O'Connor's curve ball

It’s worth remembering that not so long ago, the phrases “University of Virginia” and “baseball powerhouse” went together only in moaning jest. Yet today UVA is a legitimate baseball powerhouse, and a May 14 game against Miami demonstrated why Head Coach Brian O’Connor has been so doggone successful.

“My goal as the coach here is to put the team in the position to accomplish something like [making the College World Series] every year,” says Brian O’Connor.

All afternoon Virginia’s pitching was phenomenal—senior Tyler Wilson had a perfect game into the sixth inning, and finished with 11 strikeouts. The hitting was another story, and yet somehow the Cavaliers manufactured just enough runs to beat back one of college baseball’s former titans.

UVA held only a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the sixth, with two outs. The weather all weekend was terrible, but still almost 4,000 people huddled in the unseasonable chill. Hope murmured through the crowd as two runners improbably got on base at first and third thanks to a Miami error, a stolen base and a walk. But UVA’s smallest hitter—literally and statistically—was at the plate.

Junior Keith Werman, while not the team’s “best” player, exemplifies O’Connor’s rep for hard work and small ball. He’s listed 5’7", 150 lbs, and looks even smaller, and his cherubic official picture doesn’t age him up. But playing second base, he moves like a jackrabbit, grabbing almost every quirky ground ball that skips into his gap. Though he started 39 games last year, he had only two fielding errors.

Last year, Miami might have been very afraid with Werman at the plate—his .414 batting average was one of the best in the country. But baseball is a notoriously streaky game, and Werman had slumped to .205 by the Miami series, the lowest among the starters. Moreover, Werman’s specialty play is the sacrifice bunt. It often doesn’t end up a sacrifice because of his speed, but with two outs and a runner trying to get home from third, a bunt wasn’t what UVA needed.

The first pitch slid inside, Werman swung —and snagged it. The ball grounded just past the first baseman into right field, sending a man home. Another improbable, manufactured run for the Cavaliers.

They got one more run in the seventh—which also came with two outs—and needed it to hold off Miami 3-2.

“You can never give up on Keith Werman,” said O’Connor the next day, after a similar performance—great pitching and opportunistic offense—that also resulted in a win, 5-4. “He may be five foot five, five foot six, but his heart’s bigger, there’s no question.”

The two Miami wins moved UVA’s record to 22-5 in the ACC, and 45-6 on the season—winning rates that are almost unheard of in baseball—and solidified its place as the unanimous No. 1 team in the country. 

Pitching and small ball

 

This week, for the eighth year in a row, UVA’s baseball team will play in the NCAA tournament and Charlottesville hosts a four-team regional that begins Friday. If the Cavaliers win, they will likely remain at home for the “Super Regional,” a best-of-three series whose winner will go to Omaha to compete against seven other squads in the College World Series.

Batting third, catcher John Hicks got on base in all but one game during the regular season, but his defense has also been superb.

This kind of consistent baseball success at UVA does not predate Brian O’Connor, hired in 2003 to replace the retiring Dennis Womack, who had helmed the program for 23 years. O’Connor’s success is built on defense—excellent pitching and fielding.

“From a pure baseball standpoint, we pitch and play defense as good as anybody else in the country,” says O’Connor, who for the third time was named ACC coach of the year, in a C-VILLE interview. In person, he’s attentive with strong eye contact, gesticulating hands, and a voice tinged with the ethereal, like a sane version of Crispin Glover. “When you pitch and play good defense like we do, you’re going to have a chance to win every game.”

Even O’Connor, a former college pitcher himself, has rarely had across-the-board pitching of this caliber. His ace is Danny Hultzen, a lefty with a 1.49 ERA who ESPN.com recently predicted will go No. 1 overall in the Major League Baseball draft (it also takes place this week—a major distraction for Hultzen and other juniors and seniors). Pitching throughout the year as the second starter is Tyler Wilson, a senior who is 7-0 on the season.

This year’s revelation has been junior Will Roberts, who was 10-1 during the season and pitched a perfect game against George Washington—the first perfect game in UVA history, and the first in D-1 college baseball since 2002. While he once only started during mid-week games against lesser foes, Roberts has pitched his way into the third starting slot during weekend series.

“Will Roberts really hadn’t put it all together, hadn’t been real consistent his first two years,” O’Connor says. “And he comes out there this year, as a junior, with something to prove. And he’s proven that he’s a very, very talented pitcher.”

