I write a version of this column on #UVABaseball every year, and it’s remarkable to say that this is the fifth one in six years, about what Virginia playing a Super Regional in Charlottesville means for some of us diehards who remember the many, many lean years.
Long before I was a reporter in the press box covering UVA sports, I was a University of Virginia student in the early 1990s with two first-year dormmates who played on the baseball team, one a starting pitcher, the other the starting center fielder.
A group of us from Dobie (which was torn down a few years back; damn, I’m getting old) trekked over to Davenport on a regular basis back in those days. It was a different experience than what I’d expected after taking in games at Scott Stadium with the Top 10 football team and at University Hall with the Top 25 basketball team.
Even for ACC games, Friday games, if there were 50 people there, well, there weren’t, because we were six of them, and we had our own usher, who would offer to get us what we wanted from the concession stand, because what the hell else was he going to do?
These were the years when UVA baseball was perennially eighth in the ACC, until Florida State was added to the conference, at which point we dropped to ninth.
A single season of glory was years away, the Seth Greisinger year, 1996, but when word came down from those on high around 2000 that the athletics department was considering dropping baseball, it was no surprise.
Cut it. Baseball isn’t our thing. That was the general attitude.
Enter Brian O’Connor, who won immediately, and kept raising the temperature a little higher each year, to where we are now, when even a season pockmarked by an unprecedented run of injuries has us in another Super Regional.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I remember getting together with one of my roommates from the early 1990s for a weekend game a couple of years back. He hadn’t been to a game since we’d been students on Grounds. I told him to be aware that UVA now takes baseball seriously, that our fans do things like tailgate before baseball games.
When we met in the parking lot in the midst of tailgaters, he admitted to thinking that I’d been bs’g him about the tailgating.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to make a partial living writing sports, focusing on UVA sports, for the past 20 years. Covering college sports means for most that you write a lot of football and basketball, with baseball being a tertiary focus at best.
Baseball happens to be my first love, and by far the strongest. I’ve volunteered my time now for seven seasons as a radio play-by-play man, color commentator and front-office jack-of-all-trades (media relations, marketing, web design/content manager/whatever else is needed) for a summer college baseball league team in the Valley League, one of the top summer leagues in the country.
If I could pick one dream job out of all that I could do in media, it would be baseball, by a million miles.
Those who know me personally know well that I wear my sabres literally on my sleeve, good or bad.
Seeing UVA baseball play a Super Regional in Charlottesville is about as good as it gets for me. The only thing better will be the year that I finally get to make the trip out to Omaha.
The way things are going, I’ll have plenty of opportunities to finally make that trek.
Some who follow my coverage of UVA baseball (OK, all of UVA sports) assume me to be an unabashed critic, but that’s just the law-school dropout in me, always cross-examining, and the guy who’s been running a business for 15 years, always looking for ways to get better.
First pitch Friday through the final out Saturday or Sunday, through the mask of critic, journalist and analyst, I’m also a fan giddy to be on hand for another one of these baseball spectacles that the first-year student in me 20-plus years ago could have never dreamed possible.
– Column by Chris Graham
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