Aside from NC State’s Tommy White, who has hit nine home runs in eight games, is Jack Hurley the hottest hitter on the planet?
“I don’t know if I am,” the Virginia Tech left fielder said with a laugh after the Hokies’ 7-3 win against Fordham on Sunday afternoon. “I’m just seeing the ball really well right now.”
Since Virginia Tech’s season-opening win against UNC Asheville on Feb. 18, Hurley has at least one hit in each of the Hokies’ six games.
He’s reached base 17 times in the 26 plate appearances that he’s walked into the left-handed batter’s box this season. Over the weekend in a three-game series against the Rams, using English Field as his playground, all he did was homer and double three times, walk twice, triple and reach on two infield singles and a hit-by-pitch.
A weekend where a hitter goes 9-for-10? Unheard of. Had he gotten a fifth plate appearance on Sunday, Hurley would’ve had the chance to go 4-for-4 for the third straight day.
“That’s something I’ve never seen before,” head coach John Szefc said.
The results, since Friday, in chronological order: Homer, double, homer, walk, single, single, hit-by-pitch, triple, pop out, double, double, intentional walk, homer. That helped raise his NCAA-high batting average to .636 and his on-base-percentage to .654, trailing only a few others around the nation that have fewer plate appearances than he does.
After homering twice on Friday and using his speed to leg out two infield singles and a triple on Saturday, Hurley followed that up with a double down the right field line on the first pitch he saw on Sunday. Some 500 fans cheered him on as he later scored on a Cade Hunter sacrifice fly to right field, giving the Hokies a 2-1 lead.
And Tech never looked back. Drue Hackenberg, after pitching five scoreless in his debut last Friday, was roughed up early on against Fordham. He allowed two singles to open the afternoon, but bounced back with a groundout and a strikeout in the first inning. The only flaw he had was a wild pitch that allowed the Rams’ CJ Vazquez to score with two outs.
A batter later, was out of the inning after forcing a groundout to third base. In the second inning, he loaded the bases with one out, but a 9-2-6-5 double play ended the Ram’s threat. Nick Biddison caught a fly ball in right field for the second out then teamed up with Hunter, Tanner Schobel and Carson DeMartini to nab Casey Brown heading back to third.
That was the rest of the trouble Hackenberg ran into. He worked around a two-out single in the third and a one-out single in the fourth. Neither runner would make it past first base. Then he set the side down in order before coming out of the game in the fifth.
“[Drue] obviously didn’t have his best stuff,” Szefc said. “But that was probably better for him mentally than coming out and throwing five shutout innings again.”
During that time, Hurley doubled again in the third inning, lacing a ball off the wall in left-center on an 0-1 count. After Hackenberg was pulled with a 4-1 lead as the Hokies threatened to break the game wide open with runners on second and third in the bottom of the fifth, Fordham elected to intentionally walk Hurley. He stole second, but that’s as far as he’d make it as Conor Hartigan grounded out to end the threat.
“That was probably my favorite at-bat of the day,” Hurley said. “I don’t think I’ve been intentionally walked since Little League.”
And for an encore in the seventh, Hurley was worked backwards — Kovel started him off with a curveball then moved to the fastball — but ended up homering to left field for his third in six games this year. It brought those 500 on-goers to their feet.
He entered last Sunday’s game just 2-for-9. Since then, he’s wowed the opposition with 12 hits in his last 13 at-bats — seven of which have been for extra bases.