This was supposed to be something of a rebuilding year. Last year’s team, composed mostly of veterans from the 2009 team that went to the College World Series for the first time in school history, was one of the favorites to win it all. UVA had home field advantage for the Super Regional against Oklahoma, and Hultzen pitched a win to start the series. But Oklahoma opened up big leads in the first innings of the next two games and Virginia didn’t have the firepower to catch up. This season, UVA had to replace five of its position starters, including its entire outfield—and most notably Jarrett Parker, who was picked in the second round of the MLB draft.

But guys stepped up, a testament to O’Connor and his coaching staff. Senior outfielder David Coleman had waited his turn and it paid off—his .368 batting average is the best of UVA’s “everyday” players. Catcher John Hicks and third baseman Steven Proscia have been the heavy hitters, each with five homeruns and 48 RBIs on the season. (Batting stats are down across the country this year because the NCAA forced a switch to new bats with a smaller sweet spot.)

Still, O’Connor is known as a “small ball” coach, the offense focused on manufacturing runs with base hits, stolen bases and sacrifice bunts, though O’Connor doesn’t think the label is entirely fair.

“A lot’s been made of that,” he says. “I’d say that our offensive style is more—I like to call it opportunistic, that depending on what kind of personnel you have and what their abilities are, you play that style.”

From fourth tier to No. 1

Phillip Templeton, who runs The Korner Restaurant in Fifeville, missed two home games this year—and one of them was Roberts’ perfect game.

Initially expected to rebuild, UVA has instead reloaded. Junior Danny Hultzen is the team’s unquestioned star, and will likely go in the top three overall during this week’s Major League Baseball draft—but other pitchers have stepped up, particularly Tyler Wilson and Will Roberts.

“I was doing the dance team banquet,” he says. “I called over during the sixth inning and was like, ‘What?’”

Templeton is one of the rare UVA baseball fans whose lineage goes back to the Womack era. Since O’Connor arrived for the 2004 season, average attendance has increased from less than 800 to more than 3,000 last year, which ranked No. 19 among all schools.

Though he has season tickets that give him seats behind the dugout, Templeton prefers to hover along the left field line with the diehards, who arrive early with their own chairs to stake out the prime spots. As I chat with Templeton and several other fans before one of the Miami games, the fathers of UVA sluggers Hicks and Proscia walk by, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries.

“See how they do? Every game, they come over and speak to you,” says Mike Anderson, one of the diehards. “It’s just a big family thing. And it used to not be like this, but now it is.”

It’s a remarkable turnaround from 10 years ago, when baseball was on the verge of dropping to little more than club sport status.

As part of a University-wide planning effort, former UVA President John Casteen assembled a task force to look at the athletics department and figure out how to handle an operating deficit that was expected to rise to $47 million over 10 years.

Composed largely of academic faculty, the task force recommended arranging the 24 varsity sports into four tiers. At the top, football and men’s and women’s basketball would get full funding; on the other end of the spectrum, funding would be cut to only “need-based financial aid” for baseball, wrestling, men’s golf, men’s tennis, men’s cross country and men’s outdoor track and field. Men’s indoor track would be cut entirely.

“It was a shockwave that absolutely rocked the department of athletics and our coaches in particular—rocked us to the core,” says Craig Littlepage, who at the time was interim athletic director.

After some public outcry, the Board of Visitors, instead of cutting programs, opted instead to go all in. Student fees would increase to cover costs for Olympic sports, and at the same time, donors were asked to step up to the plate. Now every sport has scholarship funding to the NCAA limit.

“We established the challenge to all those sports that were vulnerable at that point in time to come up with a plan with what you can do, and what it is that we need to provide to help you to thrive,” says Littlepage, “and we are going to find a way of providing what it is you need to be successful.”

Part of baseball’s problem was its stadium. “We had Astroturf that was taken up from the football field that was on the infield of the baseball stadium,” says Littlepage. “The bleachers were splintering, the press box had hornets’ nests in it. There were no lights at the stadium. It was just an embarrassment.” He notes that coaches sometimes wouldn’t even show prospective students the facilities.

A few months after the task force firestorm, UVA announced it would build a new multi-million dollar baseball facility thanks to $2 million in anonymous donations (John Grisham, whose son played on the team, was rumored to be a major donor). Two years later, Womack retired and Littlepage hired O’Connor, who at the time was only 32.

“We met at a hotel right at the Cincinnati, Ohio, airport,” Littlepage says. “Within 10 minutes of Brian O’Connor and I shaking hands, I knew that this was the guy that I was going to try to bring to Charlottesville as our new head coach.”

Virginia wasn’t the only school that wanted O’Connor, who for nine years had been an assistant at Notre Dame. Iowa reportedly was interested, and O’Connor had been a finalist for the job at Fresno State the year prior.

“We needed somebody who knew the college game,” says Littlepage. “That was the unique thing about Brian.”

