It’s February, and tomorrow’s high temperature is forecasted at 40 degrees. The Virginia baseball team, however, could not be more excited to get to the ballpark.
“For five months, they’ve been competing against each other,” coach Brian O’Connor said. “When there’s somebody else in the other dugout, it means a lot more.”
The Cavaliers confidently head into their season-opening series against Bucknell. Senior righthander Andrew Carraway will start the opening game Friday after coming off an impressive season in which he finished 4-3 with a 4.06 ERA. Freshman Danny Hultzen earned the highly sought-after position of Saturday starter, and will open one of the games of the early-season doubleheader. Players also expect the remaining underclassmen to make important contributions.
“I like [the team] a lot,” junior lefthander Matt Packer said. “The younger guys we have, the sophomores, that played a lot last year — they’re really hitting well and playing well. We’re really coming together as a team.”
Bucknell’s pitching staff also will rely on several young players. While the Bison’s opening-day starter, sophomore righthander Dylan Seeley, is coming off a season in which he posted a 4-4 record along with a 4.77 ERA, the team’s other three starters combine for only seven career starts between them.
In past seasons, Virginia has focused mainly on hitting for average and less on hitting for power. Only one player, the now-graduated Jeremy Farrell, hit more than six home runs for Virginia last season.
“Our park’s not really built for a lot of home runs,” sophomore infielder Phil Gosselin said. “We’re going to have to manufacture runs and hit balls in the gap, and steal bases, and do a lot of those kind of things.”
The Cavaliers do have some hitters who could add some power to the lineup. Sophomore rightfielder Dan Grovatt leads all returners with a .481 slugging percentage, which included 22 doubles and three home runs on the year. Gosselin ranked third on the last season’s team with a .433 slugging percentage.
“Our emphasis is never gonna be on hitting homeruns, but it just so happens that in this preseason, we’ve hit quite a few,” O’Connor said. “We’ll see as it moves a long, but I think there’s some guys that really have a chance to do some damage.”
Bucknell also boasts several talented batsmen, but will have to deal with the losses of Jason Buursma and Mark Angelo, who both graduated last year. Buursma led the team in home runs and the two shared the top spot in team RBIs. Among returning players, senior infielder Dane Grandizio led the Bison with a .333 batting average last season.
Heading into the spring, the Cavaliers are seeking to reverse a negative trend. Virginia has qualified for the playoffs in each of the last four years, but has not advanced past the regional round once.
O’Connor, however, remains confident about his team’s ability to break its losing streak in the playoffs this year.
“We don’t worry too much about getting over the hump of the regional,” O’Connor said. “You’ve gotta get to that hump first is what I tell the players, and if we consistently make a run at the NCAA tournament, eventually that will happen to this program, and I believe it’ll happen this year.”
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