The selections for this year’s NCAA Tournament are out and unfortunately the Hoos did not make the cut, listed as one of the first four teams out by the committee. This signals an early start to the offseason for UVA, and a couple questions will need to be answered:
What to do with Drew Dickinson.
Our resident pitching coach has been the topic of much discussion over the past two seasons as we’ve seen our production on the mound become shaky at best, with a strong postseason run in 2024 being the main anchor keeping those performances afloat. Dickinson’s overall track record during his five years here looks strong enough on paper with our 2021-2023 seasons being standouts, but there’s been concerns within our fanbase about his in-game pitch sequencing, development of our homegrown players and also worries of overworking our arms leading to an abundance of injuries. If I had to guess I’d say Dickinson likely gets at least another year, partially because I’m just not sure what pitching coach options out there would be available to us that identify as a better solution than DD, but maybe the thought process changes now with us missing the tourney. It took BOC a couple of poor seasons in a row on the mound before we mutually parted ways with our former pitching coach Karl Kuhn, but that was also after a decade of excellence from 2005-2015. Who knows what kind of leash Oak will have this time around.
Who stays, who goes.
I’ll try to piece together our roster picture for 2026 the best I can in a post below, but starting next season we’re gonna have to shrink our roster from 40 to 34. Now that doesn’t inherently mean players are gonna have to be cut, between graduations, transfers, and attrition via the draft we should be below the 34 player threshold before factoring in potential portal/HS additions. But it does mean we’ll have to be slightly more selective with additions going forward in the near future, and there may be some conversations had about roles for veteran players and whether or not it would be their best decision to stay here or seek another situation elsewhere. This is one we’ll likely have to wait a while on, portal entries will happen relatively soon but draft decisions won’t come until mid July. There’ll be an inkling of where players/commits are leaning and whether or not their stock is rising or falling in the leadup to the draft, and I’ll try my best to keep tabs on any significant movement.
Scheduling for success.
This is a more difficult question to address, simply because half of our schedule every year is out of our control. We had no power over the fact that we didn’t play a series this season against any of UNC, Clemson, Wake Forest, or Louisville, all of whom would have helped our RPI, nor did we have control over the FSU series being cancelled due to a school shooting. It also becomes a tough equation for us when we annually schedule in-state mid major teams to fill out our midweek games and a number of them have down seasons, like VCU and JMU did this year. It makes it tougher to overcome scheduling other programs like Towson and VMI who tend to do nothing for our resume other than save us some money on travel and act as minefields whenever they give us close games. I guess the question going forward is, what do we do to mitigate this issue happening again. Obviously the easy answer is don’t lose to Liberty twice, or Richmond once, or Boston College three times, but knowing that the RPI is continuing to be a serious factor in the selection committee’s decisions come tourney time, I do think we could serve to do a better job of getting some higher profile non-conference series before ACC play starts. The two round-robin tourneys we played in to start the season were a fine idea, it allowed us to play in warm weather for once that time of year but realistically the only one that benefited us from an RPI standpoint was the Round Rock Classic. It’s my opinion that we need to be scheduling at least one weekend against programs like ECU, Coastal, WVU and UConn every single year to help out our non-conference strength of schedule, or maybe even get a fun series in against a high major team if they’re willing to do a home and home. It’s tricky to have foresight about these kind of things and you don’t wanna overload your schedule with tough matchups, but I do think there’s a happy medium to be found that we didn’t quite hit with our 2025 slate.
