First-year UVA Baseball coach Chris Pollard is trying to be the voice of calm, as the fan base is beside itself over the sudden freefall of their ’Hoos.
“I just told our guys at the end that I don’t have any qualms, any problems, with the effort or the energy or the connectiveness, guys picking each other up. We just have to play better,” Pollard said after Virginia’s 7-3 loss at Pitt on Sunday, which completed a three-game sweep in which UVA didn’t have a lead after the eighth inning on Friday night.
ICYMI
- UVA Baseball: #10 ‘Hoos snatch defeat from jaws of victory, drop series opener at Pitt, 7-5
- UVA Baseball: #10 ‘Hoos lifeless in 11-0 run-rule loss at Pitt on Saturday
- UVA Baseball: ‘Hoos swept by Pitt, season in freefall, all of the sudden
Virginia was 21-5 overall and 6-3 in the ACC on March 27; over the past month, the Cavaliers are 8-11 overall and 6-9 in the ACC.
The offense, expected to be the strength of this team, produced three runs on seven hits total in the losses on Saturday and Sunday.
That, as starting pitchers Kyle Johnson and John Paone were getting battered and bruised – Johnson was charged with seven earned runs on five hits and five walks while getting six outs in the 11-0 loss on Saturday; Paone was tagged for four runs on seven hits in 2.2 innings, with three Ks and two walks, in the Sunday loss.
The calendar is about to flip to May, and we still only have one reliable starting pitcher, Friday night starter Henry Zatkowski (6-0, 4.20 ERA, 1.10 WHIP).
Even Zatkowski hasn’t been used right – not sure what was going on behind the scenes, but Zatkowski spent the better part of two weeks this month coming out of the bullpen, before returning to the rotation for the series opener with Clemson last week, and getting the dub, going seven innings in the 6-4 win.
Pollard went with the Z Man into the eighth on Friday night, sending him back out after Zatkowski had thrown 106 pitches through seven innings.
He was lifted after walking the leadoff man, and the pen blew a 5-4 lead behind him to set the weekend off on the wrong foot.
The other weekend starters right now are:
- Johnson, who is 0-2 with a 6.50 ERA/1.56 WHIP, and just 18 innings of work spread across his six starts.
- Paone, who is 1-3 with a 5.97 ERA/1.44 WHIP in 11 starts; the win came way back on March 1. Paone has only gone at least five innings in two of his 11 starts.
Max Stammel (2-4, 7.50 ERA, 1.64 WHIP) has lost his rotation spot, and in his two relief appearances, he’s been touched up for four runs on eight hits in 1.2 innings, so it’s not like he’s pushing the other guys to get back to pitching on the weekends.
Two other guys have multiple starts, on midweeks:
- Jayden Stroman (0-0, 6.35 ERA, 1.76 WHIP) has started six times, though his longest outing was 2.1 innings, and his last start was on March 31, in the 16-2 win over ODU, in which he only got four outs before being lifted.
- Michael Yeager (0-2, 10.05 ERA, 2.13 WHIP) has started two games; his last start was in the 14-0 loss at Charlotte on March 3.
This isn’t a pitching staff that, again, the calendar is ready to flip to May, looks anywhere near ready for prime time.
That’s frustrating, and more frustrating is the underachieving offense, which has two projected first-round draft picks at the top of the order, in AJ Gracia and Eric Becker, and still ranks just 14th in the 16-team ACC in hitting (.277), seventh in OPS (.886) and sixth in runs per game (8.1).
And those are numbers inflated by beating up on a weak nonconference schedule (that ranks 119th nationally, among the 308 teams in D1).
In ACC games, Virginia is 16th in hitting (.256), 11th in OPS (.822) and 12th in runs (6.1).
I’m sorry, but this is not the profile of a team that will do more than lose a couple of games on a Friday and Saturday in the final week of May and then scatter to their summer-ball destinations.
Pollard, to his credit, is trying to rebuild his guys’ confidence.
“We have to play ourselves to the other side of this,” he said on Sunday. “We know we are a better club than we showed this weekend. We showed that in large stretches and in a big sample size over the course of this season, and we are going to play better.”
I want to believe – and I’ll point out, that 21-5 start wasn’t all weak sauce; Virginia won two of three at #2 UNC, two of three from a Wake Forest team currently in the RPI Top 25 in the opening six weeks.
And that was with a starting rotation that was Zatkowski and then two staff days, same as what we have now.
The difference: the offense.
Over the 8-11 stretch dating back to March 27, the UVA offense is averaging just 5.1 runs per game, slashing .251/.362/.420, for an OPS at .782.
It might be a bit of a miracle that they’ve been able to win eight games in the last month with those numbers, on a team with one reliable starting pitcher.
“We have to get some guys going a little bit offensively, and we will,” Pollard said. “We showed some good signs in the ninth, and there is a lot better baseball for this group ahead of us. If they stay connected and committed to each other like they are right now, they are going to look up at the end of May and like where they are at.”
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Chris Graham
