UVA Baseball: Brian O’Connor addresses the elephant in the room

UVA Baseball coach Brian O’Connor is of the mindset that his team didn’t miss out on an NCAA Tournament bid because of one game.

I’ll disagree here, and I’ve got the game: at NC State, Game 3, Sunday, April 6.

Virginia led 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, nobody on, closer Matt Lanzendorfer on the mound.

Drew Lanphere singled on an 0-1 pitch, ahead of Lanzendorfer walking leadoff man Ty Head.

The count got to 3-1 on Josh Hogue, the DH, who would go on to a 10-homer regular season.

Hogue blasted the 3-1 pitch out past the 370 sign in left-center for the walkoff, which gave the Pack the series.

Win that one, win that series on the road – combine that series win with the series win a couple of weeks later at ACC regular-season champ Georgia Tech, the May home weekend sweep of Miami.

I dunno.

It’d be hard to keep a team with a 17-10 record in the ACC out of the tourney.

Exponentially harder than keeping the team with a 16-11 record in conference play out.

I’m being facetious with the word exponentially; the resume was already pretty good.

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ICYMI

• UVA Baseball left out of NCAA Tournament: How much of a screwjob was it?

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Not only 16-11 in the ACC, but 20-7 after the 12-11 start, 12-3 in their final 15.

“My heart aches for the young men who wear our uniform that we do not have an opportunity to play this weekend,” O’Connor told reporters on Tuesday.

The lesson to his guys, O’Connor said: “you get what you earn in life.”

“I think sometimes people want to, well, what’s going on, you know, did they take a step back and things like that. This is high-level, competitive college athletics. It’s challenging every year. Every program is putting everything into being the best that they can be,” said O’Connor, who’d had his team in three of the previous four College World Series, and of course has the ACC’s last CWS title, from back in 2015.

The people who have been asking me the past few days, what happened, have been getting the answer – a mix of injuries affecting depth, some guys underperforming, and the inability to find a guy to replace what Griff O’Ferrall was able to do defensively at shortstop.

Nothing at all against Eric Becker, who led the team in batting average (.368), OPS (1.060) and RBIs (52), but the 15 errors (O’Ferrall had four in 2024 and eight in 2023) just wasn’t going to cut it.

Obviously, getting past at least Boston College last week in the ACC Tournament would have helped the NCAA chances, as would not dropping mid-week games to Richmond and Liberty (home and away in that case).

Folks have been chirping online about beefing up the mid-week schedule, but as O’Connor stressed, that’s easier said than done.

“You look at teams that we played twice in the middle of the week, right in our own state, and you look at what their RPI was the last two years, you know, one of them, in particular, their RPI was inside 80 or 75, and it was well below 200 this year,” O’Connor said, referring there to VCU, which stumbled to a 17-37 finish this season, with a final regular-season RPI at 246.

“I will take a deep look at how we’re doing it, but you’re also geographically challenged a little bit as well, right? Like, you can’t get on a bus in the middle of the week and drive somewhere for six hours to play, right? They’re students, too, OK?” O’Connor said.

“People that say, well, we should play more SEC schools in the middle week, how do you do that? You know, like Clemson can play Georgia and stuff because they’re in close proximity, right?” O’Connor said. “That said, over two decades, our scheduling model has worked, right? It’s allowed us to be top eight national seeds, right? It’s allowed us to host Regionals and Super Regionals. It didn’t this year because we didn’t take care of what we traditionally take care of. But yes, the answer to your question is yes, I will look at the schedule. There’s not much we can do about next year, OK, but into the future.”

Wild idea time: what about mid-week games in Frederick, Md., with West Virginia (41-14, RPI: 28) where each school gets to drive two and a half hours to play in a nice ballpark?

We played Maryland in Fredericksburg this past season in a similar arrangement.

Getting ECU (the AAC champ in 2025) back on the schedule for a February or early March weekend is another idea.

Inviting CAA champ Northeastern (48-9, RPI: 22) or SoCon champ ETSU (41-15, RPI: 36) to town for a weekend series early in the season could work.

I was a play-by-play guy for ESPN+ for 10 years calling SoCon baseball: there’s some good baseball being played there, just not by the SoCon team that we have on the schedule every year, VMI.

Point being, there are things that can be done schedule-wise that don’t take a lot of heavy lifting.

The harder part to figure is how a deep and talented roster coming off back-to-back trips to Omaha was so slow getting out the gate.

The offense was a shadow of the 2023 and 2024 offenses, in particular – and looking ahead, O’Connor is almost certainly going to lose outfielder Henry Ford (.362 BA, .995 OPS, 11 HRs in 2025), second baseman Henry Godbout (.309 BA, .894 OPS, eight homers), and first baseman Chris Arroyo (.290 BA, .890 OPS, 11 HRs), all of whom are projected third-round picks in the 2025 MLB Draft in July.

As is often the case, O’Connor’s 2025 recruiting class has three guys who may not make it to Grounds – in the form of lefty Jack Bauer, a projected second-round pick, righty Aaron Watson, a projected third-round pick, and shortstop Nicky Becker, a projected fourth-round pick.

Add in guys whose eligibility is up, like staff ace Jay Woolfolk (4-3, 4.73 ERA) and catcher/DH Jacob Ference (.333 BA, .960 OPS, nine homers), and, yeah, there’s going to be work to do this summer to replenish.

“We’ve got a group of young men that are really believe and committed to what this program is about. The fact that you don’t get into the conference tournament does not tarnish that,” O’Connor said. “They came here because they want to have an elite experience, to develop as a baseball player, get a great education, and candidly, be talked to and treated the right way. And so, like, we don’t have a problem in this program of a bunch of guys, because you don’t get in the NCAA Tournament, running into the transfer portal.

“I don’t know, until all those meetings are done, could there be some of that happening? Sure, there could, it exists everywhere, right? But I don’t anticipate much of that. So, what you do is, I have those individual meetings, and you know, the other coaches are continuing to recruit, whether it be high school players or transfer portal players,” O’Connor said.