weekend.  Because of tiebreakers, the Hoos had locked up a spot in the title game against FSU before the Saturday rematch against Carolina, so, as predicted, Danny Hultzen was held back til Sunday and Cody Winiarski pitched against UNC.  And won anyway.

Then UVA picked up a 7-2 victory against FSU in a very decidedly non-UVA fashion: by smacking home runs.  All seven runs came that way.  This caused the FSU Rivals site to go all George Washington on us, mixed in with a little just-a-couple-plays-away Pete Hughes action: their description of the game was, "Three bad pitches."  Seminole starter Hunter Scantling echoed the "two bad pitches" line, except what he actually said was "one bad pitch" instead, which I guess means that when John Barr was hit by a pitch to put him on base ahead of Proscia's jack, that was a good pitch.

Proscia was the tournament MVP, by the way, on account of hitting that home run that would turn out to be a game-winner, and going 7-for-16 on the weekend.  Kenny Swab and Chris Taylor also made the all-tournament team, and Tyler Wilson was left off for reasons I can only assume involve it not being fair that UVA would have so many players on the team.  UNC's Patrick Johnson made it instead, for doing the exact same thing Wilson did (mow down Wake Forest) except without the part where Wilson also burned through Florida State in relief.  In the championship game.  So that makes sense.

So the Hoos get the autobid to the NCAA tournament, I guess, but the #1 seed label means they probably didn't need it.  (Y'know....probably.)  They'll see some familiar faces in the Charlottesville regional: East Carolina, an OOC opponent the last two years; St. John's, which comes to Davenport for regional play for the second year in a row; and Navy, which actually isn't all that familiar but wutever.  You might think that our old buddy Tim Weiser finally did us a solid by giving us the #1 seed, but you'd be wrong: assuming UVA makes it out of its own regional, Weiser handed the Hoos Pac-10 champ UCLA and their rotation of doom (with potential #1 pick Gerrit Cole) as a likely opponent.  THANKS DOOD

The baseball win gives UVA five ACC champeenships for the year, which ties us with Maryland for the season's most with five.  Our five: men's tennis, rowing, baseball, and men's and women's swimming and diving.  This is as good a time as any to brag about Virginia's ACC dominance.  In the years since ACC expansion (so, starting with the 2004-2005 season), here's the rundown of schools and their ACC championships:

1. Virginia - 37
2. FSU - 26
3. Duke - 25
4. UNC - 21
5. Maryland - 16
6. Ga. Tech - 14
7. Va. Tech - 11
8. Clemson - 8
9. NC State - 6
10. Miami - 5
11. Wake Forest - 5
12. Boston College - 1

UVA's 37 championships (in 7 years) break down like so:

• 6 each: Men's swimming & diving; men's tennis; rowing
• 4: Women's swimming & diving
• 3 each: Men's cross country; women's lacrosse
• 2 each: Baseball; men's lacrosse; men's soccer
• 1 each: Men's outdoor track & field; women's soccer; wrestling

Other accomplishments in this distinguished field:

- In each of the last seven years, only one of them saw another ACC school pick up more championships than Virginia.
- That year was 2006-2007, when UVA had three.  That's the lowest total in any of the seven seasons, but every other school has had at least one year of just two or fewer.
- UVA has otherwise picked up at least five in each season.
- UVA's six ACC championships in 2008-2009 and 2007-2008 would be the highest single-season total for any school in the expansion age - nobody else has ever had more than five - but....
- UVA broke that record in 2009-2010 with seven ACC titles.

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Busy week coming up, what with overdue recruiting board updates, and I also can't wait for the customary introduction to our latest basketball recruit, Justin Anderson.  Justin Anderson is the five-star we stole from Maryland, and I'll probably never get tired of using that phrase and may eventually just abbreviate it TFSWSFM because that is just so damn catchy.

But it's even more important that you know this: June 8 is the official Blog Birthday, marking three years of service to the Wahoo community.  That's a week from tomorrow.  Around these parts we celebrate birthdays by giving out presents, not receiving them, and that means the 3rd annual Cavalier of the Year Award.  In the near future, I'll unveil the 12 nominees that I think are most deserving of recognition as the top Virginia athlete of the year.  Over the course of a couple weeks, I'll profile each and tell you why they're on the list, and then you the fans will have the privilege of voting on the winner.  There's no awards ceremony, trophy presentation, or scholarship donation in the name of the winner (yet - the 20th annual award will be a black-tie affair, you just wait and see.)  For now, just a goofy Photoshop.  But the voting is fun.

acc tournament semi-preview

UVA baseball didn't exactly roll into the ACC tournament on a wave of momentum.  They do happen to be the #1 seed, and if you like that, thank (ick) the Hokies for taking one of three from Georgia Tech.  UVA did itself no favors in a horrendously weak hitting exposition against the Heels last weekend, getting themselves....swept.  Never thought I'd say that as long as Danny Hultzen was still on the team.

Not the end of the world, though.  The pitching is still as good as it ever was.  Carolina didn't get much hitting in, either, a five-run inning against Cody Winiarski and Kyle Crockett last Thursday being the scariest thing that happened all weekend.  As long as you have pitching, you're in every game.  So the ACC tournament pods shook out like so:

1. Virginia
4. North Carolina
5. Miami
8. Wake Forest

2. Florida State
3. Georgia Tech
6. Clemson
7. NC State

Now for the good news: the Hoos got the tourney off on the right foot.  Simply winning would've been cool and all, but the ACC tourney has a mercy rule (there's other games going on, chop chop, get a move on) and the Hoos took advantage.  Wake Forest, whom UVA hasn't seen on the diamond for a couple years, got smacked to the tune of 13-1 in just seven innings.  And really, six for the bats, because UVA was the home team.  So the bats are back.  Tyler Wilson got the start and pitched a gem, naturally.  Struck out 12 in 6.1 innings.  Nasty as ever.

The other result of the day - you'll like this, too, promise - was Clemson blanking Georgia Tech, 9-0.  Losing the first game of the tourney means you need to win your next two games and hope the team that just beat you wins neither of theirs.  So GT has a major uphill climb to win their side of the pool.

Friday, UVA plays Miami, and throws Will Roberts against right-hander Eric Whaley.  Last time against the Canes, Roberts gave up three hits to Miami in seven innings, allowed two runs, one earned, and struck out five.  Whaley was just as strong, with four hits, two runs, none earned, and five strikeouts in six innings on Saturday.  That was right after the exam break so hopefully that's why the bats were like that.  They always are.  This is the game that makes me most nervous; Roberts is a solid pitcher but obviously he's more hittable than the guy that might just be the #1 overall pick in the draft.

The final game of pool play in the tournament is the UNC game on Saturday at 7 PM; RoboDanny pitches against UNC's Kent Emanuel.  This was the same matchup as last Friday.  Emanuel is a lefty, same as Danny, and he held UVA to one lousy run in six innings.  Again, hopefully lingering exam break cobwebs.

The championship game, which hopefully UVA will be in, will be Sunday.  If we get that far, expect Cody Winiarski to start.  Unless a situation arises in which a CG appearance is clinched before Saturday's game, which can happen if UVA beats Miami and UNC loses both their first games, then you'll probably see Cody go on Saturday and Danny held back for the championship.

I'd be remiss, too, if I failed to mention all the Hoos on the all-ACC squads: John Hicks, Steven Proscia, David Coleman, Danny Hultzen, and Branden Kline on the first team and John Barr and Tyler Wilson on the second.  CyberDanny is the pitcher of the year, obviously, and Brian O'Connor is the COY, both for the second year in a row.

Programming note: Tomorrow I preview for you the lacrosse game against Denver, and then I'm off until either Monday or Tuesday.  Happy start of summer, and try not to get schwacked by a tornado.  They seem to be all over.  No tornadoes here, but the manhole on my street outside got blown out of its socket somehow by all the water raging through the sewer system and took a huge chunk of the street with it.  Never seen that before.

series preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Thu.-Sat., May 19-21; 7:00, 7:00, 2:00

TV: None unless you want to shell out for the UNC video production

History against the Heels: 92-167-4

Last matchup: UVA series win, 3-0 (3-2, 5-1, 5-3), Charlottesville; 5/15-5/16, 2010

Last game: UVA 5, Miami 4 (5/15); UNC 7, App. St. 2 (5/17)

Last weekend: UVA 2-1 series win over Miami (2-6, 3-2, 5-4); UNC 1-2 series loss to GT (3-2, 8-9, 0-3)

National rankings:

Baseball America: UVA #1; UNC #17
Collegiate Baseball: UVA #1; UNC #16
NCBWA: UVA #1; UNC #14
Perfect Game: UVA #1; UNC #15
Coaches: UVA #1; UNC #13
Composite: UVA #1; UNC #14

RPI: UVA #2; UNC #3

Opposing blogs: It's Carolina, so baseball is something that other teams play during the basketball offseason.  Seriously.

