SOUTH BEND — An exhausted Jack Radel, ace righthander for Notre Dame baseball, sat silently to coach Shawn Stiffler’s right after pitching the Irish past Clemson and into the second round of the ACC Tournament.
A junior projected as a potential first-round pick in this July’s Major League Baseball draft, Radel earned a public “Thank you” from his coach after throwing 93 pitches on a 92-degree Tuesday evening, May 19 in Charlotte, N.C.
“My guy to my right is ‘him’ again,” Stiffler said after Radel recorded the first 19 outs. “I’ll be looking for one of him for 20 years from now.”
And then the fourth-year Irish coach gave an impassioned plea to young ballplayers everywhere to emulate the patience, diligence and work ethic Radel displayed over his three seasons in South Bend.
“Over the next three weeks, we’re going to see everybody looking for something better,” Stiffler said, referencing the transfer portal. “We’re going to see everybody looking for something easier, something new, something shinier. Everything will become about transactions.
“What (Radel) did is he delayed his gratification. We laid out a plan in front of him. The work had to be done by him. He had to put the work in. He did it. He did it one catch-play at a time, one lift at a time, one sprint at a time.”
A product of Sioux Falls, S.D., Radel now packs 250 pounds of muscle on his prototypical, 6-foot-5 pitcher’s frame. His much-improved fastball was up to 98 mph at times on Tuesday night, and his darting slider and late-moving cutter led to 19 total swing-and-miss strikes.
Eight more strikeouts pushed his season total to 116 or 11.9 per nine innings.
WATCH: “Go be a Jack Radel.” #NotreDame baseball coach Shawn Stiffler praises his self-made ace, challenges young ballplayers to resist the shortcuts of a “microwave popcorn” era in college sports. @NDBaseball#ACCpic.twitter.com/M49ikISBvS
— Mike BerardinoNDI (@MikeBerardino) May 20, 2026
“We see this almost finished product right here,” Stiffler said. “This is not an overnight success. This is a guy that fully trusted Notre Dame, fully trusted our staff and fully trusted himself. Everybody talks about, ‘I’m going to go bet on myself and jump in (the portal).’
“Really what they’re doing is they’re saying, ‘I just want something easier and I want it right now.’ In a world of microwave popcorn and a world of wanting something easier right now, go be a Jack Radel. To all you young kids out there, go be a Jack Radel.”
The Jack Radel Challenge: ‘Go earn it’
In beating Clemson for the second time this season, Radel improved to 8-4 with a 3.29 ERA. He’s come a long way from Sunday starter as a freshman to Saturday starter (behind Rory Fox) as a sophomore to the face of a youth-laden program.
“Go earn it,” Stiffler continued. “Go fight through the ups and the downs and go work. He is the model of what you want to be as a student-athlete. I’m just so proud of him and the man he’s going to become.”
Stiffler paused and smiled as he turned to Radel.
“He’s going to graduate —you are going to graduate — and he’s going to pitch a long, long time in front of a lot of people,” Stiffler said, “and he’s going to have a Notre Dame degree on top of that. Just thrilled for him and his family.”
Notre Dame lost star catcher Carson Tinney to Texas after last season. Radel stayed.
“Coming into this year, it was established that, ‘You need to come back throwing harder, have better stuff,’ and that’s what I worked on,” Radel said. “They had full trust in me to go home and work on that.”
Shuttling back and forth between South Dakota wasn’t ideal for Radel’s offseason workouts, but that was the plan put into action.
“Just being around these coaches for three years has meant a lot to me,” he said. “They care about you as a person, not just a baseball player. Had some stuff happen in my life, like everybody else, and they’ve been totally understanding. It means a lot.”
Mike Berardino covers Notre Dame football for the South Bend Tribune and NDInsider.com. Follow him on social media @MikeBerardino.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Self-made ace RHP Jack Radel leaves his mark on Notre Dame baseball