Virginia Tech claimed a 17-10 victory over Notre Dame on Wednesday evening in the second round of the ACC Tournament at Truist Field in Charlotte, North Carolina — a scoreline more reminiscent of a football afternoon in Blacksburg than a baseball night in the Queen City. But for the Hokies, it was all diamond, all dominance.
The 17 runs matched a season high for Virginia Tech (30-23, 15-15 ACC), backed by a season-best 19 hits as eight players recorded multi-hit performances. The offense was relentless from top to bottom, but no one made a statement quite like freshman Ethan Ball.
It wasn't a clean game from the jump. Starter Ethan Grim faced just five batters and didn't retire a single one of them, allowing three runs before Logan Eisenreich came in to clean up the mess. Eisenreich managed to strand two runners and only let one more score, but the damage was done — Virginia Tech found itself down four before it had even settled in.
The Hokies went down in order on 13 pitches in the bottom of the first, and Fighting Irish starter Ty Uber looked like he was going to make it a long night.
Then Ethan Ball hit a baseball 409 feet to center field.
The leadoff shot in the second cut the deficit to three and seemed to shake something loose in the lineup. Hudson Lutterman walked, Nick Locurto doubled, and Owen Petrich followed with a two-out, two-RBI double to bring the Hokies within one.
Notre Dame (31-24, 13-17 ACC) pushed one back in the third on a Mason Barth single — the only run Eisenreich would allow in his 4.2 innings of work —, but Ball answered immediately, parking a 416-foot shot to dead center with Ethan Gibson on second to tie the game at five. Locurto doubled in Lutterman right after to give Virginia Tech the lead, and from that point, the game belonged to the Hokies.
Eisenreich was excellent in his time on the mound, striking out six and doing exactly what a bullpen arm needs to do in a tournament setting — keep it manageable until the offense figures things out.
Virginia Tech kept adding from there. A Lutterman RBI single and a perfectly executed Sam Gates squeeze play in the fifth made it 8-5. The Hokies then sent 10 men to the plate in the sixth, with Lutterman again doing the most damage, lining a two-RBI single with the bases loaded as part of a four-run inning. Notre Dame clawed back a bit — Shane Miranda cleared the bases with a double in the seventh to bring it within two — but Gibson scratched an RBI single shortly after to push the lead back to three, and the eighth inning put it out of reach for good.
Four hits, an error, a hit-by-pitch, and a walk added four more runs, and Madden Clement came in and sat the Irish down in order in the ninth to close it out.
The game took four hours and eight minutes and featured 28 combined hits, and Notre Dame went through eight pitchers trying to slow it all down. They failed.
Ball finished with two home runs, four runs scored, and 12 total bases, all program records for a single ACC Tournament game. His two home runs tied one as well. With the win, Virginia Tech locked up its NCAA Tournament bid and extended its streak of 30-win seasons to five straight.
North Carolina, the two-seed, is next on Friday at 3 p.m ET.
