Connor Jones didn’t have his best stuff Friday night, at the worst possible time, with UVA baseball facing a series of must-win games in its efforts to qualify for the 2015 postseason.
Best stuff or not, Jones did his job.
The sophomore right-hander limited Duke to a run on five hits in seven innings that also saw him walk six Blue Devils. Jones didn’t factor into the decision, since he left the game with the score tied at 1-1, but it’s obvious that he was a key reason Virginia got the 3-1 win.
Jones struck out eight Duke hitters, and his velocity wasn’t the issue, with his fastball regularly hitting 93-95 on the radar gun, but he was having trouble locating the fastball, and had to rely on his off-speed stuff, particularly his slider.
Duke designated hitter Cris Perez was sitting slider on the two-out fourth-inning double that he roped down the left-field line to score Mike Rosenfeld from first base for what turned out to be Duke’s lone run of the night.
To Jones’s credit, even as it was obvious that he had to get outs with his slider, he was still able to do so, and given the context – the must-win game, the UVA offense not mustering much of anything against Duke ace Andrew Istler, who ended up being charged with the loss, giving up three runs, two earned, on six hits in seven and a third, but matched Jones pitch-for-pitch all night until the eighth, yeah, wow.
Kevin Doherty (3-1) vultured the win in relief, pitching a scoreless top of the eighth in advance of the two-run rally in the bottom half of the inning that provided the final margin.
In the big scorebook in the sky, Jones gets the W. He did the heavy lifting, and did it with his B-minus stuff.
– Column by Chris Graham
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