game preview: South Carolina

Date/Time: Friday, June 24; 7:00

TV: ESPN

History against the Gamecocks: 27-36

Last matchup: USC 7, UVA 1; 6/21/11; Omaha, NE (College World Series)

Last game: UVA 8, Cal 1 (6/23); USC 7, UVA 1 (6/21)

Blogs of the enemy: Garnet and Black Attack, Leftover Hot Dog

South Carolina possible lineup:

C: Robert Beary (.290-3-35)
1B: Christian Walker (.358-10-62)
2B: Scott Wingo (.345-4-28)
3B: Adrian Morales (.288-3-40)
SS: Peter Mooney (.276-3-36)
LF: Jake Williams (.274-2-38)
CF: Jackie Bradley, Jr., (.264-6-27)
RF: Evan Marzilli (.297-3-31)
DH: Brady Thomas (.313-4-40)

Pitching probables:

LHP Danny Hultzen (12-3, 1.41, 157 K's) vs. LHP Michael Roth (13-3, 0.97, 103 K's)

South Carolina's bullpen:
RHP John Taylor (7-1, 1.17, 63 K's)
LHP Steven Neff (3-1, 2.45, 29 K's)
RHP Jose Mata (3-0, 1.76, 16 K's)
LHP Tyler Webb (3-1, 3.21, 28 K's)
RHP Matt Price (6-3, 2.12, 68 K's, 18 sv)

Last night's game was, well, it was kinda like Tuesday's game in reverse.  Like South Carolina on Tuesday, UVA did enough to win on their own but used mistakes by the opposition to make the score uglier.  No matter how "loose" Cal was as claimed by the ESPN commentators (all....week....long) they didn't play like it on the field.  The Golden Bears helped the Hoos' cause tremendously by throwing 55-foot curveballs, heaving force-out balls into right field, hitting three batters (ok, two different ones, with Chris Taylor being victimized twice), and misplaying a number of batted balls, the sun probably being a factor in this last set of mistakes.  UVA ruthlessly took advantage of Cal's miscues.  Some led directly to UVA runs (center fielder Matthews's three-base error on Kenny Swab's single that turned it into an unofficial inside-the-park home run; wild pitches) and others took runs off the board for Cal (leadoff hitter Anthony Booker sliding past second base after initially stealing successfully; the next batter doubled.)  A season to remember for Cal fans, but not that game.

Tyler Wilson pitched magnificently, of course.  He kept the Cal batters off balance for 7 2/3 innings, inducing a ton of harmless infield (and many foul) popups.  Cody Winiarski finished off the GBs with little trouble.  UVA will need that kind of performance again today from Danny Hultzen.

All UVA fans, regardless of interest in baseball, should really be tuning in tonight, for what will possibly (but hopefully not) be Danny Hultzen's last appearance in a Virginia uniform.  There shouldn't be any doubt Hultzen is the most dominant pitcher in UVA history; I don't think I'll get much argument when I say he's simply the best baseball player in UVA history too.  Truthfully, Hultzen has established himself as one of the best athletes in UVA history, period; right up there with Ralph Sampson and Ed Moses.

And this is a fitting stage for an athlete of his caliber.  Omaha, the College World Series, in an elimination game against the defending national champs and their ace pitcher, Michael Roth.  The odds are stacked against him.  Hultzen will need better run support from his teammates than they gave Will Roberts on Tuesday, but if there's any pitcher in the land that can win a 1-0 game, you know who it is.  If the Hoos lose this game, it by no means tarnishes Hultzen's legacy, but winning this one would be a hell of a way to shine it up a little.  But this is the guy you want on the mound.  Period.

There's a tough uphill road to climb, but step 1 of 3 is out of the way.  If the Hoos lose tonight, they'll still have achieved the best finish in school history.  If they win, then it's on to a winner-take-all on Saturday.  Cross your fingers.

seriously the best weekend review ever

That was awesome and nobody can tell me different.  The best way to respond to an ACC championship by the baseball team is to one-up that sucker the next day and win a national title.  I doubted it could happen even up to the day before the Denver game.  You doubted it could happen.  Don't lie, you did.  19 goals to Duke will do that to you.