4TH YEARS WHO MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE ELIGIBILITY LEFT:
LHP Matthew Buchanan
LHP Blake Barker
LHP Dean Kampschror
MOVING ON FROM THE PROGRAM:
LF Harrison Didawick
LHP Bradley Hodges
DRAFT ELIGIBLE 2ND/3RD YEARS:
2B Henry Godbout
3B Luke Hanson
CF Aidan Teel
RF Henry Ford
RHP Ryan Osinski
RHP Jack O’Connor
LHP Evan Blanco
LHP Chris Arroyo
RHP Kevin Jaxel
C Trey Wells
RHP Joe Colucci
PORTAL ENTRIES:
UTL Max Prozny
THE REST:
OF Will Broderick
LHP Tomas Valincius
LF James Nunnallee
OF Isaac Vanderwoude
RHP Charlie Oschell
RHP Bryson Moore
UTL Chone James
IF Jackson Sirois
OF Aiden Harris
1B Antonio Perrotta
SS Eric Becker
RHP Drew Koenen
LHP William Kirk
RF Walker Buchanan
RHP Michael Yaeger
UTL Tommy Roldan
RHP Auggie Richie
RHP Matt Augustin
RHP Nate Bassett
INCOMING HS CLASS:
LHP Jack Bauer (Draft risk)
RHP Aaron Watson (Draft risk)
LHP Aiden Stillman (Draft risk)
SS Nicky Becker (Draft risk)
C Thomas O’Connell (Maybe draft risk)
RHP Thomas Stewart
RHP Sam Rosand
OF Bryce Neely
OF Jett Bristow
OF Will Mahala
RHP Ryan Prior
RHP Ben Schulman
Again as mentioned in the first post of this thread, we’ve gotta have the roster at 34 by the start of the 2026 season. If I had to take a rough guess, I’d say we lose Godbout, Ford, Teel, Arroyo, Blanco, and Didawick to the draft. Always better to be pessimistic in this regard. Outside chance of losing Jaxel, Hanson, Hodges, O’Connor, and/or Osinski but all of those guys could reasonably come back for another year. I don’t expect Wells or Colucci to get any draft buzz but who knows, there’s always a chance for late round flyers. NIL could also change the equation for any of those players like it did for Didawick and Woolfolk this past offseason, but it’s tough to project that right now when we have no idea what roles our staff has planned out for some of those guys going forward. Might be in their best interest for a couple to pursue the draft while they still have some amount of stock and leverage left.
I’ll probably say this multiple times but the numbers will work themselves out one way or another. There’s gonna be some tough conversations had and likely a good number of transfers. I’m expecting more than we had last year.
If Teel goes pro they may need to look at a portal addition to hold down center. Not sure anyone on the current roster has the defensive chops. (Not familiar with anyone in the high school class besides Bauer and Becker really)
I agree, could definitely use one just to hedge our bets. Worst case scenario you could probably put Nunnallee out there and be fine, but not necessarily ideal because you’d rather have him in LF or RF and someone who is a little bit smoother in CF. I’m high on Jett Bristow from our HS class, he’s a very good athlete but am not confident he’s someone who can come in and be a standout starter day one.
It’ll all depend on how much space we have on our roster to operate with, and what positions all of a sudden become needs. As of right now I think SS and CF are the highest priority defensively in that order.
I’d probably put higher chances that none of Watson, Becker, Bauer or Stillman are on the roster next season than any of them are.
Well, let’s think about this and model it out. The last pick of the 3rd round last year got 700k, but looking at high schoolers, 98 got 1.7 mil, 94 got 1.2 mil, 93 got 700k, 90 got 620k, 88 got 850k and 84 got 2 mil. 3 HS guys in the 4th got 650, 800 and 1 mil. So ballpark a mil for the bottom of the top 100.
Contracts include access to the MLB educational fund for post-baseball education, so nets out with NCAA scholarships.
Baseball is getting 5% of rev share, so that’s about 1 mil a year among 34 guys. Figure half to full scholarships alone is enough for most of those guys. And rev share of say 25-100k a year for 3 years. Best case scenario is going to school, 3 years towards a degree, 200k cash and getting drafted as high or higher. Worst case is going to college and flaming out and losing your roster spot.
I’m risk averse, I think I take the pro money every time under the old rules and the new rules. The difference is only maybe 100k a year upside vs the same unlimited downside.
Anyway, those 4 guys are at least top 100 and Watson and Bauer are borderline 1st round. That’s a no brainer for those 2.