UVA's established itself (at a pretty good time to do so) as the king of the rankings; for the first time this season the Hoos are #1 in all five polls.  Such is the power of Virginia baseball that Miami actually moved up in some polls as a reward for not getting swept last weekend.

This week, another test for UVA: a road trip to Chapel Hill.  UNC is similar to Miami in the sense of having a good pitching staff and only fair hitting.  Better pitching, in fact, but slightly worse hitting, and very solid fielding.  The result is a team that's surprisingly (to me) third in the RPI.  Maybe it's that series sweep over 37-10 Stony Brook.

UNC's staff is one you'd feel very confident going into a weekend series with; the rotation is strong and the bullpen is stronger.  Their pitching staff is second in the nation in strikeouts (guess who's first?? yup, very interesting matchup this weekend) and the leader there is Patrick Johnson, who'll pitch tonight against Cody Winiarski.  Johnson does it with command and control; he's not overpowering, which could be a plus for UVA and their patient ways at the plate.  Bottom line for UVA batters, though, is that they're facing a pitching staff very much like their own: going for strikeouts and not working the corners hoping for a generous umpire.

Carolina's got a few dangerous hitters - they're no murderer's row but there are a couple guys worth watching out for - but the real star of the team has been a freshman: third baseman Colin Moran, who's hitting .349 with nine home runs.  Yes, that's a big number in the brave new world of bats that go clank instead of ping.  He and shortstop Levi Michael lead the team in RBIs, and Moran has 63 to Michael's 45 so it's not real close.

I think the Heels' #3 RPI overrates them quite a bit.  How has UNC fared in the ACC this season?  A little bit underwhelmingly.  They're 9-0 against the real dregs (Duke, VT, and Maryland) but inexplicably lost their series with Wake Forest and even more inexplicably got swept by NC State.

The pitching rotation is a little bit different this weekend.  UNC hasn't changed anything, but it's Brian O'Connor's custom to shake things up and realign his rotation for the postseason; accordingly, Tyler Wilson is off this weekend with Winiarski starting tonight, Danny tomorrow, and Will Roberts on Saturday.  All it takes is one win this weekend or one GT loss and the #1 seed in the ACC tourney is ours; BOC is anticipating needing pitchers Wednesday (probably Winiarski), Thursday (Wilson), Saturday (Danny himself), and then hopefully Sunday (Roberts or Johnny Wholestaff.)  That's my guess at the rotation next weekend.  That Thursday game, assuming we're the 1 seed, will be against the 5 seed: probably UNC.  See the logic of keeping Wilson back this weekend?

Honestly, this weekend UVA has nothing to prove.  A series win would be a reaffirmation of awesomeness - series wins at GT and UNC and a sweep at Clemson, that'd be a record to be reckoned with - but barring the Rapture or some kind of catastrophe in the next couple weeks, UVA will be hosting a regional and getting first dibs on a super-regional, too.  That won't change if we have the misfortune of going 1-2.

Rest of the ACC:

NC State at Boston College
Wake Forest at Maryland: BC and Maryland are toast; the two road teams here will be vying for placement in the 2-3-6-7 pool in the ACC tourney.  NC State won the series against Wake, and so has the tiebreaker - both are 12-15.
Clemson at Florida State: A single win will give FSU the Atlantic Division and the #2 seed.  Clemson can win it if they sweep.
Duke at Miami: Good chance for Miami to get some separation from UNC in the standings, but it matters little since it'll probably be for the 4th seed over the 5th.
Georgia Tech at Virginia Tech: GT must sweep and hope for a UNC sweep in order to win the division.  Otherwise they'll almost definitely be the 3rd seed, having already beaten Miami and UNC in their series.

Probable ACC finish:

1. Virginia
2. Florida State
3. Georgia Tech
4. Miami
5. North Carolina
6. Clemson
7. NC State
8. Wake Forest

Remember, the teams are sorted into 1-4-5-8 and 2-3-6-7 pools, so whatever happens this weekend, expect to have to do it again the next.  That's why BOC isn't letting UNC get a look at Tyler Wilson.

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Bonus: Good news is afoot on the basketball recruiting trail.

- First, as predicted, Mike Tobey is starting to see a serious upward kick in his rankings.  Rivals gave him a fourth star and lists him now as the #100 prospect in the country, giving UVA two of the top 100 for 2012 along with Evan Nolte.  24/7 also puts him in their own top 100.  Time to be legitimately excited for a true center with major talents.  If Tobey pans out that way he could be the first real scoring center since, I dunno, Ralph?

- And two of the top 100 might be just the beginning; last night, rumors went 'splodey all over the tubes about Justin Anderson - a five-star to Rivals, top-25 player to just about everyone, and holding "god given off the charts athletic ability" according to ESPN.  By any measure, precisely the kind of player you always have room for on your roster.  Anderson is a Boo Williams player from Virginia and technically a Maryland commit at the moment; the coaching change and apparent loss of his lead recruiter there are causing him to have second thoughts.  The rumor mill is in full swing in the way that the rumor mill does, with affirmations and denials of everything and I'm not gonna even get into all that because I don't really do that.  Here's the bottom-line point: keep your eyes open for the next couple days because the possibility exists that the 2012 hoops class, which is already starting to look mighty awesome, could look twice as awesome by the end of the weekend.

weekend review

I like to get the bad stuff out of the way early, which means lacrosse goes first today.  Want to know what's so thoroughly frustrating about this team?  Besides the brainfartitude, there are two huge, gaping flaws in the makeup of this team that prevent it from reaching its potential, which is frankly enormous.

Flaw #1: the obvious inability to win a faceoff.  This frustrates me to no end, not least because I'm about to harp on the problems at the faceoff X after a game in which UVA's faceoff men won 15 of 26 for 57%.  That's not half bad.  It's pretty good.  But you know what makes my head explode?  I've been thinking for a while that Ryan Benincasa should take the majority of the faceoffs, Garrett Ince and Brian McDermott should come in only rarely, if ever, and Chris LaPierre should be the second guy for a change of pace every so often  And then Benincasa wins zero of five against Duke and Ince and McDermott combine for 71%.  I've mentioned before that I think the faceoff problems are basically coaching problems because of the inordinate amount of faceoff violations called on our team, and I think the total lack of consistency also points to coaching.

Flaw #2 is that there is but one player on the offensive side of the field - Steele Stanwick - who can make his teammates better.  And he sat out to rest his foot on Saturday.  For my own sanity I'll just assume that Coach Starsia did that because this game didn't matter half of what the next one did and he wanted that ace in the hole he could throw in next week to change the game around....and not because Stanwick's injury got worse somehow.  I hope to hell not.

This is partly why I have that nagging feeling that the end-of-career fade is beginning for Starsia.  For the last decade UVA has had a star attackman that gathers assists nearly as fast as he gathers goals.  Right now that's Stanwick.  In the past it's been Danny Glading, or Ben Rubeor, or Matt Ward, or whatever.  They score and they help their teammates score.  When Stanwick leaves after next season, who'll that be?  Stanwick's talent was immediately evident as a freshman.  You can always tell who the heir apparent is.  Not this time.  It's not Matt White or Rob Emery; the former has disappointed this year and the latter looks like a nice complementary player along the lines of Colin Briggs.  I dunno, maybe I'm overreacting and the reason nobody's really emerged is because of so many upperclassmen in the lineup, but I doubt it; Stanwick and even Chris Bocklet, not to mention the players of the past, played their way in and made themselves indispensible.

But I digress.  Two major flaws in this team and we still only lose to Duke and Syracuse by two goals.  The talent is there to blow the competition out of the water.  But there are some missing elements.  It's like a Corvette with four-cylinder engine.

It doesn't help that we drive it with the parking brake on and the gas cap hanging off.  The silly mistakes are still there.  They weren't as obvious as against UNC, but there they were.  Example: Shamel Bratton jogging down the field after receiving a nice outlet pass following a turnover and setting up the offense.  Fine, except....you're Shamel Bratton and nobody's covering you!  Jog?  Shamel should've been sprinting downfield and ripping a shot at a corner of the net.  If it misses, fine....then go set up the offense.  Instead, Shamel jogged across midfield and the team proceeded to huck the ball around the box for thirty seconds before lobbing a beach ball at Duke's net, which of course was saved.  I'm not questioning Shamel's effort here, I'm questioning the recognition.  The Brattons are the kings of "argh don't do th.....YES!"  Would've been the time for it.

So as a punishment for losing to Duke like we always do, we get to play Duke again on Friday.  Let's hope Steele Stanwick is the difference.  I'm not brimming with optimism here.

