You probably don’t think it was anything impressive that Virginia shipped off from Boston having taken two of three from BC, and scored 10 runs total in the three games.
The hitting will come around. What Brian O’Connor found in Beantown this weekend – no, not a wooden leg – is the big news here.
“I shared with the team after the game, great teams find different ways to win, and certainly our pitching and defense carried us today,” O’Connor said after his team’s 4-0 win on Saturday.
Joe Savino was the story in the series finale. The grad transfer from Elon pitched a season-best four innings as he continues to rehab from an offseason injury, and he allowed one hit and walked two, and was able to go for 68 pitches.
“Joe Savino gave us a great start. We were able to extend him, and we’ll continue to build him up,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor went into the weekend with really just one guy that he could rely on as a rotation starter, Evan Blanco, who had a deceptively tough line in Thursday’s 8-2 loss at Fenway Park – four runs on five hits in six-plus innings.
The deceptive part to his numbers was the two-run Vince Cimini homer in the fourth that wrapped around the Pesky Pole in right – literally a 297-foot homer that would have not only not been a home run in any other non-Little League park in the world, but would have almost certainly been a foul ball in 99.5 percent of active ballparks, given its wicked pissah slice it took once it passed the pole.
Is what it is.
Blanco was otherwise solid, and O’Connor got five scoreless innings of relief from his bullpen in Friday’s 4-3 win.
O’Connor is still trying Penn grad transfer Owen Coady as his #2 starter.
Coady, I’m still not sure on. He still hasn’t gotten out of the fifth inning in any of his five starts, and on Friday, he was charged with three runs on five hits and three walks in four innings, and 76 pitches, of work.
And my hopes that Jay Woolfolk could still come around, well …
Woolfolk was lights-out in a 1-2-3 seventh inning in Friday’s win, striking out two, but then walked two and hit a guy before being lifted with one out in the eighth, then being saved by a diving catch from Aiden Teel, the former closer who was inserted into the game in left field in place of Harrison Didawick to begin the BC half of the eighth, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on.
Teel, a day later, gave O’Connor two innings of scoreless relief in Saturday’s win, striking out two, walking one and allowing one base hit.
That was the formula for taking two of three at Boston College this weekend, deviating dramatically from the script, which had Virginia bludgeoning teams all season long.
Blanco pitched into the seventh, Savino went four full, Teel took a baby step to getting back on track.
There’s still a need for another rotation guy – Woolfolk?
And need for back-end bullpen depth – again, Woolfolk?
A baseball season for a college team like Virginia, which is sitting at 33-12 with two games to go before the spring exam break, is about getting all of your pieces in place for the postseason, which is still a month away at this writing.
You’d like, if you’re Brian O’Connor, to have a better feel at this stage for how you game plan in terms of pitching, but the good news is, he might have some options that weren’t obvious even a couple of weeks ago.
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Chris Graham