Trust me I am in no way counting Bauer or Watson as part of our roster equation next season. 99% chance those two are gone. Have heard Stillman and Becker are both a little more receptive to the idea of playing college ball, but if I had to put money on it I also wouldn’t count on either of them making it here.
It’s tough to really project anything right now without getting a more clear idea of the draft and transfer decisions. If I’m just looking down the roster and making educated guesses as to who I think stays/goes, the rough draft of what the team looks like is probably less talented than this year’s on paper but could end up being a more cohesive unit, if that makes sense. If I had to project the starters right now, without factoring in incoming/outgoing transfers or players forgoing the draft it would look like this:
1st: Antonio Perrotta
2nd: Chone James
3rd: Eric Becker
SS: Jackson Sirois
LF: Aiden Harris
CF: James Nunnallee
RF: Walker Buchanan
C: Trey Wells
DH: Jake Weatherspoon
Fri: Tomas Valincius
Sat: Bryson Moore
Sun: William Kirk
Again it’s highly unlikely this ends up being our opening day starting lineup. There’s a good chance we bring in transfers to play CF and SS unless guys unexpectedly forgo the draft. Probably will bring in transfers anyway just to hedge our bets since the portal cycle tends to take place before draft decisions do.
I’ll add one — we cannot have another season in which our 3B (usually a power / production spot) hits .240 with only 3 HR and 21 RBI with a fielding percentage of .900.
If he comes back for another year Hanson definitely has to be better in order to keep his spot in the starting lineup. It was pointed out to me that he actually hit .318 in ACC play, which is a much better number than I expected, but the defense was not good enough throughout the season plain and simple. Lowest fielding pct at 3rd since Nick Howard in 2013, who was primarily a pitcher for us.
Luke is clearly a very talented player who has had some big AB’s for us in the past and someone who the staff has a lot of trust in, but yeah we gotta have improvement at that position regardless of who is playing there next year.
On the transfer front, I hope they ramp up the Ivy grad pipeline. Where’s our Ben Miller for example? And we need better fielding from SS in particular but also 3B. Balls hit to that side have us all gasping and that just can’t be the case.
I’ve been thinking a lot of whether Teel goes in the draft or not. He’s only really had one year of field performance. Is that enough to maximize or is another year worth it to him to stand out next year? Also wouldn’t he still have two years of eligibility if he so chose, so could still maintain leverage…anyway, we will see. Would be sad to lose him for sure.
We need a better bullpen for sure. I don’t pretend to understand the issues, but we have lacked that in a major way and it hurt us big time this year.
I hope the fielding and baseball instinct can rebound to form next year. Too many plays that just feel like lack of true baseball instinct this year especially at short & 3rd.
And on the schedule front, seems we need more than a Dartmouth series early in the season. Better team to help RPI. And I hope BOC throws his weight around with the ACC to demand they give a schedule that doesn’t allow for the criticism of in conference strength. Recognize the coach doesn’t “control” that schedule, he has a case to simply put his foot down and demand it…how can this program of all programs find itself disadvantaged from the conference scheduling. (And of course we need to beat BC and not get swept by Duke or lose series in walkoffs)
I don’t pretend to know the solution on the midweek strength but it seems the classic local games aren’t going to work any more, so likely need to get more creative on those and stop doing as many local/regional games, especially the home/homes. (And don’t lose them!)
Or transfer to SEC and then deliver a killer 13-17 in conference record and still get in.
The schedule was fine this year. They took the missing FSU series into account and our RPI still wasn’t good. We lost to a ton of bad teams and took forever to start playing well. We just weren’t good enough. The pitching situation has been an issue for a while but I think college offenses are just better now too. Seems like a ton of injuries though so maybe it’s a coaching thing. We seem to have traded elite defense for juggernaut offense but the offense didn’t wake up until the 2nd half of the season. It was an extremely disappointing waste of talent and now we’ll rebuild next year and making the tournament would be a great outcome. But I won’t be surprised if this takes 2-3 years to build back up.