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Fortunately, there's a cure for that: the baseball team.  As punishment for beating our lacrosse team on Saturday, the baseball team beat Duke twice on Sunday - first by ripping their hearts out when they thought they had a real chance to steal a win, and then by stomping on it to the tune of 18-4 in the second game.

Friday was easy, of course, at least after the first three innings.  Danny Hultzen served up seven innings of Danny freakin' Hultzen, although the early going was a little rocky while the UVA hitters tried to figure out how to get to Duke's soft-tossing lefty Dillon Haviland.  Eventually they figured that out and before you knew it, it was 10-0, which is how the game ended.  Shutout woo.

Sunday's game 1 was quite the pitchers' duel.  UVA scratched out two runs against Dennis O'Grady and Duke did the same on a two-run double off of closer Kline, in relief of Tyler Wilson and his disgustingly efficient outing.  Wilson took the blame for the runs but it wasn't fair the way he was pitching.  Duke then  brought scheduled third game starter Marcus Stroman in to finish it up.

Not a bad move, by the way.  A few observers criticized the move but I liked it.  For Duke, I mean.  With Duke's miserable pitching staff you don't look for two of three against UVA.  You look to steal one where you can get it, and so they went all-in and brought Stroman in, figuring that because he's a starter and the best pitcher they have, he could work some long innings in what you had to assumed would be an extra-inning game, and outlast UVA's bullpen while Duke worked on manufacturing a run.  Stroman throws 95 and has the control of a kamikaze pilot.  He plunked the first two batters he faced, which appeared to draw a warning from the home-plate ump - "one more of those and you're gone" is my bet, because UVA's third batter walked on four straight pitches that were so far outside they'd have been behind a hitter in the other batter's box.  Bases loaded, none out, and UVA managed to score not even once.  Then they did the same thing in the 10th.  And then because baseball is a screwed-up game, two straight two-out base hits plated the winning run in the 11th.

Having run out of pitchers who can get hitters out, and having forgotten how to field fly balls, Duke fell apart in the third game and UVA won by 14.  I can't decide which pop-up I enjoyed more: the one that landed about five yards behind second base because three Duke fielders collided on their way to it, or the one that landed about five feet in front of home plate because the Duke pitcher lost it in the wind.  In the nine-run third, two of the three outs Duke recorded were sacrifice bunts.  After that inning UVA had just as many hits as Duke and nine more runs.

If you paid attention to the starting rotation, you noticed Will Roberts got his ACC shot on Sunday, and you probably also noticed it didn't go too great.  Roberts settled down some, but all in all gave up eight hits in five innings.  But he walked nobody, which is the kind of thing that makes pitching coaches happy.  For the same reason Cody Winiarski didn't get yanked after a couple tough outings here and there (that being: Brian O'Connor doesn't have a knee-jerk reaction to things) Roberts will almost certainly start next Sunday as well, and Cody will be the weekday guy for now.  Both will be absolutely critical come the postseason.

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Newsy bits:

- Ausar Walcott is back on the football team, about a week after his charges were dropped.  Because I trust London on matters of discipline, it seems to be a good indication that Walcott in fact was less involved than his teammates in the Great Harrisonburg Party Invasion.  But he's now buried at defensive end.  I don't even want to guess at why, but playing time there is in far shorter supply than it is at linebacker.  The defense is still very much a work in progress and keeping track of the shuffles is sufficient to drive a man crazy, so I'm not going to read much past that into the move for now.

- Speaking of legal matters, the George Huguely murder trial will begin next February.  Surprised at the length of time?  Don't be.  It is the way of the court system.

- When Mike Tobey committed to UVA in January, I thought he looked like a player who'd start attracting a lot more attention as time went on.  Remember, he was supposed to reclassify to 2013 and then changed his mind, and I really think Tony Bennett is a big part of the reason why he changed his mind.  Bennett didn't want another two years to go by for people to get a look at what Tobey could do.  This is why.  Besides Tobey, the other interesting name on that list is 2013 recruit Anthony Barber, who UVA is recruiting pretty hard.  Remember that name because he's a possible answer to the point guard question.  I want him at UVA just because his nickname is Big Cat, which is the kind of old-old-school Harlem Globetrotter nickname they don't even make any more.

- Speaking of bright futures in basketball, Joe Lunardi's way too early bracketology for 2012 has UVA sliding into the ill-conceived at-large play-in round.  (Look, I don't care what the NCAA calls those Dayton games: UAB and USC didn't actually make the tourney this year.)  Lunardi's probably about right in what our expectations should be for the season.  The ACC will be much better, especially if Jordan Williams and Reggie Jackson and Harrison Barnes and whoever else stay in college, and our highly-improved team might not beat it's 7-9 mark from this season but 7-9 will look a hell of a lot better.  Especially if having Mike Scott back with all these freshmen turned sophomores and a functional Assane Sene and a redshirted James Johnson and everything else means we don't screw the pooch against the Seattles and Iowa States of the world.

- Lastly, you remember how there used to be highlight videos around these parts?  There haven't been this year because of a change in my living, and therefore TV, status.  But I think I've got that covered now.  The solution to AT&T's fascist unwillingness to let you download your recordings from DVR to computer arrived on a big brown truck today.  It's hopefully only a matter of time before videos are firing again.

weekend review

Thank everything for Steele Stanwick and a slippery Klockner field, or this wouldn't be a very fun weekend review in the lacrosse section. The good news in that department: An 11-10 win in which UVA significantly outplayed UNC for long stretches. The bad: Dipshit brainfarts that put the game severely in jeopardy.

Nobody was immune. Adam Ghitelman's decision to heave the ball upfield with six seconds on the clock in the third quarter led to one Carolina goal four seconds later. Rhamel Bratton tried the slick, low-percentage pass toward the net (and copious defenders) when all that was required was to run around the field for three minutes. Chris LaPierre froze in the face of a double team, which naturally dislodged the ball a split second later. All of these led to goals and heightened blood pressure.

The other thing that kept leading to goals was the defense's decision to defend everyone but the ballcarrier in transition. This is probably brain-damaged coaching rather than brain-damaged playing. Yes, I get that we don't want the ball to be passed to one of UNC's actual stars, but once the guy with the ball gets within eight yards, does it matter if it's Billy Bitter or Billy the Clown? They're going to score from that range, and it's not helpful to let them get there.

That said, transition defense was a major struggle but settled defense, amazingly, was not. My first thought was that the defense had improved just enough to allow Ghitelman to make the saves and look like the goalie he really can be. Later I realized that was wrong: the defense improved a ton. It turned Carolina's offense into our own offense at its most frustrating: ball gets passed around the perimeter until it's turned over or shot harmlessly into the goalie's stick. Credit the switch to the zone, a timely adjustment that was probably forced upon the coaches as much as anything by Matt Lovejoy's season-ending (OH GREAT) surgery. UNC clearly didn't expect that.

Overall a pleasant surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise at all (a reminder that this can still be a dominant team, even against quality opponents, when it wants to be) pockmarked by some monumental insanity. Encouraging; dumb mistakes are more easily fixed than the entire system.

It sets up the Duke game next week for an interesting scenario: because of how the tiebreakers work, UVA is either going to be the #1 seed or the #4 seed in the ACC tournament. Not that it ever matters, but that's the way it breaks this year.

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Just to get this part out of the way: the baseball team lost a game. OH NO. We being UVA fans, no doubt by now the meltdown is well underway. (checking to see.) (not finding anything.) (doublechecking.) (still no.) Huh, OK, so, baseball fans are a patient bunch, or more patient than basketball fans anyway. It helps that that was only the third loss in 34 games and that a series win on the road against a top-ten team that's probably second-best in the conference is a good thing, not a bad thing. And you'd expect this patience from a group of people who enjoy a game in which they have to sometimes wait for the pitcher to get done scratching his ass and horking loogies on the ball ground before he decides he's ready to deliver again. Gives us time to get another beer.

Anyway, even then it's not entirely rainbows. All three losses have been on Sundays, which means Sunday starter Cody Winiarski is in for some scrutiny, especially after a game that saw his ERA jump up nine-tenths of a point. Every time he struggles and every gem that Will Roberts pitches on Tuesdays increases the call for Roberts to be moved to the weekend rotation. Never mind that Winiarski completely shut down both Poly and Maryland; a bad outing against the team with the seventh-best batting average and ninth-best slugging percentage in the country is enough to bring the doubters out of the woodwork. Explaining to people that George Washington bats .254 as a team and is 245th in the country and Georgia Tech bats .330 and is seventh never seems to have any effect; there's still a crowd that wants to see Roberts "get his chance," as if pitching on Tuesdays isn't a chance and as if that means he'll be forgotten about come the postseason and further as if he and Cody and the rest of the pitching staff hadn't been pitching side by side all offseason under the scrutiny of the coaches. RRGGH. Roberts is pitching wonderfully but Winiarski isn't pitching badly.

