Virginia Tech split a two-game home series with UNC Greensboro this weekend, salvaging Sunday's 11-9 win after Saturday's 18-13 beatdown exposed a pitching staff that still hasn't figured out how to keep bad games from becoming disasters. The Hokies (27-22) now turn their attention to Clemson, with their NCAA tournament hopes very much alive but very much dependent on what happens next.
Game One: UNCG 18, Virginia Tech 13
Virginia Tech's pitching staff has had a handful of these games this season. The names change — Rutgers, Marshall, Georgia Tech, Miami — but the shape of the afternoon is always the same.
Saturday against UNC Greensboro was the latest, and by most measures, the worst.
"That was probably one of the top three worst-pitched games in the nine years I've been here," head coach John Szefc said. "That was an absolute atrocity of pitching."
What made it particularly hard to swallow was the timing. The Hokies had won ten of their last thirteen. They'd allowed four runs or fewer in six of their last eight games. They were playing their best baseball of the season. And then UNC Greensboro — a Southern Conference team with a losing record — walked into English Field and hung 18 on them.
Brett Renfrow set the tone for how the day would go, falling behind Brantley Truitt on the very first hitter of the game. Truitt singled and stole second, Jacob Budzik dropped in an RBI single, and Luke Holland followed with a first-pitch double to put two more runners in scoring position. Twenty-six pitches in one inning. With Clemson on the horizon and Renfrow already pitching on a short leash, that was enough. But the seven pitchers who followed had similar issues.
Logan Eisenreich, Aiden Robertson, Brendan Yagesh, Preston Crowl, Danny Lazaro and Jacob Exum all struggled to get ahead in counts, which let UNCG's hitters sit on pitches and do damage. Six Spartans went deep — Luke Jenkins hit two, while Jacob Dilley, Jacob Mueller, Budzik and Holland each added one — and 11 of their runs scored by batters who had worked the count to three balls. They drew eight walks, struck out just five times and went 19 three-ball counts deep against a staff that couldn't locate.
"Our pitchers were behind the whole day," Szefc said. "That's all you've really got to know. We went to 19 three-ball counts. It's almost hard to do that. I've never seen it done before — ever."
Ethan Ball, who went 3-for-6 with a double and a home run, thought UNCG had a clear plan walking in. "They were taking big swings on mistake pitches," he said. "It seemed like they had a game plan coming in here. I don't think any of us expected that to happen."
The offense wasn't the problem. Tech actually tied or led five times through the first five innings — Ball's first-inning double gave them a 2-1 edge, Grube's RBI double made it 3-2 in the second, Locurto's two-run shot pushed it to 6-4 in the third, and Gibson's homer and a Hughes RBI single tied it at nine heading into the sixth. But once Holland's three-run shot off Crowl in the eighth made it 16-10, the deficit was too deep to climb out of. Cooke's three-run homer to left in the ninth — his fourth in as many games made the final margin 18-13, but changed nothing about what the afternoon was.
"You put up 13 runs at home," Szefc said. "You can't ask your guys to do much more than that. I don't even know what to say about giving up 18 runs at home. It was like I was watching a different team."
Game Two: Virginia Tech 11, UNCG 9
The Hokies responded.
Griffin Stieg and Ethan Grim combined to keep UNCG in check long enough for the offense to do what it's been doing lately, and Virginia Tech took Sunday's series finale 11-9 to salvage the split and keep their postseason footing intact.
UNCG scored first when Dilley doubled in the third to plate two and Holland's ground-rule double to left-center made it 3-0, but Virginia Tech answered in the second with five runs that flipped the game around. Willie Hurt tripled to right-center to plate Locurto and Daniel, Petrich singled Hurt home, and Grube put a two-run shot to center — his seventh — to make it 5-3. Sam Gates added a 430-foot solo homer in the third, his fifth, and when Hurt went inside-the-park to center in the third — the first of his career — the Hokies had the cushion they needed.
UNCG kept scrapping. Truitt's 398-foot shot in the sixth tied it at eight, and Dilley led off the ninth with a homer to make things briefly interesting. But Swift came on and worked out of a bases-loaded jam — Holland and Budzik had reached behind Dilley's homer — getting Jenkins to foul out and striking out pinch hitter JJ Parsons swinging to close it out. His second save of the season.
Grim picked up the win to improve to 3-4, going 3.1 innings of four-hit, two-run ball with five strikeouts.
Tech is staying home to face Clemson in a three-game must-win ACC series that starts Thursday with a first pitch time of 6 p.m. ET.