There's so much to be said about the fifth national title in UVA lacrosse history that it's hard to know which should come first.  How about we start with Dom Starsia, since his is the evaluation I seem to have screwed up the most?  Contrary to the idea that his career is tailing off, Coach Starsia pulled off what might well be his best season of coaching ever.  He changed up his whole philosophy.  This year he couldn't out-athlete the competition like he likes to do, so he shuffled players around, implemented a zone defense, and he and his crew of assistants got together and figured out how to change the offense from a one-man-at-a-time show to a working machine.  This season I've harped on the unsustainability of having more than half your goals be unassisted; Inside Lacrosse points out that in the four tournament games, 74% of UVA's goals had an assist attached to them.  This is more fun to watch by far, more successful, and ultimately the result of a focus by the coaching staff to make a concerted change in the way the offense attacks the net.  You could brush that off and claim it was forced upon them by the removal of the Brattons from the equation, but you and I both know that not every coach is savvy enough to know he needs to radically switch gears and talented enough to make it work.

And on top of it, Starsia, as evidenced by his interviews and the things the mike caught him saying to his team ("now go shake their hands, they deserve it") is as classy an individual as any that we have coaching here.

So there's one kind of leadership for you.  Then you have the players, especially captain Bray Malphrus, that got their teammates together and demanded accountability.  Malphrus is one of the team's captains, along with John Haldy, Adam Ghitelman, and Steele Stanwick.  Would this team be here without the leadership they brought?  I'd venture to say no.  The season would've ended early, probably in the first round, the team would have an unheard of six losses, and the only narrative would be about how the whole thing fell apart after last year's drama.  The laid-back Haldy is the perfect foil for the fiery and hyper-competitive Malphrus, and the combination was precisely the medicine this team needed after last year's troubles and another heartbreaking loss to nemesis Duke.  Malphrus plans to kick terrorist ass in the military after graduation and I'd say he'll do very, very well in the military environs.  Next year's team will have little trouble filling in the gaps on the field left when these seniors depart (and that's meant as a compliment to the rest of the team, not a knock on the seniors) but they'll need to make a very concerted effort to fill the leadership gaps.

If there's one on-field hole to fill next year, it'll be in net.  It seems like Ghitelman's been in there forever, and he took some real lumps early on from disapproving fans.  But he leaves UVA as the NCAA's third-winningest goalie of all time with 50 victories.  In a way I'm especially happy to see Ghitelman get this trophy because it'd be a shame to be that good for four years and come away empty-handed in the trophy department.

Other things I think:

- Steele Stanwick was held almost completely off the scoresheet, but with 20 points in the previous three games, he's made the Tewaaraton voting awfully interesting.  There's a school of thought that says no Final Four = no Tewaaraton for you, and Stanwick was the only candidate on the field in Baltimore.  That he got there by wildly outplaying the previous prohibitive favorite, Cornell's Rob Pannell, makes it even tougher to vote against him.  The trophy will be awarded Thursday.  If Stanwick doesn't win it won't be a travesty of justice, but if he does it won't be a shock any more.

- Crystal ball time: In February you learn that UVA will make it to the championship game in Baltimore.  (That would've saved a lot of gnashing of teeth in April.)  In that game:

• You'll see zero goals from Rhamel Bratton, Shamel Bratton, Steele Stanwick, or Chris Bocklet, and the only goal scorers at all will be Colin Briggs, Matt White, and Nick O'Reilly,
• UVA will lose the faceoff battle 12-7,
• UVA will also lose the groundballs battle and be outshot,
• Top defender Matt Lovejoy will be out from shoulder surgery,
• UVA will be shut out in the first quarter

And your prediction?  Yes, I think losing 16-4 sounds about right.  Actually winning instead is a real testament to the defense and the efficiency of the offense.

- I didn't hear any major horror stories from people in the overwhelmingly pro-Terp crowd in Baltimore.  John Tillman seems like a stand-up guy and the Maryland team doesn't seem to act too bad.  Admittedly the Terps probably had at least as good a reason for neutral fans to root for them as we did, maybe better.  And it was cool to have an all-ACC final.  Still, it never hurts to have the occasional reminder that Maryland fans can be the shittiest dickbags this earth has ever seen.

- I'll have a whole separate post on 2012 lax in the not-far-off future.  National championships have a way of brightening the future.

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It wasn't too bad a redemption story for the baseball team, either, erasing all memory of that final-week sweep by Carolina by winning the ACC title.  And not the cheap way, either: a 4-0 weekend.  Because of tiebreakers, the Hoos had locked up a spot in the title game against FSU before the Saturday rematch against Carolina, so, as predicted, Danny Hultzen was held back til Sunday and Cody Winiarski pitched against UNC.  And won anyway.

