Will miss having a Teel on the roster. Both of them were dogs!!
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#95: 2025 MLB Draft top 100 prospects: Ethan Holliday, Liam Doyle top a class with depth - The Athletic
Teel is the younger brother of White Sox prospect Kyle Teel, having followed his brother to UVA. Aidan doesn’t have a plus tool but does everything reasonably well, hitting .321/.438/.543 in the regular season with just a 12.7 percent strikeout rate, showing 55 speed and 55 defense in center, even going 9-for-9 in stolen bases. He has a fourth outfielder floor and I wouldn’t be shocked if he ended up a regular because he keeps making adjustments.
Side note: I appreciate that Law pulls no punches. He can be very grouchy, but he’s not the kind of extreme optimist scout that is not so helpful to read.
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Teel also raked in the Northwoods League last summer so he’s put together a pretty solid draft resume even in just the one year. Thought he might have a little more power, but still just an all-around great player.
Really hoping we get to see one season of the Becker bros on the middle infield.
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Keith Law also mentioned in his chat that he thought Becker was 50/50 to make it to UVA since he had a slightly disappointing spring.
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I still don’t understand UNC getting the 5 seed
So, I checked the team’s final stats, here’s some key ones for fun and then I’ll summarize at the end.
Hitting
- 26th in Batting Average - actually pretty good
- 40th in SLG - Not great but not terrible, would be fine for a team with great pitching
- 64th in OBP - Not good
- 102nd in Runs Scored - Wow, that’s awful.
Pitching/Defense
- 25th in K/9IP - Solid
- 45th in ERA - Not what you want, but could be fine if paired with a great offense
- 76th in H/IP - Surprisingly weak
- 78th in K/BB for pitching - In a vacuum its disappointing, but combined with being 25th in K/9 suggests “walks allowed” was disastrous
- 130th in BB/9 - “Disastrous” is accurate
- 93rd in WHIP - A valiant effort given the walks, but still very bad
- 144th in Fielding% - Next year, coaches should make sure everyone is wearing glove on the correct hand
Both the offense and defense were disappointing, albeit in totally different ways.
The lineup hit for good average, and while the power wasn’t what we were expecting, it at least managed to claw its way up to respectable by season’s end. But they were never good at drawing walks and, maybe worse, the team’s offensive output was WAAAY below the sum of even its disappointing parts. I couldn’t find season-long stats for hitting with Runners in Scoring Positions (RISP), but I’m pretty sure the team was horrendous in those situations.
Like, a team’s offense tends to align with however its On-base + Slugging (OPS) stats turn out, mildly over or underperforming that result based, arguably, on whether batting average (BA) is better or worse than you’d expect. BA, surprisingly enough, isn’t really a core offensive stat on its own (its mostly significant as a part of both halves of OPS), but being better at BA tends to make everything else run smoother. In our case, BA was our best stat offensively, yet we wildly underachieved offensively. On paper, based on the hitting stats, we “should” have had a somewhat disappointing, but still respectable, offense. Instead, we were actually bad. That sucks.
On the other side, our pitchers were actually pretty good at striking out hitters and while I can’t find season-long SLG% allowed stats, UVA pitchers allowed the fewest HRs of any team in the ACC. Kinda like in hoops, the ACC had a few good teams at the top but wasn’t strong overall. But even so, lots of strikeouts and few HRs allowed should be a solid combination for a pitching staff.
In MLB, a lot of math says Ks and HR’s allowed are the primary things a pitcher can control. Individual pitchers can be better or worse at BA-allowed beyond those two things, but it tends to vary a lot for individual pitchers from season to season and is thus considered to more be a function of how good their defense is and luck.
Our pitchers were good at striking out batters and not allowing homeruns, yet were pretty mediocre at allowing hits. Part of that is probably bad luck, but our defense was quite bad all season long with the final game against BC putting an exclamation point on it. If we were even an average defensive team then we’d probably have won that game.
Also, the pitchers were bad at walking batters. Like, really bad. I’d say control was a problem, but weirdly they also tied for hitting the 2nd fewest batters in all of D1 college baseball. Its an impressive gap. Our pitchers hit 40 batters all season, while UC San Diego’s pitchers hit 138. They almost hit 2 more batters per game than we did. Its a conundrum.
The final result, the pitchers’ ERA, wasn’t actually bad. We were 2nd in the ACC in ERA! One might look at these results and think “The offense had ok components but underachieved in runs scored, and the pitching did the opposite by allowing fewer runs than expected from components.” Unfortunately, that’s wrong.
