It’ll be an unfamiliar foe facing the Diamond Heels when they take Truist Field for the first time this ACC Tournament, namely the Virginia Tech Hokies. The 7th-seeded Hokies beat Notre Dame 17-10 during Wednesday’s action to advance in the bracket, and now UNC will get a look at one of the ACC teams they didn’t play this regular season.
The two halves of Virginia Tech’s season, particularly in conference play have been wildly disparate. They opened ACC play with series losses to Georgia Tech, Virginia, Stanford, Miami, and Boston College, sandwiching a weekend win over Duke. Other than Stanford, those are all pretty good teams, but starting out 7-11 in conference play was still far from ideal. Since then, they’ve won 4 straight series, against N.C. State, Clemson, Pittsburgh, and Cal — a much easier schedule, to be sure, but they’ve also just looked better. They win a lot of Sundays thanks to a deep bullpen and have had a knack for getting timely contributions with the bat without having a real star in their lineup, and should make the Field of 64 fairly comfortably.
That said, the contributions they got on Wednesday were more than timely, as they put up a 17-run explosion for their highest scoring total of the season. ACC All-Freshman team member Ethan Ball reached base 6 times, with 2 home runs, 2 walks, and 2 HBPs, while DH Hudson Lutterman drove in a team-leading 4 while recording a 3/5 line. Everybody in the lineup got a hit as they quickly erased a 4-0 first-inning deficit by putting up a bunch of crooked numbers while reliever Logan Eisenrich calmed things down with a masterful 4.2 innings of 1-run work. The Irish fought back, pulling the score to 12-10 at the stretch, but VT put up a run in the bottom of the 7th, worked a 14-pitch scoreless 8th, and then scored 4 more in the bottom of the 8th to take the air fully out of Notre Dame’s sails.
The win means that the Hokies will have Friday ace Brett Renfrow available to throw against the Heels. Renfrow is a legit MLB Draft prospect with a high-octane fastball that touches 97 to go with a cutter/slider/curve/change mix, and while he’s had an uneven season with a decent-but-not-fantastic 4.65 ERA, he’s gone at least 7 innings in his last 3 ACC starts and allowed 2 runs across them. The righty stays in the zone, with an impressive 86:21 K/BB ratio, and teams that have gotten to him have done so via contact rather than by taking walks — his issues tend to be related to leaving balls in the zone, not with losing command. I said something similar about Pitt when UNC played them, and the Heels responded by being more aggressive at the plate than they had tended to be all season and getting their only home ACC sweep of the year by punishing mistakes in the zone. A similar approach will be needed against Renfrow.
Behind Renfrow, things change in that regard. Other than Renfrow and Saturday starter Griffin Steig, just one of the Hokies’ regular arms — Chase Swift — has a walk rate below 10%, which means they’ve dealt with consistent traffic throughout the season and has led to a lot of pretty high-scoring games. The Hokies have walked the 5th-most batters in the ACC, and while they have decent strikeout numbers, that many free passes helps explain the staff ERA of 6.74, third-worst in the conference. Like I said earlier, they have a lot of arms they can go to, so they can wear down teams in a three-game series if the bats are going, but they have been getting pretty well lit up. They’ve tightened up more than a little during this hot streak, it must be said, but part of that is level of competition — you can see from the fireworks Notre Dame put up that those issues aren’t quite behind them.
Offensively, the Hokies have been pretty mediocre with a knack for doing just enough when things are going well. The aforementioned Ball has been awesome, hitting .304/.403/.607 with 17 doubles and 13 home runs, and he’s playing his best baseball of late. He’s struck out 70 times on the year, but has been a lot better at the plate recently and looks like a problem. They’ve got a few solid bats besides him, including Lutterman, first baseman Ethan Gibson (.927 OPS, 18 XBH), and shortstop Pete Daniel (.470 OBP). They don’t stick out in any one particular area, with lackluster speed, power, contact, and walk/strikeout numbers compared to the conference, but they’ve got some grit and some clutch factor to them that isn’t really quantified by the stats. Add that they’ve played so much better in the back half of this season than the front and it’s a team that’s more dangerous than they look on paper.
The game is currently scheduled for 3:00 PM on Friday on ACC Network, but there’s a chance it gets moved up due to weather.