https://x.com/UVABaseball/status/1932469396913697060
New staff thread
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Who is a better coach in 2026?
- Pollard
- BOC
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voters
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Are we happy?
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Virginia Baseball Head Baseball Coach just rolls right off the tongue like Dean and Markel Families Men’s Basketball Head Coach.
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Is Virginia Baseball sponsoring itself? Is that allowed?
Hearing the announcement surprised a good bit of the department.
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And his pinned tweet is something about Duke?? This is Tina Thompson all over again
Not pinned — it was his last tweet, which was a repost from two days ago, before UVa announced that he had been hired.
Nice overreaction though.
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It’s also possible I was making an obvious joke. But nah, I’m probably furious.
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Touched on it a bit in the baseball offseason thread, but will give some random thoughts about the hire for people not super familiar with college baseball.
Pollard was the leader behind one of the best rebuilds in college baseball. Prior to him getting to Duke they hadn’t made a postseason appearance in over 60 years, and since 2016 they’ve made the NCAAT seven out of a possible nine times including four super regional appearances. What he did at Duke was basically what O’Connor did for our baseball program, just on a lesser scale with even worse financial support. Duke has arguably some of the worst facilities and NIL in the ACC and yet Pollard was able to attract some very serious talent there, multiple top 100 HS prospects and guys who ended up being top 5 round picks in the MLB draft. I would describe his job there in building up that program as miracle work, the only thing that really alluded him was a CWS appearance.
From a baseball perspective it’s gonna be a very different approach to how O’Connor, McMullen and Dickinson operated. Our offenses under KMac were hyper aggressive in the box, often jumping on the first good pitch we’d see and living with the outcome. It was kind of an old school, just put the ball in play strategy that was tweaked in recent years to add a little more power but generally speaking it meant high batting average, medium amount of walks and low amount of strikeouts for us. We also never truly got away from our small ball tendencies, much to the chagrin of many in our fanbase. At Duke, Pollard leaned much more towards playing gorilla ball and trying to find the perfect pitch. His team led the country in walks this season, and have ranked in the top 20 in HR’s hit four out of the last five seasons. It’s gonna be a lot more patience at the plate, probably less hits and a lot more strikeouts but our contact is gonna be loud. If Pollard can continue to stack his lineups with the physically imposing guys he tends to get on his roster without sacrificing defensively then it’s gonna be a very fundamentally sound baseball club on offense. As for pitching, Pollard likes to take a more modern approach to his staffs and bullpen. He’s known for using ‘openers’, which is essentially putting a reliever on the mound to start the game for one or two innings and then going to your typical guy in the starting rotation. And he is very quick to go to his bullpen, which tends to be extremely deep with viable arms. I think at times he can be a little too quick to pull a guy or a little too extreme with the amount of arms he uses (he notoriously threw 9 different pitchers against us in game three of our 2023 super regional and it backfired horribly) but it’s not an inherently bad strategy. He likes to get tall, lanky lefties to fill out his pitching staff, tends to lean more on the projectable side than the pitchability side. He’s had a lot of different types of pitchers during his time at Duke and tended to hit the Ivy League very hard for transfers, both hitting and pitching. I wouldn’t be surprised if he employs a similar strategy here, I doubt we’re gonna all of a sudden be major players in the NIL game and will have to continue to poach from a slightly more narrow group than SEC programs but it doesn’t mean we won’t be able to get some really solid guys out of the portal.
And finally, Pollard is an ace level recruiter of HS talent. Their 2025 class is ranked 12th in the country on Perfect Game, which is higher than ours and features six guys ranked in the top 100, not all of which are threats to go pro immediately. Given that Duke is a very tough place to recruit to, the amount of talent he’s been able to field there is incredible and he’ll have an even larger pool to work with now that he’s at UVA. This is the part I’m most excited for, because I think he’ll be very aggressive in getting the top guys in the state of VA given his ties to the region and also continuing to kill it in NC as well. In my opinion there’s a chance he’s able to bring in enough year one to get us back to the postseason and keep the train immediately rolling.
All in all, this is a pretty fantastic hire and I’m not sure we could have done much better. Absolute homerun and I think a lot of people who follow the program closely are very, very excited about this one. Things were looking bleak for a little bit after O’Connor left, and we don’t know of much success without him but I’d be very surprised if we don’t at least continue to be a consistent tournament team under Pollard, and the expectation should be even higher than that.
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A hs kid to watch is Noah Yoder from Atlee in Richmond. He is a little raw but has serious arm talent. Has been up to 99 this spring. He was/is committed to Duke.
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I notice that a lot of recruits commit during their FR or SO years and spend years looking forward to playing at a particular school and coach. And then weeks before they are scheduled to arrive your world is turned upside down when the coach leaves. I can’t imagine how that feels.
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Yeah he’s definitely one to keep an eye on. Rankings would suggest he’s probably going pro but his blurb on Future Star Series does mention that “Yoder is expected to be an extremely difficult sign away from his commitment to Duke”. So the hope would be that if he flips here that would remain the same at UVA.
Jayden Stroman is another to watch. Younger brother of Marcus who has been a starting pitcher in the majors for over a decade and was an All-American at Duke. Jayden is a great athlete much like his brother and has shot up draft boards recently, could end up being a two way player.
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Do you think Pollard could use a 53 year old shortstop? I have eligibility left. I’d be the only player out there with a Ron Guidry signed Wilson glove. I’m a little slower now so he might have to move me to first base…
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I would assume that’s because of the funding and facilities?
On the flip side, I could see Duke as a destination due to the academics. If you’re a good student, your family probably recognizes the low odds of an MLB career and it’s not a bad place to earn a degree. Maybe that has no bearing on this level of recruit - not my are of knowledge.
On the double flip, holy cow, he had a lot of success bringing in top 100 kids. A lot of them matriculated.
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Any breakdown of the staff he’s bringing with him? Assistants that are particularly highly (or negatively) thought of?
This is changing. Look at the soph class. No real commits yet. They changed the rules on when a school can offer two years ago. Also, I hear Yoder is going to school. He is a good student, academics matter to his family and he isn’t polished yet. He would be a good get.
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Yes to both, and the academic side of things was a blessing for them in some instances and a curse in others. Definitely hurt them in the portal, along with the aforementioned lack of NIL. As mentioned Pollard was really smart to target Ivy League transfers hard, Duke became the destination program for a lot of that conference’s top pitchers and hitters.
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