106-23.
It may take a moment to process this score’s lopsidedness, but it is indeed the margin by which the undefeated No. 14 Virginia baseball team has outscored its opponents the last seven games. In the Cavaliers’ latest game against Florida State — the preseason No. 6-ranked team nationally and a perennial baseball powerhouse — the result also was familiar, as Virginia cruised to a 15-2 victory at Davenport Field Friday.
“I don’t know what’s going on offensively — I can’t explain it,” Virginia coach Brian O’Connor said. “We’re just in one of those streaks right now where we’re just swinging the bats really, really [well] throughout our lineup.”
The Cavaliers (15-0, 4-0 ACC) and the Seminoles (9-6, 1-3 ACC) were scheduled for a three-game series, but games two and three were cancelled because of wet field conditions.
With Friday’s win and top-ranked Georgia’s first two losses of the season in a weekend series against Alabama, Virginia stands as the only undefeated team in the nation. After entering the season unranked and picked to finish fourth in the Coastal Division of the ACC, the No. 18 Cavaliers will surely climb still higher in this week’s poll, which comes out Tuesday.
“We’re just trying to ride this as long as we can,” sophomore right fielder Dan Grovatt said. “It’s a lot of fun.”
Almost as impressive as the Cavaliers’ explosive offensive production has been the pitching of freshman Danny Hultzen, who improved to 4-0 on the season with his most impressive outing to date. Hultzen rarely let the Seminoles put the ball in play, allowing just one earned run on four hits and striking out 13 in seven innings of work. The 13 punchouts included 11 swinging, and seven consecutive strikeouts from one out in the first to two outs in the third.
“When he has command of his off-speed pitches, and then can throw his fastball with the velocity he does and the command he does, that’s a special pitcher,” O’Connor said. “He’s not perfect, but he’s been pretty close to perfect this year up until this point.”
Although Hultzen had thrown 98 pitches and held a 13-0 lead through six innings on a chilly evening at Davenport Field, O’Connor had Hultzen toeing the mound in the seventh. While Hultzen appeared to have enough energy left for another inning, O’Connor said, he also wanted to test the freshman’s stamina, who chose to attend Virginia after being drafted in the 10th round of the MLB draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“There’s gonna be games that he’s gonna need to go 110 pitches,” O’Connor said. “I wanted to see what he still had left in the tank in the seventh inning, and he still had it.”
Offensively, Virginia compiled 14 hits, as every ball the Cavaliers made contact with seemed to fall. Following a scoreless first inning, the Cavaliers made their first offensive surge against Florida State starting pitcher freshman Sean Gilmartin in the bottom of the second. With Virginia runners on second and third with one out, freshman catcher John Hicks popped what appeared to be a routine fly ball to shallow centerfield. With the Florida State infield in and sophomore centerfielder Tyler Holt playing deep in cavernous Davenport Field, however, the ball fell harmlessly in front of Holt, scoring one runner and moving the other to third.
Hicks then moved to second after junior catcher Franco Valdes grounded into a fielder’s choice to score another run, and sophomore left fielder John Barr smacked a two-out line drive to right to score Hicks for the final run of the inning.
The Cavaliers followed with 10 runs combined in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings, but it was the three-run second that was the springboard for the rest of the night.
“Once we got through the lineup once and started to figure [Gilmartin] out a little bit, we were able to get a few knocks in and some scoring opportunities, and drive some guys home,” O’Connor said.
The Cavaliers also managed to hit two homeruns — both two-run shots — as Grovatt hit his third of the year in the fifth inning and Hicks followed with his third of the season in the sixth.
With the two long balls, the Cavaliers added to their vastly augmented power numbers. Virginia already has 17 homeruns this season, after knocking just 25 out of the park in last year’s 61-game season.
What O’Connor is most pleased about, however, is that his team has remained eager to put runners on and advance them in any way possible, in what he has referred to as an “opportunistic offense.”
“The thing I really like about our offensive ballclub is that we still haven’t lost what we do well too, and that’s steal bases and put pressure on the other team,” O’Connor said. “We need to continue to play that style of offense, and also knowing that we can also step up and hit a three-run homerun when we need to, too.”
Gilmartin got his first loss of the season, giving up four earned runs on six hits in four-plus innings after entering the evening with a 3-0 record and a 2.31 ERA. Poor fielding didn’t help the Seminoles’ cause, as they committed five errors.
“I think defensively, that’s very uncharacteristic of Florida State,” O’Connor said. “It being 35, 38 degrees might have something to do with it.”
The lopsided loss to Virginia will not help Florida State in the national rankings, as the team continued one of the worst starts in program history. This is the second straight conference series loss for the Seminoles, who dropped two of three games to then-unranked Boston College in Tallahassee the previous weekend — their first opening ACC series loss in school history. These struggles also have occurred in the context of a dark time for Florida State athletics, as baseball was among 10 sports found to have committed academic violations, resulting in a four-year probationary period for the athletics department, according to a report released by the NCAA March 6.
Virginia, meanwhile, will look to continue rolling against Marshall Tuesday and Canisius Wednesday at Davenport Field.
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