Anyway. Georgia Tech. Killed 'em. Danny Hultzen was lights the hell out again, allowing one earned run and one walk and striking out 12 on Friday. The bats came alive late, and Danny had his 7th win of the season. The lineup continued to hammer GT pitching for the rest of the weekend, earning a 12-9 win on Saturday and taking a 10-8 loss on Sunday. Even with the loss and a few extra runs for GT hitting, you are directed to be ecstatic about this: GT's starters are not chumps - they are the opposite of chumps - and our bats chased Mark Pope from what had been a pitchers' duel til the 7th, beat Jed Bradley into submission, and rained hits on Buck Farmer, too.

So: 31-3. Two one-run losses and a two-run loss, up against more than a five-run average margin in our wins. This team has never been out of a game. They're loose, enjoying themselves. They've got that swagger, without swaggering. The last time we saw a UVA team rolling like this was probably during the soccer team's run to the national title (not to put any pressure on.) But soccer is the kind of game where any old fluke at any time can explode all your work up to that point. Baseball can be fluky too but you know you're gonna get your nine hacks, every time, and there's something reassuring about that. There's also something reassuring about Danny Hultzen being on your team. Don't forget that.

series preview: Virginia Tech

Date/Time: April 1-3; 5:30/2:30/1:30

TV: none

History against the Hokies: 84-75

Last matchup: UVA 2-1 series win (4-2, 8-2, 5-8); 4/16-4/18/10; Charlottesville

Last game: UVA 2, GWU 0 (3/29); Radford 7, VT 5 (3/29)

Last weekend: UVA 3-0 over Md.; BC 2-1 over VT

National rankings:

Baseball America: UVA #2; VT unranked
Collegiate Baseball: UVA #1; VT unranked
NCBWA: UVA #2; VT unranked
Perfect Game: UVA #2; VT unranked
Coaches: UVA #1; VT unranked
Composite: UVA #2; VT unranked

Opposing blogs: Gobbler Country

File in the "back to normal" department. After being lauded as a "national power" last season by their mouthpiece in Roanoke, Tech is back to strugglesville in baseball and the Roanoke Times, like Hokie fans the world over, once again disregards college baseball as a sport. (Hey, at least the infamous GWU writeup acknowledged Will Roberts's perfect game. No such luck from the Hokie Times.)

The reason is the massive wave of graduation Tech suffered this year. But some talent remains, and truth be told the Hokies are more dangerous than their 1-8 ACC record and split four-game series with Bryant might indicate. As with most teams, the big advantage we'll have over Tech is in the rotation. Tech will probably go with Joe Mantiply on Friday; he's never been a good pitcher but he's been their Friday starter all season, probably as a sacrificial lamb to the other team's ace. Tech will hope for a bad outing from Danny Hultzen (good luck with that) but otherwise punt to Saturday and Sunday. Marc Zecchino and Joe Parsons will pitch those two against Tyler Wilson and Cody Winiarski, and UVA should hold the advantage in both. Zecchino is probably Tech's best, striking out 42 this season. Parsons has a better ERA but worse peripherals, and Cody's decent-but-pedestrian 3.51 ERA masks a .212 opponents' BA and excellent K/BB ratio.

The Hokie lineup is interesting. The first six hitters are worrisome. Mostly that's the holdovers from last year like Michael Seaborn and Tim Smalling. (Those two are good hitters but butchers in the field. That's the middle infield. They each average an error every four games or so, so expect at some point to see a fielding mishap. UVA hitters should be looking to drive the ball up the middle.) Part of the reason VT's dropoff in the standings isn't hella worse than it already is, is the emergence of Andrew Rash, who came on strong last year and clearly Tech's best hitter now. Eight home runs; a helluva number for this early in the season with these new bats. Tech has hit 29 all season, good enough for sixth nationally, so they can rake at times.

Still, that's two-thirds of the lineup. Tech is still trying to figure out what to do with the other three spots. Chad Morgan hits for average ok but never walks and strikes out too much for a guy with his lack of power. Everyone else hits worse than .220. The UVA lineup doesn't have anywhere near the slugging that Tech does, nor the top-end hitting overall, but it's more consistent 1 through 9. The other thing Tech doesn't have is lefties. Two regular left-handed hitters and no switch-hitters; and other than Mantiply the chances of ever seeing a lefty on the mound are slim. Whenever you do, start salivating 'cause none of 'em are any good.

So Tech has a decent lineup, but it's still a sweep-or-die series. Partly because it's Tech and you know you've missed hearing the VT battle cry: "nobody cares about that sport." But partly because, again, you don't want to run the risk that the other good teams will too. UNC already did, for example. It's a dangerous series because like with Maryland, you really do want the sweep, but unlike with Maryland, Tech actually has the capacity to take two of three. I look for a similar series as last week: a large margin of victory on Friday and then two close ones over the weekend.

Other series this weekend:

Miami @ Boston College - People were expecting a closer series between Miami and GT but Miami doesn't have the bats. This is more their speed, but BC could surprise with a series win. Good chance for BC to solidify their chances for a spot in the ACCT.
Clemson @ North Carolina - Series of the weekend. Clemson's been on shaky ground but this is a great chance for a statement series against a UNC team that I think is slightly overrated.
Georgia Tech @ Duke - Probably a GT sweep.
Florida State @ Maryland - Same for FSU.
Wake Forest @ NC State - Two bottom-feeders jockey for position. Loser has a very tough road to ACCT eligibility.

series preview: Florida State

Date/Time: March 18-20; 6:00, 1:00, 1:00

TV: none

History against the Noles: 13-42

Last matchup: UVA series win, 2-1 (5-0, 9-8, 8-9); 3/12-3/14, 2010; Tallahassee

Last game: UVA 7, JMU 3 (3/16); UF 5, FSU 4 (3/15)

Last weekend: UVA 3-0 over Clemson; FSU 3-0 over BC

National rankings:

Baseball America: UVA #7; FSU #6
Collegiate Baseball: UVA #6; FSU #4
NCBWA: UVA #5; FSU #4
Perfect Game: UVA #4; FSU #3
Coaches: UVA #5; FSU #4

Opposing blogs: Tomahawk Nation, Scalp 'Em

Thanks to scheduling gurus who I'm sure are very smart people, the two ACC divisional favorites will play each other in March. You'd think it would make a lot better TV if this was in, say, early May, but that's OK, it's not on TV. I'm sorry for getting sarcasm all over your keyboard.

Anyway, no matter who you ask, it's a top-ten matchup, and to most, it's a top five. Even with Florida visiting LSU, it's the only series this weekend with two top-five teams, and with FSU's ace Sean Gilmartin going against super-ace Danny Hultzen on Friday, you can totally see why the ACC wouldn't think it's worth it to find a way to get this on TV.

Florida State is one of the country's top teams partly because they're Florida State. They're hard to figure, though. They swept Boston College - one of the conference's bottom-dwellers - but had a hard time with it. Then they took Florida to extra innings. The big matchup, of course, is Hultzen vs. Gilmartin. Gilmartin's stats are outstanding, but nothing like Hultzen's. The series could well hinge on Friday's game.

On Saturday, we'll send out Tyler Wilson against the underachieving Brian Busch. Busch was a better pitcher last year, but even if he returns to last year's form on Saturday, Wilson is the better hurler. This year, opposing hitters are batting .343 against, Busch, so Saturday's game is the likeliest for a UVA win. Sunday, Cody Winiarski goes against the semi-surprising Scott Sitz.

FSU's bats, frankly, are better than ours at this point, but not overwhelmingly so. Hultzen vs. Gilmartin is the exciting pitching matchup, but our pitching vs. their hitting is really what will decide the series. FSU's pitching is good, but not so incredible that the UVA batters won't be able to push runs across the plate relatively consistently.

I like how this sets up. As long as Danny Hultzen is in our corner it's nigh-impossible to conceive of losing a game that he starts. Saturday looks good too. When it comes to Sunday, the game should either be a rubber match or with a UVA sweep on the line, because of all possible outcomes, losing on both Friday and Saturday seems the least likely. It's the home conference opener and the team should be fired up for it. FSU is ranked higher no matter where you look, but after this weekend, I think that changes.

baseball preview, part 1

In case you haven't noticed - understandable if for some reason this is your only lifeline to UVA sports - there's once again a pretty good baseball team playing at Davenport Field this year. Pitching is by far its strong suit, which will take you a long way, for sure. The team is 12-1 with the lone loss coming in a 2-1 series win against East Carolina. They're ranked as high as 6th and as low as 11th (college baseball has tons of polls) by virtue of three weeks' worth of strong showings, including a total dismantling of SEC semi-power Auburn.