Then UVA picked up a 7-2 victory against FSU in a very decidedly non-UVA fashion: by smacking home runs.  All seven runs came that way.  This caused the FSU Rivals site to go all George Washington on us, mixed in with a little just-a-couple-plays-away Pete Hughes action: their description of the game was, "Three bad pitches."  Seminole starter Hunter Scantling echoed the "two bad pitches" line, except what he actually said was "one bad pitch" instead, which I guess means that when John Barr was hit by a pitch to put him on base ahead of Proscia's jack, that was a good pitch.

Proscia was the tournament MVP, by the way, on account of hitting that home run that would turn out to be a game-winner, and going 7-for-16 on the weekend.  Kenny Swab and Chris Taylor also made the all-tournament team, and Tyler Wilson was left off for reasons I can only assume involve it not being fair that UVA would have so many players on the team.  UNC's Patrick Johnson made it instead, for doing the exact same thing Wilson did (mow down Wake Forest) except without the part where Wilson also burned through Florida State in relief.  In the championship game.  So that makes sense.

So the Hoos get the autobid to the NCAA tournament, I guess, but the #1 seed label means they probably didn't need it.  (Y'know....probably.)  They'll see some familiar faces in the Charlottesville regional: East Carolina, an OOC opponent the last two years; St. John's, which comes to Davenport for regional play for the second year in a row; and Navy, which actually isn't all that familiar but wutever.  You might think that our old buddy Tim Weiser finally did us a solid by giving us the #1 seed, but you'd be wrong: assuming UVA makes it out of its own regional, Weiser handed the Hoos Pac-10 champ UCLA and their rotation of doom (with potential #1 pick Gerrit Cole) as a likely opponent.  THANKS DOOD

The baseball win gives UVA five ACC champeenships for the year, which ties us with Maryland for the season's most with five.  Our five: men's tennis, rowing, baseball, and men's and women's swimming and diving.  This is as good a time as any to brag about Virginia's ACC dominance.  In the years since ACC expansion (so, starting with the 2004-2005 season), here's the rundown of schools and their ACC championships:

1. Virginia - 37
2. FSU - 26
3. Duke - 25
4. UNC - 21
5. Maryland - 16
6. Ga. Tech - 14
7. Va. Tech - 11
8. Clemson - 8
9. NC State - 6
10. Miami - 5
11. Wake Forest - 5
12. Boston College - 1

UVA's 37 championships (in 7 years) break down like so:

• 6 each: Men's swimming & diving; men's tennis; rowing
• 4: Women's swimming & diving
• 3 each: Men's cross country; women's lacrosse
• 2 each: Baseball; men's lacrosse; men's soccer
• 1 each: Men's outdoor track & field; women's soccer; wrestling

Other accomplishments in this distinguished field:

- In each of the last seven years, only one of them saw another ACC school pick up more championships than Virginia.
- That year was 2006-2007, when UVA had three.  That's the lowest total in any of the seven seasons, but every other school has had at least one year of just two or fewer.
- UVA has otherwise picked up at least five in each season.
- UVA's six ACC championships in 2008-2009 and 2007-2008 would be the highest single-season total for any school in the expansion age - nobody else has ever had more than five - but....
- UVA broke that record in 2009-2010 with seven ACC titles.

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Busy week coming up, what with overdue recruiting board updates, and I also can't wait for the customary introduction to our latest basketball recruit, Justin Anderson.  Justin Anderson is the five-star we stole from Maryland, and I'll probably never get tired of using that phrase and may eventually just abbreviate it TFSWSFM because that is just so damn catchy.

But it's even more important that you know this: June 8 is the official Blog Birthday, marking three years of service to the Wahoo community.  That's a week from tomorrow.  Around these parts we celebrate birthdays by giving out presents, not receiving them, and that means the 3rd annual Cavalier of the Year Award.  In the near future, I'll unveil the 12 nominees that I think are most deserving of recognition as the top Virginia athlete of the year.  Over the course of a couple weeks, I'll profile each and tell you why they're on the list, and then you the fans will have the privilege of voting on the winner.  There's no awards ceremony, trophy presentation, or scholarship donation in the name of the winner (yet - the 20th annual award will be a black-tie affair, you just wait and see.)  For now, just a goofy Photoshop.  But the voting is fun.

weekend review

I've been watching baseball a long time - longer than any other sport I like - and I haven't seen too many series that put the capricious nature of the sport on display like this weekend's series against Maryland. A sweep, by the way. Which looked as if it was going to be in some danger during the first game of Saturday's doubleheader.

