We get a home baseball series this weekend as Notre Dame visits. It will be the third road series in a row for the Irish who have only played ACC games to date.
Notre Dame was picked last in their division but they’ve won both of their series so far (Wake Forest, Clemson).
We really need to get a series win here.
Good news is that up to 1,000 fans are now allowed in per game starting today.
We need success in baseball and lacrosse ASAP w/ all the bad juju currently surrounding basketball. 
We’re due!
We didn’t get the good juju on the baseball diamond today.
After a promising start that showed the bats might come alive (UVA rallied from a 2 to 0 deficit to immediately respond with 4 runs), the bats went back into their slumber and Notre Dame coasted to a 10 to 5 win.
They hit 3 home runs today. We have 3 for the season.
We finally managed to get ourselves swept.
Not a lot to like from the weekend which also saw Mike Vasil leave his Sunday start early due to a tight back and slip on the mound in the 2nd inning.
First year Kyle Teel did hit his first two career home runs this weekend and he now leads the team. Fellow first year Jake Gelof got a shot in the starting lineup on Saturday and Sunday at 2B and acquitted himself well.
Next up on Wednesday is Towson. We shouldn’t have much problem there. Then we host Pitt on the weekend. If the normal pattern holds, we’re likely to have another frustrating weekend. Pitt just went to Atlanta and took 2 of 3 from Georgia Tech who was playing the best baseball in the league in my opinion heading into last weekend.
I don’t keep up with baseball that much since the dominant years we had but I thought this team was going to be pretty good
What do you think is the problem Karl ?
The offense just isn’t good enough. It actually stinks out loud right now.
Some of our better players from last year (Chris Newell, Max Cotier) are essentially unplayable right now. A solid veteran (Devin Ortiz) is in the same boat. And a veteran we were counting on having a decent to solid season (Alex Tappen) also can’t hit the broad side of a barn with his bat. Other guys have had their share of struggles from game to game. We’ve only been able to count on two or three players each game on offense to be any threat.
It’s putting enormous pressure on the pitching and defense as a result. They can’t make any mistakes or we don’t have a chance. In baseball, mistakes on defense happen and the margin of error between great and average defensive teams is usually pretty thin. But that small margin error on defense is enormous for us.
Up until this weekend, our weekend pitching was routinely excellent. We saw a couple cracks develop in two high usage bullpen guys the prior weekend at Florida State and that carried over against Notre Dame. Notre Dame looks to be a better team to me than FSU, so it’s no surprise that they hit better against us overall. But we really can’t afford to have two of our key bullpen guys start to falter.
None of our starting pitchers were excellent against Notre Dame. But that’s an impossible standard to be required to maintain over the course of an entire season. Our Saturday guy, Griff McGarry, has struggled with consistency the last two weekends. That’s always been the book on him but when he’s on his stuff is good enough to overcome those issues. But when he’s not, his stuff fades really quickly.
The offense is always subject to turn around and get hot. But the guys that aren’t hitting well on the weekends don’t look good for the most part either. It’s one thing to have some bad luck where you keep hitting the ball right at the defense. But our guys routinely look like JV high school players versus college pitchers.
I’m sure it’s making for some sleepless nights for all the coaches. They had expectations for this season that were just as high as the fans and media. They live and die this stuff daily. You won’t find a better leader at UVA than Coach O’Connor (Oak), but something isn’t translating with this group. From all reports, the offense was just fine during the fall baseball season (akin to spring football). So everyone is left surprised with what’s happening.