Because ERA stands for “Earned Run Average”. That means runs that score as a result of errors (Unearned Runs) aren’t included in the total. And our defense was bad, right? They indeed committed a ton of errors and allowed a ton of unearned runs. We may have been 2nd in the ACC for ERA, but we were probably 11th in the ACC in total Runs allowed per game (per my envelope math. We were tied with Pitt for most Unearned runs allowed, and had by far the highest % of Unearned Runs/Total Runs). So, the pitching staff (and fielding) was allowing a lot of runs but particularly un-timely fielding made them look better than they were.
Overall, the team had a few areas in which they were actually pretty good, but mostly they were “fine”. Close enough to “good” that if they were great at a few things they could have made up for it, but they weren’t actually “great” at anything.
Its honestly a bit of a surprise they won as many games as they did in ACC play. We did play our best during ACC play, but for the full season we were 6th in the ACC in runs scored per game, but 11th in runs allowed. I’m not sure how to break out in-conference results vs OOC, but clearly the team was, if anything, even worse than you’d probably guess during OOC and that sank the season.
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Just briefly glancing at the stats you presented, a high BA combined with a low OBP with middling power suggests to me that we were a pretty free swinging team with good bat control, but didn’t walk much and middling power. Put balls in play to make defenses work, but didn’t take enough pitches to make pitchers work. Also, pitchers might not have been afraid we’d punish them with power, so they threw more strikes that forced us to swing more and earlier in counts.
Our defense committed a lot of errors making our pitchers work more, but I wonder if our BABIP allowed was higher than average too. As in was the bad defense both in getting to balls and executing or just the throwing and catching part?
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Not that surprising given how many unearned runs we gave up. We just found so many ways to lose this year.
Also think our LOB stats would have been eye opening along with average with RISP.
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https://x.com/MProzny/status/1927486718959325340
Max Prozny in the portal. Will update the 2nd post in this thread with all our players in the portal as we go along.
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And that’s the other issue. Oak doubled down on the starters even after the bad start, we still missed the tournament, and a very talented first year class remained in the dugout.
Wouldn’t be surprised if we lose a few more.
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I don’t disagree in the case of others like James or Sirois but I get the sense that Prozny was always gonna have an uphill battle to get PT here. He was behind both Broderick and Vanderwoude in Fall practice, neither or whom saw any meaningful time this season.
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Are we losing transfer cause of lack of PT or you’re not good enough for uva?
You can generally figure out the expected first year transfers based on who doesn’t get into a game during the first month of the season, barring a known injury case like William Kirk.With us, it’s been a pretty consistent guide for years.
Broderick and Van Der Woude are the next two to watch. Broderick randomly got in for a plate appearance (based loaded walk) against Towson but that cameo was his only appearance of the season. Van Der Woude didn’t play at all and I’m not aware of any injuries.
Broderick’s dad is pretty engaged with liking UVA Content on X though. He’s always liking my posts.
Prozny was a football recruit first who was also a baseball player. The writing was on the wall when he gave up football recently to focus on baseball.
JUCO transfer pitcher August Richie is another I’d expect to hit the portal. He’s from Arizona and only made a couple late game cameos during the season.
Players want the opportunity to play and should prioritize that as hard as they worked to get to this level when college is likely their final level in their baseball careers.
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Yeah. Back before MLB reduced the number of minor league affiliates, paid minor leaguers at least minimum wage and cut the draft in half, teams were happy to sign any halfway decent 4 year college player, give them $1,000 to sign and pay them $300 a month for 3 months and live with host families to play short season rookie league ball and hundreds of guys a year could say they played pro ball. Now the vast majority top out in college and after that they can play in adult recreational leagues or corporate softball leagues.
I liked those old short season leagues. It gave folks in small towns some inexpensive local live entertainment on summer evenings, but I guess when the business model relies on exploiting basically free labor, the business model has to change or go away. Kinda like what’s happening to college sports.
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Anything to the Mississippi State fans saying O’Connor to MSST?
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yeah he’s apparently headlined to go there
Board was down so couldn’t really talk about it, but there’s way too much smoke to ignore at this point.
Have been told for weeks not to worry and that BOC is staying here but when you have multiple MSU insiders saying it’s close to a done deal on their end, doesn’t really make you feel great about it.
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Not surprising. Was inevitable this would happen with the disparity between the ACC and SEC. Our membership in the ACC seems to be a strategic and existential issue that we have no plan to solve. Oh well
@UVApride7 and I were chatting about this last night while the board was offline. Not sure we’ve ever seen anything like this in a coaching search before.
Eventually, either us or State are going to catch a shiv in the ribs when it finally plays out.
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A&M coach to UT last summer was horrendous