The UVA Baseball team trailed 8-4 after four innings, a rough third that saw Miami take advantage of a fly ball lost in the sun and some squeezing from the home-plate umpire to score six runs being the main culprit with the early deficit.
Credit to Brian O’Connor’s ‘Hoos – they didn’t throw in the towel.
Single runs in the fifth and sixth and a two-spot in the seventh got the game square.
Miami got the lead back on a Dorian Gonzalez Jr. RBI single in the top of the eighth, then Michael Torres robbed Jacob Ference of a potential game-tying homer with two outs in the bottom of the eighth with a running, leaping catch over the wall in deep right-center.
The official play-by-play just makes that one out to be: “Ference flied out to CF.”
Play-by-plays don’t qualify as literature.
Bottom nine, Harrison Didawick, leading off, took Brian Walters off the scoreboard in right-center – Torres wasn’t going to rob this one without access to a bucket truck – to tie the game at 9-9.
James Nunnallee worked a work on a 3-2 pitch, stole second, then, after Luke Hanson grounded out, came around to score on an Aiden Teel single through the hole between first and second, allowing Virginia to walk off the ‘Canes, 10-9.
Fun ballgame, even with all the pitching changes – the two teams used a total of 10 pitchers, five apiece – and the delays for discussions about pitching changes, the replay reviews, the Miami first baseman losing a contact lens.
The game took a pastoral three hours, thirty-five minutes to play out.
Now I get why MLB limits the number of throws to first, requires relievers to pitch to at least three hitters, the rest.
Still, a good baseball game, borderline great game – the caveat from me being, the team that I root for won, so I’m conceding the orange-and-blue-colored glasses thing could skew my rating.
Bradley Hodges started for Virginia, and was battered – touched for eight runs, all earned, on five hits and four walks, in three-plus innings of work, the big blow against him being a third-inning Renzo Gonzalez grand slam.
In Hodges’s defense, all six of the Miami runs in the six-run third came with two outs, after Teel lost a fly ball to center in the sun, and it fell in for what went down in the scorebook as a base hit.
Nothing literary about that in the play-by-play.
“Galvin, M. singled to center field.”
The UVA bullpen, after that, was stellar, holding the ‘Canes (30-20, 14-11 ACC) to one run on six hits in the final five and a third, with former #1 starter Evan Blanco doing yeoman’s work, three and a third scoreless innings, three hits, two strikeouts, no walks.
The bats did damage all afternoon and then into the evening.
Teel was 3-for-3, with a three-run double in the second and the walkoff, and he also walked three times.
Didawick and Henry Godbout each hit solo homers, and Eric Becker had two hits and two RBIs.
Big win for Virginia (29-16, 13-10 ACC), which will try to finish off the sweep on Sunday at 1 p.m.
Freshman lefty Tomas Valincius (4-1, 5.05 ERA, 1.28 WHIP) gets the start on Senior Day, also Mother’s Day, for those who celebrate.
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Chris Graham