All this without hitting a single home run.

It's a slightly new era in college baseball; metal bats continue to be used, but they're deader than they used to be. This probably bodes well for UVA, at least this year; Brian O'Connor has eschewed power hitting in his recruiting in favor of pitching pitching pitching and guys who can hit for really high averages. Making it harder to hit home runs gives UVA a little bit of an edge since that's not what the offense depends on.

Today we'll have a look at the pitching, and later this week, the position players.

Starters

Unlike last year when the Sunday starter was up for grabs a little bit at the beginning of the year, this year the weekend starters are engraved in marble. They are:

- Friday - Danny Hultzen. Hultzen is the guy Charlie Sheen wishes he was. Sheen was misquoted in his rantings; what he meant to say was, he has tiger blood and Hultzen DNA. Hultzen has a real chance to win every variation of national player of the year award there is, and will certainly be drafted with one of the top ten - maybe top five - picks in the MLB draft ths June. Even though he's leading the team in OPS and batting average and is second in RBI, his hitting duties will probably lighten up a little as the stretch run gets hot. Hultzen's pitching is what makes him valuable - he carries an 0.87 ERA so far and has struck out 36 in just over 20 innings. Yes. Almost two strikeouts per inning.

He did walk a batter once this season, though. So he has been known to throw the occasional pitch out of the strike zone. Still - it's not likely UVA will lose any of his starts this year, until maybe the postseason. To make matters worse for opposing lineups, Hultzen is a southpaw.

- Saturday - Tyler Wilson. Wilson has made a smooth transition from long relief. His 23-to-5 K/BB ratio would look pretty awesome if not for Hultzen's 36-to-1. Aw hell....it's still pretty awesome. Wilson's move out of the pen has created a few question marks in long relief, but so far the team has been able to handle it.

- Sunday - Cody Winiarski. A little bit of a soft-tosser, the start to this season has been tremendously encouraging as Winiarski has been striking out more hitters than last year. He and Wilson have started the year with ERAs under 2, and they share a .206 opponents' BA. A tough, four-run first inning against ECU was enough to tag Cody with the only loss of the season, but outside of that one inning he hasn't allowed a single run, and he's averaged 6+ innings in his three starts. Winiarski's hot start is the most encouraging sign of the whole season; if this kind of pitching holds up, UVA will have easily the best weekend rotation in the ACC.

- Weekdays - Will Roberts and Kyle Crockett. Crockett was probably the most-hyped recruit of the freshman class that actually made it to the season (Justin Nicolino signed with the Blue Jays and Tyler Skulina transferred before the season began.) Crockett won a few awards and such as a high school pitcher and had the added advantage of being from Virginia. UVA fans love a Virginian. But Crockett will spend most of his time in the bullpen and probably only get starts when the weekday schedule includes two games, such as in a couple weeks against Towson. Roberts is the main weekday starter. A junior, Roberts hasn't quite been able to pitch his way into the weekend rotation, but will probably be needed there next year. He's good enough for some emergency innings against ACC competition, if needed, and should be able to rack up the wins one by one pitching against the JMUs and Towsons of the world.

Bullpen

This looked like a question mark before the year began, with Wilson moving to the rotation, but events since then have solidified the outlook. The pen got hit by graduation - especially at closer where Kevin Arico was unbelievably dependable in 2010.

The new closer is sophomore Branden Kline, who had an excellent freshman season, especially late as the fourth starter in tournament play. Kline has yet to allow a run and has five saves already. There will be no problems here.

Whit Mayberry had a tough start to the season, but he's settled down nicely. Mayberry has starter's endurance and will probably be the primary long reliever this year. Kyle Crockett is the first lefty out of the pen and he's pitching well, too. Left-handed pitching out of the pen is much more readily available than it's been in the past - Crockett can provide a couple innings, if needed, and then there's Scott Silverstein. Silverstein's history of arm trouble is longer than O.J.'s rap sheet; multiple shoulder surgeries have kept him off the mound until this year. He made his first pitching appearance for UVA a little over a week ago. He's not gonna be rushed back, but he gives us a situational lefty.

Justin Thompson is another guy we'll see plenty of, though he's more likely to be primarily a weekday reliever. And the freshman class brought a lot of arms that we've already seen a little of and will get a few innings here and there - guys like Ryan Ashooh and Austin Young.

No doubt, pitching is where this team will draw its success from. As you'll see a little later, the batting lineup isn't quite the murderers' row it's been in the past, but given the choice between OK hitting and awesome pitching, or the opposite, I'll take the awesome pitching every time. The new bats should help this staff - not that they need much help - to keep their numbers down. Except for their strikeouts. Strikeouts will be up; Danny Hultzen is rapidly climbing the all-time list at UVA. I'm very confident in calling this the best rotation in the ACC, and if the bullpen continues to pitch the way they started the season, they'll be able to claim the same crown.

weekend review

So it's back to the grind. Losing by 19 to Boston College, if nothing else, serves to remind us of the cavernous talent (and more importantly, experience) chasm separating this basketball team from the rest of the ACC. Various game reports opened by wondering what to point to in order to explain the blowout - or more specifically, the total lack of ability to play either offense or defense in the second half. The answer is simple: the implicit conclusion from last week's column that this team has been playing way over their heads. At some point that has to be expected to catch up to you.

You are now forbidden, for your own health, from uttering the word "NIT." I suppose it doesn't especially matter what happens for the rest of the season, but since Tony Bennett is still Tony Bennett it's not like the team is going to agree with that. Worse teams than this one have made the CBI, and even if that's the only tournament we get invited to we should accept. It's probably a money-loser, but this is the most profitable athletic department in the conference and what good is making all that money if you don't spend it on something like that? This team needs to cram as much basketball into its gullet as possible. And even if the only thing we have to look forward to this year is three more losses to end the season, we'll always have Paris, where "Paris" is code for "sweeping the Hokies right the hell out of the arena."

Speaking of the Hokies: Fuck you, Duke. Seriously. You run roughshod over the entire conference for three decades and then the one time I want you to actually take care of business and crush someone, you choke like Monica on the President's cigar. I hope when Coach K retires you hire Matt Doherty.

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OK, now that the profanity is out of the way let's talk about things that make us happy, like lacrosse and baseball.

I don't know whether to worry or not about the start of the lacrosse season. Yes, 3-0 is a good thing, and Drexel is no slouch of a team and Stony Brook is potential final four material, so beating them is great. Beating them without the suspended Bratton twins is pretty incredible.

That said, why the rash of suspensions? First Ghitelman and now both Rhamel and Shamel, and both for games of importance. Let's hope this is Starsia's way of reacting to the problems of last year and clamping down on stuff that he wasn't clamping down on before. And let's hope the team gets the message.

Discipline problems aside, this why there's such a thing as Steele Stanwick. Five goals against Stony Brook, including the OT game-winner, should tell you who the team sees as their go-to guy, especially when last year's second-line midfield of Haldy, Briggs, and Emery is suddenly the first-line midfield. The Brattons got the preseason hype and they'll be creating all the highlight goals, but Stanwick might well be the irreplaceable one.

The Stone-Age lack of TV means I'm still at a loss for individual observations, and tonight's VMI game won't add anything to what we know. Fortunately, it's Syracuse on Friday.

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I might be waffling on the lacrosse team, but not the baseball team. Despite losing on Sunday and allowing East Carolina to avoid the sweep, the start to the season has been fantastic. Danny Hultzen, of course, sparkles as the Friday starter. Fifteen strikeouts and top-notch work with the bat earned him National Player of the Week honors from Collegiate Baseball. (Seriously, read that article. Hultzen's pitching on Friday was as dominant as you can get short of throwing a perfect game.) Hultzen's dominance is to be marveled at, and should result in all kinds of recognition, gaudy numbers, and Friday evening victories as the season goes on.

But we've kind of been counting on that. The same for Tyler Wilson's excellent job on Saturdays. Wilson's an excellent pitcher too, and we knew that. Even though Cody Winiarski took the Sunday loss with one bad inning, I'm more encouraged by his play than by that of anyone else so far this season. Winiarski has struck out six in each of his two starts, almost doubling his K rate from last season. A weekend rotation without a hole in it means lofty ACC expectations; this is probably the top rotation in the conference and should result in a solid 20 conference wins and maybe then some. This is an awesome development. This is how you live up to people calling you "one bad machine."

I was going to get moving with a full-out preview of the season this week, but actually it'll probably have to wait til next week when the basketball regular season is done.

