Freshman Tomas Valincius struck out 10 in six one-hit innings as #2 Virginia closed out a 2-1 weekend in Puerto Rico with a 7-0 win over Rice on Sunday.
Valincius, the 2024 Gatorade Tennessee Baseball Player of the Year, was a projected fourth-round pick coming out of high school, but made it clear to MLB teams that he intended to matriculate at Virginia, which was good news for Brian O’Connor.
The lefty only needed 66 pitches to get through his six-inning stint, a low number for a guy who recorded 10 strikeouts.
Notable: no walks.
Virginia got him a lead early, scoring three runs in the second – on a two-RBI single by Harrison Didawick, and an error on a stolen-base attempt by James Nunnallee that allowed Didawick to score from third.
Henry Ford had two hits in three trips, and a sac-fly RBI in the fifth.
Luke Hanson was 1-for-3 at the plate with an RBI double and two runs scored.
Jacob Ference and Aidan Teel each had two-hit days for the ‘Hoos, who had 10 hits on the day.
On Saturday, UVA notched its first win of the season with a 3-1 triumph over Villanova.
Starting pitcher Bryson Moore was stellar in his outing, allowing one hit, one run and striking out six, walking two, in five and two-thirds innings.
Nunnallee, a 14th-round pick of the Milwaukee Brewers in the 2024 MLB Draft, was 3-for-4 at the plate with an RBI single and two runs scored.
Nunnallee had been a projected second-round pick heading into the 2024 draft cycle, and dropped because he had made clear his intentions to play college ball first.
The schedule tells us that Virginia is set to host George Washington on Wednesday at 3 p.m. for the program’s 2025 home opener at Davenport Field, but AccuWeather tells us that the high temperature in Charlottesville on Wednesday will be 23 degrees, with 8.1 inches of snow in the forecast.
It would be well-advised for UVA Baseball to maybe take an early flight out to Dallas to get ahead of the storm.
The next games on the schedule after our snow day are in the Dallas metro area starting on Friday, with Oregon State (Friday, 7 p.m. ET), Minnesota (Saturday, 1 p.m. ET) and Oklahoma (Sunday, 5 p.m. ET) in an event called the Karbuch Round Rock Classic.
The games will be streamed on D1Baseball.com.
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Chris Graham