If you're in need of evidence that the baseball gods are the most demanding of all the other sports - perhaps combined - witness the 8th inning of game 2 of the Maryland series. Down 2-1, things were looking dark until Maryland center fielder Korey Wacker caught the final out of the bottom of the 7th and opted against the standard practice of rolling the ball nonchalantly back to the mound for the pitcher to use. Instead he spiked it. Hard. And deliberately. Leave it to Maryland to find new ways to show up the opposition before the game is even over. This violation of the Code was not met by either UVA or the baseball gods with acceptance, and in retaliation the gods turned Maryland's normally sure-handed left-side infielders into Booty the Clown. After they themselves recorded assists on the first two outs of the inning. UVA took advantage by singling home a run to tie, and then brought Kenny Swab to the plate, who hit the pitcher's offering so hard that it bounced past the diving first baseman into foul territory for a base hit - after first ricocheting off the pitcher himself. And who was this hard luck pitcher who saw his infielders twice play an ill-timed game of kickball to put two on with two out and then felt the winning base hit slam into his ankle before he ever saw it coming? Korey Wacker.

UVA scored 22 runs in the series - 17 of them in three innings. The final margin of the third game was provided in the second inning when UVA plated four runs, and the first game saw the floodgates open in the fourth as UVA broke the scoreboard. It doesn't go past nine runs per inning on the line score, see. People arriving late to the game must have wondered how 1 + 2 + 1 + 0 = 14.

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The lacrosse team could have used some luck, because once again they started the game off flat and fell short on their furious comeback. Aiiyy. Oh, and by flat I mean shitty. I might have said this before, but our offense looks like Hokie basketball. One guy runs around a little to see if he can shake his man. When he can't, he passes to someone else, who tries. When he can't, he passes to someone else who tries again. Eventually someone either coughs up the ball or shoots, the latter with mixed results and not often the desired one. Motion without the ball is nonexistent at times, and when finally someone does put himself in position to receive a pass that could actually do some damage to the scoreboard, he lets it fly right past the stick. The ACC schedule is coming up, and it's gonna be awful hard to even go 2-1 if whatever that was makes any more appearances.

Even Adam Ghitelman was less than his usual solid self, but that might be because the defense thinks that other teams run their offense the same as we do.

After two weeks of doing lacrosse bracketology, a few games on TV, and a little over half a season, the lax landscape looks like Syracuse and a bunch of teams separated by nothing. Teams 2 through 10 in the rankings don't seem to be any different from each other, and the next 10 are probably capable of beating anyone in the top 10 as well. So while the good news is we're clearly no worse than any of the other contenders except maybe Cuse (which Villanova demonstrated is not invincible by losing 5-4 in the very last minute of the game) we're also clearly no better unless we figure out how to play more than half a game.

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Other stuff:

- The lady swimmers were 13th and the men a very, very solid 8th at the NCAA nationals these past two weekends. The men were headlined by a second-place relay and the first individual national championship since 2000 when Ed Moses was doing his thing. Matt McLean not only won the 500 freestyle, he blew away the competition by nearly four seconds. Yes, that's an eternity. He's the third swimmer at UVA to win a national title and he beat the event's defending champ en route to it.

- Better cross-pollination is something I wanted to see in the unsolicited suggestion box post I wrote a while back, so I'm pleased about the lacrosse/football extravaganza this weekend. Because Maryland is the lax opponent, Hit A Twerp With A Stick Week is underway and it should be a good crowd for the game. Even more betterer is that the spring game (as well as lax) will be on ESPN3. It's great that the admin is getting on board with the '10s. I'm slightly selfishly annoyed about the ESPN3 thing on account of shelling out $30 for the live video package - part of the attraction of which was the spring game which is now free to all - but regardless, the fact that they have it on the video package is a poor reason not to open it up to ESPN3 if ESPN is willing.

- We're #1 again in 2 of 5 baseball polls. I don't care too much because it puts a target on your back and doesn't get you to Omaha, but some do, so there you go. Annoying siderant: why the hell is ACC baseball broken up into divisions?

- Georgia Tech has a new basketball coach, and hooray it's not Richmond's Mooney or VCU's Smart or anyone you thought might get the job. It's Dayton's Brian Gregory. Gregory's got a decent record at Dayton but this is not the proverbial home-run hire. Instead of swinging for the fences, GT choked up on the bat. Chances are excellent that he's an improvement over Paul Hewitt in the X's and O's department but I'm not sure we'll see GT earning a first-round bye in the ACC tournament any time soon.