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And now, the rest of the story:

- Ralph Sampson, Hall-of-Famer. My initial reaction was this would've happened fifteen years ago if Sampson were a Dookie. Instead he played for lowly - which wasn't at all lowly at the time - Virginia. After all, Sampson is a member of a three-time-NPOY club that includes just two other players - Oscar Robertson and Bill Walton. Screw the man, man. Then I remembered that the NCBHOF is only like four or five years old, and Sampson wouldn't have been part of the (absolutely enormous) founding class because he's not in the big HOF on account of a mediocre NBA career. Still, how does Ralph Sampson, Three-Time-National-Player-Of-The-Effing-Year Ralph Sampson, have to wait behind Christian Laettner for his turn? Oh, right: Duke, and Not Duke.

Anyway, justice is done. The fact that a College Basketball Hall of Fame could exist as an institution with a building and everything and not have Ralph Sampson inside it was silly. Now it's not.

- Swimmers rock. The men's team, as predicted, made it two-for-two at the ACC Swimming & Diving championships. The meet, as not predicted, wasn't even close. 232 points separated UVA and 2nd-place UNC, which is more points than four of the competing teams achieved at all.

The meet's MVP was distance swimmer Matt McLean for the third time in four years. Other event winners: sprinter Scot Robison and butterflyer Peter Geissinger. The tone of the meet was pretty well set in the first individual event - the 500-yard freestyle - where Virginia swimmers took 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 8th. For those keeping score at home, the meet's over so you can put your pencils away, but that's still 92 of the event total 155 points. In one event UVA scored more than Boston College or Miami combined.

Nationals are next, where hopefully top-10 finishes await both the men and women.

- Can't let this go without a recruiting board update. But first, something even better. A map. I put together a Google Map of the recruiting board. It's color-coded and everything, although the red is kinda pink. And the orange looks red if you don't have the pink near it to compare it to. Blame Google's pastel coloring. Anyway, the link will have a permanent home on the recruiting board page so you can check it out whenever.

Now, the update:

- Added RB Kye Morgan and WR Drakar Harvell to yellow. Both might be green, but for a couple mitigating factors: Morgan lives almost literally in the shadow of Rutgers The SUNJ, and Harvell needs an offer. Harvell will eventually get one, I think, at which time he'll be instabumped to green or blue.

- Moved DT Korren Kirven from yellow to red.

- Moved ATH Cyrus Jones from red to yellow. Jones hails from Gilman - Darius Jennings's alma mater.

Full schedule this week (that's code for "I don't have to pull anything from my ass this week"): I'll preview the NC State game, and lacrosse's Syracuse game. I don't know if I'll preview the Maryland game, as we're destined to be killed by a team we match up with exceedingly poorly. As much as I enjoy this very likable version of our basketball team, I am really looking forward to spring sports.

sweeps weekend

It must be spring when UVA fans get a whole weekend full of good news. Never happens otherwise. Hardly a Wahoo took the court, or field, or starting block, without leaving victoriously. Best of all: completing the hardcourt sweep of Virginia Tech in front of a sold-out JPJ Arena.

Did I say sweep? I said sweep. Of Tech. Barring a semi-miraculous run to the NIT (which would likely require winning the next three games in a row) or a thoroughly miraculous tournament run to the ACC championship, that's probably the highlight of the season. It's not a minor deal; regaining our identity as Virginia Basketball requires, among other things, putting Tech back in their place. In the future this needs to be the norm.

I must be the only person who cares enough to write about this stuff to have seen this coming, though. The rest of the media - and certainly just about every Hokie in existence - is all surprised and shit. The excuses are flying. I'm not surprised, because I told you before the game: UVA matches up very well with Tech. We're bigger. We're either deeper, or Seth Greenberg is insane for never playing anyone but his starters. We're smarter. With Mike Scott out, Tech does have the two and maybe three best players on the court (Malcolm Delaney, Jeff Allen, and maybe Erick Green) but otherwise, the point is this: Basketball is a game of matchups, and that can sometimes overcome a sizable talent deficit. And you won't find many other ACC teams that UVA is as well-equipped to beat as Tech. The reason for the sweep doesn't go much beyond that, and to whatever extent it does, it sure as hell wasn't fatigue on Tech's part, as has been suggested. Anyone who thinks that ought to be embarrassed.

Another thing that's been made a big deal of, and shouldn't be, is that UVA outrebounded Tech. By one, but that's not the reason it shouldn't be a big deal. It's true that we usually get outrebounded, because somebody will launch a three and most of the team will be on the other side of halfcourt by the time it hits the rim. That's Tony Bennett's way. On the defensive end, though, guess who the best rebounding team in the conference is? If you guessed "not Virginia," you're wrong, and you're making the same mistake everyone else does, by using raw, non-tempo-adjusted rebounding averages. The fact is, UVA has the best defensive rebounding percentage in the ACC, and 36th best in the country. File under "another reason I'm not surprised we won."

So yes, Akil Mitchell had a nice game with seven rebounds, but I'll wait to throw his debutante party til he double-doubles one of these days. Stats-wise the player of the game really is Sammy Z, who should never be allowed to shoot until thirty seconds of the shot clock have elapsed, but if you want to make a case for "blossoming potential" from that game, Assane Sene and Jontel Evans are your guys. Jontel actually can shoot, and when he realizes it he'll be that much better. Sene can score when he catches the ball. We just have to figure out how to optimize the transition from someone else's hands to his, and we're set.

The future holds three winnable games, and I'd allow you to get excited about the possibility of winning them all except the moment I do, we'll lose by 30 in Atlanta. So as far as the fates are concerned, it's one-game-at-a-time mode from here on out. Just to be on the safe side, try and give 110% too. It is what it is.

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Sweeps weekend continued in Auburn, where Danny Hultzen, in between striking out 10 UAB Blazers and driving in seven runs for the weekend, also took a leak on Toomer's Corner and healed the trees. Chuck Norris has nothing on Danny. The opponents for the weekend were UAB, Auburn, and Arkansas State, in that order; UAB and ASU are fringe top-100 types in the RPI, while Auburn isn't SEC royalty like LSU but is a borderline top-25 team. Tyler Wilson shut down their powerful lineup, and UVA nickel-and-dimed their way around the basepaths for 13 runs against Auburn and 27 on the weekend in sweeping the tournament.

It's certainly refreshing to see that Hultzen is in his usual form. Enjoy it; the man will be a first-rounder this year. It's even better to see Tyler Wilson pitch six innings of shutdown baseball as the new Saturday starter, and Cody Winiarski did the same on Sunday. It makes me giddy. Winiarski, even at his best last season (and he certainly got better as the year went on) was never a strikeout pitcher, barely averaging one every two innings. He posted six on Sunday in six innings of work. Branden Kline also proved worthy of the closer role, slamming the door on a UAB rally on Friday. Six pitches, six strikes, and a one-out situation became Kline's first save of the year.

The wins bump UVA a few spots in most of the polls. East Carolina comes to town next weekend, with a home game against VMI in between. The ECU series won't have the same stature it did last year when ECU was considered the up-and-comer on the baseball scene, and a sweep there would open up the possibility of being undefeated heading into the ACC season in about three weeks.

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The lax team started its season with its usual solid, if slightly uninspiring, win over Drexel. Drexel's a half-decent team, so the margin of victory - 12-9 - is no cause for worry. As per usual, though, the game offered some reasons for optimism and some for worry. UVA won the faceoff battle, which they did not last year, and maintained its usual dominance in clearing the ball, successfully clearing all but one opportunity. This was without Adam Ghitelman (who is one of the nation's top goalies at starting a clear) in net, who didn't dress because of a mystery suspension. Rob Fortunato played, and played reasonably well.

On the other hand, ground balls, normally an area of UVA dominance, tilted only slightly in UVA's favor, at 46-43. (That's a lot of ground balls to begin with.) Nothing's perfect, though.

Ghitelman will hopefully be back in net tomorrow against Mount St. Mary's; it'd certainly be ideal to have him see game action before Saturday's dangerous matchup against Stony Brook.

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For the fourth straight year, the women's swim and dive team is ACC champions, and for the second straight year, it's sprinter Lauren Perdue taking home the honors as the meet's most outstanding swimmer. Perdue sets records like it's her job, but freshman butterflier Rachel Naurath gave her a run for her money for the top-swimmer title. This was, as suggested by the psych sheet scoring, a close meet - our girls were behind UNC by 37 points (not quite a virtual dead heat but close) going into the final day, and the meet was in doubt until the 200 yard butterfly - the second-to-last event. UVA swimmers went 1-2-3-5, seizing the lead and putting UNC far enough behind that they could afford a safe-start relay in the final event; they went ahead and won the relay regardless. You have to love the championship attitude Mark Bernardino has instilled into his swim teams, as well as the talent he's brought to UVA.

This week, it's the men's turn. Psych sheet scoring, with all the caveats of last week's exercise, is as follows:

UVA - 844
UNC - 764
FSU - 500
VT - 314
NCSt. - 190
Clem. - 186
Md. - 177
Duke - 160
GT - 150
BC - 70

Wake Forest doesn't have any swim teams, and Miami doesn't have a men's one.

