Dealing with the residual effects of a taxing win over No. 12 North Carolina the day before, a spent Virginia Tech dropped its series finale against the Tar Heels on Sunday.
Second baseman Jared Davis and first baseman Anderson French were ejected after a squabble at the end of Saturday’s game, resulting in a one-game suspension for both under ACC rules. Combined with a slew of injuries, those absences left the Hokies (25-15, 10-11 ACC) thin and clumsy in their 7-4 rubber-match loss at English Field.
“I think the whole [game] hurt, yesterday took a lot out of the group,” Tech coach John Szefc said. “Losing those guys, with our current injury situation, you didn’t really have a whole lot of moves to make. It’s a pretty thin group. But you can’t make four errors against [UNC], that’s really what it came down to. We couldn’t play defense for a little bit, and that was the end of that.”
Tech’s 10-pitcher staff threw well enough, but the Tar Heels (31-9, 13-8) took advantage of a season-high three Tech errors — though like Szefc said, it was effectively four — that resulted in five unearned runs. Two of the miscues were committed in a detrimental seventh inning in which reliever Cameron LeJeune looked to pitch a three-up, three-down frame before a Clay Grady error. It was the first thread pulled in a sequence that unraveled the entire weekend.
It began when Grady gloved a routine Alex Madera chop to shortstop. The junior was a toss to first baseman Sam Tackett — making his first start there this season with French out — away from the defense’s most efficient inning of the game.
But Grady, one of the best defenders in the ACC with just two errors coming in, tossed it just awry enough to pull Tackett off the bag. He was perhaps used to throwing to French’s 6-foot-5 frame and not the stockier graduate student.
In the following at-bat, Lee Sowers singled to score Madera unearned before Carter French walked. Another error — which seemed clear but was removed postgame, likely in an act of college baseball politics — by third baseman David Lewis again kept the final out from coming. It would’ve been Lewis’ eighth error of the year. Even without it, his fielding percentage is .875.
After he dropped the ball, Jackson Van De Brake singled to unload two baserunners. Finally, catcher Henry Cooke’s interference combined with a Brendan Yagesh balk — Tech’s reliever who had just replaced LeJeune — plated one more run before the frame’s end.
“That inning was the difference in the game,” Szefc said. “You can’t expect to beat a team like that when you’re making those kinds of errors and giving them extra free bases. And it wasn’t like [North Carolina] was killing it. We just didn’t make routine plays.”
Considering David McCann’s two-run homer in the eighth inning gave the Hokies four runs, the seventh inning proved to be backbreaking. Even more, the Hokies’ first error in the fourth inning accounted for the Tar Heels’ first run, also unearned.
Sophomore Nick Locurto — playing right field in place of Tackett — fielded a bloop single that dropped out of his glove before he could make the throw, guiding Madera home instead of stopping him at third. With personnel stretched thin, Locurto made his first career ACC start on Saturday, finishing 0-for-2 with three putouts and an error.
To be fair, just four Tech players recorded a hit and only one had multiple. Henry Cooke (1-for-4) opened scoring in the third, doubling into the left-field corner and plating Grady after his walk. Ben Watson (2-for-2, two walks) followed with another well-placed single, bringing Cooke around to put the Hokies up 2-0 early. Tackett (1-for-4) hit that inning too, but he and Watson were stranded at the corners after McCann struck out.
Another Watson single and McCann’s 406-foot blast accounted for the only Tech hits the rest of the way. Watson has climbed to a .310 batting average this season and has nine multi-hit forays in his last 14 games. McCann has two homers in his last two outings, which may mark the end of his 10-for-52 ACC-play slump. That’s not how he sees it, though.
“I wouldn’t really call it a slump; I’ve been squaring balls up right at people,” McCann said. “They’ve been playing me with a shift, and I was hitting a lot of balls into that. I’ve doing a good job of pitching me to where they’re playing me, and that has a lot to do with it.”
On the mound, the Hokies employed a season-high 10-pitcher front that finished with just two earned runs allowed, despite seeing its depths in the final inning.
Freshman Logan Eisenreich started, lasting just 1 ⅔ innings after walking himself into a bases-loaded situation with two outs. Righty Preston Crowl took over and retired four straight batters before allowing his first hit, which ushered in Josh Berzonski. He, along with Mathieu Curtis and Jacob Exum, found outs hard to come by, allowing two runs — including a Van De Brake homer — before LeJeune took over in the fifth.
He surrendered three hits, two unearned, before Yagesh relieved him. Luke Craytor took over in the eighth, collaborating with Luke Jackman, Brendan Cowen and Chase Swift — who returned from injury — to keep the Tar Heels off the board for the rest of the game.
According to LeJeune, the staff planned to pitch by committee and play righty-lefty matchups. The strategy worked fine, but Szefc felt the arms could only do so much with the floundering defense behind them.
“If you watch the game, when our shortstop can’t throw the ball across the infield, and it puts X amount of more pitches on those [pitchers’] arms,” Szefc said. “But once he’s not out of the inning, then it kind of blows up other stuff, and that’s when we end up starting to lose a lot of arms. If we play routine defense throughout the game, it’s probably a whole different story and we’re not using 10 arms.”
The Hokies have lost five of their last six ACC games but remain 7-6 against ranked opponents. There are no more top-25 opponents on the rest of their schedule (for now) but difficult matchups, like next weekend’s series at Duke, will come.
But before that, Virginia Tech heads to Richmond to play VCU on Tuesday. It begins at 6:30 p.m. ET on ESPN+. The Rams (12-27) lost the first leg of the home-and-home 13-2 on March 18.
It’ll be a chance to get back on track for the Hokies, whose regional hopes remain well in sight.
“We can hang with anybody,” Watson said. “We’re on track for regional. We’re outperforming what people thought we would do already. Not to send a message that we’re satisfied, because we’re definitely not. We know we have a lot to go. I think we all know that we can beat really good teams, and that’s what we’ll try to do.”
On an injury note, Szefc said that outfielder Jackson Cherry is out with an oblique injury. He called it “a bad injury for a baseball player” and compared it to a hamstring injury in the way it hinders players from twisting and turning.
Cherry joins Garrett Michel (leg, likely out for the season), Treyson Hughes (hip, taking a medical redshirt this year), Andrew Sentlinger (forearm) and Madden Clement (flexor tendons) on the Hokies’ list of injuries.
Box Score: No. 12 North Carolina 7, Virginia Tech 4