This is eerily similar to the women's results, no? UVA and UNC will duke it out for the title, and it'll definitely be close. We are nasty strong in distance events - all strokes - and a little thin on sprinters - all strokes. FSU is a factor, but probably not a threat for the title, VT is a comfortable fourth, and the peasants will have themselves a really stirring chase to line up fifth through ninth. (Except BC - as with the women's events, the only points they'll garner will come from placing last in every relay.)

This is even closer than it looks thanks to the general lack of points we'll get from diving. The women didn't get any - the men might scrape a couple but we'll take a bath here. Figuratively. Frankly, this meet should be considered just about neck and neck, just like the women.

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Speaking of four straight championships, and national-wise this time, it's the men's tennis team's turn for championship glory. This is indoor tennis, so before you get too excited - it still doesn't count in the NCAA tally. Not once in this run has UVA managed to win an outdoor tennis title. Why so different? Beats me. They'll have another shot this spring. This championship was a 4-0 win over Tennessee - yup, another sweep - and that's the kind of dominating fashion they've been using this winter, so with any luck this is a stronger team than years past and they can finally bring home an NCAA title in a couple months.

That finishes the good news weekend. Hope it wasn't too much all at once. They say starving people shouldn't pig out the moment they see food, it's not healthy. Unfortunately for your health, there's a recruiting board update in the hopper for tomorrow and you'll probably like what you see there, too.

regional of near-doom review

I tell you what - it's probably actually more nerve-racking to watch baseball games unfold on Gametracker than it is watching them on TV. Cause you never know when the next pitch is gonna happen. Might be now, or it might be three minutes from now and then it's gonna give you four quick ones in a row. And sometimes the damn thing ain't even right. This baseball version seems to be OK enough, but I still have very annoying memories of the time the Yahoo gametracker thing told me we'd hit a game-winning three-pointer against VT only to find out a few minutes later it was a game-tying bucket, and yes, we lost big in OT.

Anyway, Gametracker it was for me this weekend, for two games that were pretty much blowouts and two games that were way closer than they should have been. So here's what happened over the weekend:

Friday: UVA 15, VCU 4

Cody Winiarski gets the start for the Hoos and is quickly staked to a 7-1 lead at the expense of VCU's not-so-scary-after-all ace, Seth Cutler-Voltz. Winiarski doesn't last as long as we'd ideally like, frittering away half that lead in the fourth inning and forcing Brian O'Connor to bring in shutdown long reliever Tyler Wilson. Wilson puts an end to any more VCU thoughts of ever again arriving safely at second base, let alone scoring; he breezes through three full innings, by which time the lead is large enough that backup infielder and sometimes-pitcher Corey Hunt - he of the ten IP all year - is brought in to finish the last two, which he does as the UVA bats continue to give the scoreboard operator something to do. All nine UVA starters get at least one hit, and the 5/6/7 hitters (Parker, Hicks, and Cannon) combine for nine hits, nine runs, and eight RBI.

Saturday: UVA 13, Ole Miss 7

The Hoos jump on Ole Miss starter Aaron Barrett for 7 runs, leading Rebs fans to lament that if their second starter can't last three innings, they're really screwed going forward. (They were right: in the next game, Ole Miss starter David Goforth failed to get out of the first inning enroute to giving up eight of St. John's 20 runs.) Danny Hultzen fails to be Hultzen-esque, giving up six runs in six innings. He gets the win anyway, and Branden Kline slams the door after making an oops pitch on a full count to the first batter. For the second game in a row, every UVA starting hitter collects a hit. Most collect two. John Barr collects four in four at bats and somehow manages to never score.

Sunday: St. John's 6, UVA 5

Well damn. UVA had just racked up 28 runs in 2 games and was facing a pitcher with an ERA north of 6; this was supposed to be the crowning slaughter. Instead we get a game that wasn't really as close as it looked. Other than a five-run fourth, UVA's bats were held mostly silent, and Robert Morey immediately gave back two of them in the bottom half of the inning. Despite this, UVA clung to a 5-4 lead through three and a half more innings, until St. John's slugger extraordinaire (who is a FRESHMAN and has TWENTY-FOUR HOME RUNS) delivered his second souvenir of the day into the outfield bleachers. Or maybe beyond. That was the margin of victory, and of course it came with two outs.

Monday: UVA 5, St. John's 3

Since we couldn't seem to figure out how to hit the ball past the outfielders, O'Connor resorted to some small ball. Sacrifices, double steals, and the ever-popular UVA classic, grounding into inning-ending double plays with the bases loaded, resulted in getting runs one at a time. Better than barely getting them at all, though. Branden Kline pitched 5 1/3 excellent innings and Kevin Arico had his longest outing of the year. Why longest? Because Brian O'Connor is a smart baseball man, not a dummy. UVA was sitting on a 4-1 lead in the top of the 6th; unfortunately, the bases were loaded and St. John's had Baltzey at the bat. You do not keep your closer around for the 9th inning if the game is about ready to be lost in the 6th. O'Connor brought in Arico to face Baltz, and Baltz grounded weakly to second; too weakly, as the Hoos didn't manage to get the double play and a run scored anyway. UVA escaped the inning with a 4-3 lead, which would prove to be enough as Arico has balls the size of coconuts.

Outlook:

- Should you be worried about the bats? No, not really. Most of the time, the hits were there when we needed them. Oklahoma's starting pitching is a little bit meh for a one-seed, so we'll get our offense.

- Should you be worried about Danny Hultzen? Absolutely. An ERA that's ballooned about a full point in the last month or so is cause for concern, and his last few outings haven't been great. You live and die with your ace, so he'll be out there for Game 1 on Saturday; let's hope he's good for six or seven strong ones.

- St. John's is going to be a very, very good team next year.

- Again: Props to O'Connor for bringing in the fireman when it mattered. The game was won right there in the sixth-inning with the go-ahead run at the plate and 24 home runs under his belt. It may seem like the no-brainer, but with the bats steadily going cold, it's too risky to bring in anyone but your best; nevertheless, some managers -big-league ones, too - will insist on the notion that if you have a closer, he's a 9th-inning guy only. No, you bring him in when you need the big guns, and if that's as early as the 6th, so be it.

- More on Oklahoma on Friday. For now, give a shout to your regional champs.

Charlottesville regional preview

No traveling for the Hoos this year, at least not for a couple weeks. The reward for being one of the top 8 teams in the NCAA baseball tournament is to host a four-team regional, and a super-regional if they make it out of the weekend. The only puzzling decision is making UVA the #5 seed instead of the top-3 seed they deserved, but it's been pretty much confirmed that everyone who knows anything about baseball thinks that's retarded. (Ratcliffe at the CDP says we got "the fuzzy end of the lollipop" which sounds like the weirdest G-rated euphemism ever for something very X-rated. Use your imagination.)

That being said, it's not a bad draw. Here's a preview of the three teams coming to Charlottesville this weekend:

Ole Miss

You recognize the name. You won't really recognize the team. Last year's Rebel squad was good enough to be in Omaha had they been maybe a little more fortunate on the draw. That team could hit and had plenty of quality options behind Drew Pomeranz on the mound. This team still has Pomeranz, but the hitting and the pitching isn't nearly up to snuff with last year's team. They ended up with a middling finish in the SEC, the result of a really maddening season in which they would do things like sweep powerhouse LSU but drop a series to doormat Tennessee. You're always in for a fight when you take on an SEC team in the NCAAs, but as #2 seeds go, we could have had a worse draw.

Possible lineup:

CF Tim Ferguson (.301-8-33)
3B Zach Miller (.279-2-46)
RF Matt Smith (.344-12-51)
DH Matt Snyder (.343-10-33)
LF Taylor Hashman (.307-9-40)
2B Alex Yarbrough (.285-3-37)
1B Miles Hamblin (.225-6-39)
SS Kevin Mort (.279-2-22)
C Taylor Hightower (.285-0-17)

Rotation:

RHP Drew Pomeranz (8-2, 2.21)
RHP Aaron Barrett (7-4, 4.16)
RHP David Goforth (1-5, 8.41)
RHP Rory McKean (4-2, 5.65)

Bullpen:

LHP Matt Crouse (5-1, 3.12)
RHP Trent Rothlin (3-4, 4.43)
RHP Eric Callender (4-1, 5.83)
LHP Matt Tracy (4-3, 5.98)
RHP Brett Huber (2-0, 2.54, 12 SV)

Ole Miss against the ACC: no games

The lineup is largely conjecture; as you can see, Ole Miss has struggled to find any consistency from the bottom half. In some cases they have two players to choose from at a certain position: one that can't hit for contact and one that has no power. And of the seven players with .300 or greater batting averages from last year, four are gone and one was Miller, for whom the bottom dropped out this year.

Since Davenport qualifies as a pitcher's park - smaller than Ole Miss's Swayze Field in the alleys and out to center - I think we'll see Ole Miss lean toward contact hitters, so you might also see backup outfielder Tanner Mathis in the lineup against right-handers.

As for the pitchers, there's conflicting information as to who'll get the call on Friday for Ole Miss. Might as well go with the direct quote from Rebels' coach Mike Bianco, who says top-ten-pick-in-waiting Drew Pomeranz will get the start against St. John's. That means the Hoos, if UVA and Ole Miss win, will face Aaron Barrett. And it means Barrett will have to go against Danny Hultzen, as O'Connor has tabbed Cody Winiarski to start on Friday. (The right choice: if we can't beat the #147 team in the country with any of our weekend starters, we'll never get to Omaha anyway.)

After Pomeranz and Barrett, though, the rotation is almost totally worthless. The Rebels missed out on a lot of sweeps - including one against SEC punching bag Georgia - because they have no third starter at all. If the series holds true to seeding form and UVA faces Ole Miss in a championship game on Sunday, the hitters will be absolutely salivating at the prospect of a few at-bats each against a used-up Ole Miss pen. With Pomeranz going on Friday, a UVA-Ole Miss matchup should be in the cards for Saturday, and the Rebels don't have the bats to chase Hultzen nor the arms to win any games after Saturday.

St. John's

Dangerous matchup for Ole Miss here, as the Johnnies can hit and have one quality pitcher. They caught a break on the schedule by not having to play regular-season champ UConn, but nevertheless had to get past the Huskies for the Big East championship, which they did. Ace Kyle Hansen pitched into the 7th inning against UConn after having gone eight full frames just four days earlier.

A lot of the Storm's best players are freshman, including Hansen and masher extraordinaire Jeremy Baltz. Not good for future Big East opponents, but here's hoping experience and guile plus a loud Davenport win out in any potential UVA-SJU matchup.

Possible lineup:

CF Scott Ferrara (.282-1-29)
RF Jimmy Parque (.352-4-44)
SS Joe Panik (.383-8-48)
LF Jeremy Baltz (.393-20-74)
3B Greg Hopkins (.367-6-55)
2B Matt Wessinger (.284-4-43)
1B Paul Karmas (.329-8-52)
DH Sean O'Hare (.352-1-29)
C Joe Witkowski (.217-0-8)

Rotation:

RHP Kyle Hansen (8-1, 3.09)
RHP Bruce Kern (6-5, 5.91)
RHP Nick Cenatiempo (1-1, 6.34)
RHP Matt Carasiti (7-4, 5.88)

Bullpen:

LHP Kevin Kilpatrick (1-1, 3.57)
RHP Stephen Rivera (4-2, 3.65)
RHP Ryan Cole (3-1, 3.96)
LHP Sean Hagan (4-1, 4.74)
RHP Daniel Burawa (1-0, 2.78, 11 SV)

St. John's against the ACC: lost to UNC 8-2, beat Boston College 17-9

Extrapolate Jeremy Baltz's numbers out to a 162-game MLB season and you get 56 HRs and 207 RBIs. Jeesh. 20 and 74 are damn good for major leaguers, never mind someone who's only played 58 games in his entire college career. Do not make a mistake pitching to Baltz.

St. John's plays in a bandbox, however: about 320 down the lines and just 380 to straightaway center. They're going to have an extremely tough road in this regional: first Drew Pomeranz, then likely Danny Hultzen if they get past Pomeranz, all in an unfamiliar pitcher's park.

And after Hansen in the rotation - nothing. They have a good bullpen; important because starting pitchers like Cenatiempo have a nasty habit of giving up a lot of hits and not pitching deep into games. Rivera and Kilpatrick are the long-relief types and they figure to get a lot of work this weekend.

If St. John's is the Saturday opponent, Kern will likely oppose the Hoos. He's a better pitcher than that ERA would indicate; decent strikeout pitcher, but in the end nothing worse than UVA's seen in ACC competition, and no match for Hultzen. This is a rotation even thinner than Ole Miss's, but the bullpen is better. Even so, if St. John's is going to win games this weekend, they'll need to be by scores of 12-8. And if they're going to win the whole regional, they'll have to do as they did in the Big East tournament and pitch Hansen on short rest. If SJU manages to make it to Monday for a winner-take-all game, don't be surprised to see them trot him out there.

VCU

The baseball committee thinks all #4 seeds are equal, and assigns them to regionals by pure geography. Thus, VCU. The Rams have the only .400 hitter in the regional other than Keith Werman, but might also go the entire weekend without hitting a home run. You want a light-hitting team? VCU is it: 33 home runs all year, and 20 of them hit by two players.

Possible lineup:

CF Matt Leskiw (.270-0-14)
2B Richard Gonzalez (.391-0-37)
3B Joe Van Meter (.433-10-72)
1B Brent Mikionis (.332-10-50)
RF John Lenherr (.293-2-35)
SS Nick Kime (.250-0-10)
LF Paul Nice (.278-2-29)
C Taylor Perkins (.306-2-30)
DH Doug Otto (.281-4-33)

Rotation:

RHP Seth Cutler-Voltz (8-3, 3.20)
RHP Kyle Haynes (3-3, 5.40)
LHP Ryan Farrar (4-5, 8.14)
LHP Michael Graham (4-4, 7.36)

Bullpen:

RHP Jonathan Watson (4-2, 2.78)
RHP Kyle Pelchy (2-0, 4.12)
LHP Brennan Huelse (1-1, 3.54)
RHP Robbie Andrews (1-2, 3.18, 9 SV)

VCU against the ACC: lost to Maryland 7-2, lost to UVA 10-5

One month to the day of the regional opener against VCU, UVA was playing a weekday game against these same Rams. The Hoos won 10-5, scoring runs off of every pitcher VCU sent to the mound, and Branden Kline gave up four runs in six innings for the win. VCU actually hit two home runs in that game. I haven't bothered to check if that was their only multi-homer game all year, but it's possible. Get through VCU's 3 and 4 hitters and the ball is not at all likely to leave the yard.

VCU will throw Seth Cutler-Voltz against us, and he's got more than just a cool name going for him. SCV is coming off two complete-game wins in a row, and any hope of an upset lies with his right arm. The thing is, though, Cutler-Voltz has yet to throw against anyone worth talking about, and no, JMU doesn't count. Fellow tournament 4-seed Bethune-Cookman is the only opponent resembling a difficult team on Cutler-Voltz's resume, and they shelled him.

Right-hander Winiarski should match up well against VCU's lineup, which figures to trot out just two lefties and no switch-hitters. VCU's non-home-run-hitting lineup is also a better matchup for Cody than the other lineups in the regional, as he's a soft-tosser and has a much greater tendency than our other pitchers to give up home runs. But the bottom line is this: Cody is a weekend starter, and if we can't beat a four-seed, #147-RPI team with a weekend starter, then Omaha was never going to happen anyway.

Outlook for UVA

Keith Werman and Franco Valdes may not have been everyday starters this year, but chances are we'll never see a southpaw this weekend, so look for both to get plenty of at-bats this weekend. Along with Dan Grovatt and Jarrett Parker, that's a solid number of lefties to send to the plate against all these right-handers we'll see; first Cutler-Voltz, then Kern or Barrett, and then whatever poor schlub and his 6+ ERA has to face this lineup after that.

The biggest game is the second one. It's good to be the king; the 1 seed has the luxury of being able to hold back their ace for Saturday, expecting that it won't take your top pitcher to beat Friday's opponent. A win on Saturday either gives us a one-win (vice three-in-a-row) path to victory, or it (heaven forbid we end up in this situation) staves off elimination, so having Hultzen available for that game is huge. Especially if it's against St. John's and their murderer's row.

This is set up very, very nicely for UVA to win. The difference in pitching staffs is a mile wide. No, I'm not spoiled by looking at our own; there are plenty of teams that didn't make this tournament that have deeper and better pitching staffs than the three that got sent to Charlottesville. Even if we have to play Sunday morning in an elimination game, by that time our opponent will have burned through just about every worthwhile pitcher and we'll have Robert Morey. And if we go 2-0 on Friday and Saturday, it's over; some poor used-up staff is going to have to try and win two in a row against Morey and then (probably) Kline. Ain't happening. If we go 2-0, the third game will be a slaughter.

But to get to 2-0, the bats need to perk up. The Miami game was a great reassurance, because the rest of the ACC tournament and a few of the weekends prior were starting to see things go cold at the plate. Still - this weekend could be just the tonic, especially if we never see Drew Pomeranz.