The hire didn’t make all the Wahoo faithful happy, at least initially. Some wanted Cavalier legend Mike Cubbage, who at the time was a coach with the Boston Red Sox. After some mutual flirtation, Cubbage withdrew from consideration. He told the Boston Globe in July 2003 that UVA wasn’t willing to pay him enough: “The message I was getting was that I didn’t see their commitment to take the program to the next level to compete with the big boys in the ACC.”

It left some alums sour. “A couple of friends of mine wouldn’t even come to a baseball game for four or five years because Cubbage didn’t get hired,” says Templeton. “They’re coming now though.”

Build more, and more will come

At Creighton University, O’Connor majored in business with a concentration in marketing. After a year playing for the minor league team in Martinsville (“It’s not Charlottesville,” he says of his time there), O’Connor returned to Creighton as the pitching coach, bartending at night because the NCAA restricted pay for some assistants at the time.

As for second baseman Keith Werman: “He may be five foot five, five foot six, but his heart’s bigger, there’s no question,” says his coach.

But he didn’t waste his degree—O’Connor’s success is tied to his sales pitch. He was immediately able to market UVA to top recruits even though the baseball team had only made the NCAA tournament three times ever before he arrived.

Some of the sports teams at UVA have seemed to struggle with matching athletic talent to the University’s academic requirements—multiple football recruits have been rejected by the admissions department over the years—but O’Connor says he has no problem with it.

“I think it’s great,” he says. “My feeling is, if they haven’t done the work in the classroom to have this kind of opportunity, then they shouldn’t come here, because one, they don’t deserve to, and secondly, they’re going to have a hard time being successful here.” The baseball team boasts one of the best Academic Progress Rates in all of college sports with a roster dominated by Virginians. 

“That’s always going to be our number one priority,” says O’Connor. “We’re the state university, and if we want to get four or five thousand people in the stands to watch us play, then having the best kids in the state I think helps from that stand point.”

It was the level of recruiting under O’Connor that brought out fans like Charles Anderson, who swore me to secrecy about how early he shows up to stake his seat.

 “When O’Connor came in, and I seen some of the recruits he’s getting—oh yeah, baseball time,” Anderson says, a smile creeping under a baseball cap littered with pins commemorating UVA’s postseason appearances.

Every fan I spoke with adores O’Con-nor. “When you’ve got a coach who every player respects him and feels like they’re with their dad or their family when they’re not, that’s a hell of an accomplishment,” says Mike Walker. “He gets all the praise from me. I don’t want to never see him leave.”

Ray Lamb jumped on the bandwagon two years ago; like Templeton, he gives away his seats to set up shop on the left field line, and says he’s hooked now.

“I’d always read about UVA baseball, but it looked to me, when Womack was here, they didn’t seem to want to go any further than where they were, they were kind of satisfied with the status quo,” says Lamb. “O’Connor, all the credit goes to him. We’re very fortunate. He could be coaching anywhere he wanted to be, really.”

The increasing fan base helped justify a $4 million further expansion of the baseball facility that was completed for the 2010 season.

“We’ve always had great fans, but since we’ve made the stadium expansion, it’s almost like we expand and make more seats and more people just keep showing up,” says pitcher Tyler Wilson. “The crowd’s our 10th man.”

Lamb, Walker and Anderson exemplify UVA baseball fans—including that none of them attended the University. Games have yet to catch on even with current students, who don’t show up to baseball games in the same way that they go to other non-revenue sports like soccer and lacrosse.

“Everybody always cries for a winner, and we’ve been as consistent a winner as you can be and we don’t get a great student following,” says O’Connor. “That being said, I’m saying that to try to encourage them to come out and support it.”

Is Charlottesville a baseball town? “I absolutely think it is,” says O’Connor. “You look at our attendance over the years, just the over all popularity of our team, I think in this community has really, really grown.”

Breaking through

During its final series of the regular season at North Carolina, Virginia clinched the top seed in the ACC tournament and won the division for the second straight year. But it came by default, because of a Georgia Tech loss, and many other streaks came to a desultory end against UNC: John Hicks failed to get on base for the first time this season; Will Roberts’ 17-game winning streak, longest in the nation, was snapped; and Virginia was swept for the first time since 2008. The Cavaliers lost all three games to the Tar Heels, as well as their No. 1 ranking, dropping to between No. 3 and No. 5 in the country.

The series highlighted the cruel whimsy of the baseball gods. Two of those losses were by only one run, and in his game, Hultzen kept UNC scoreless for seven innings. But UVA bats just weren’t connecting at the right times, not like they had in the Miami series, and frustration seemed to mount through the weekend, culminating in the third game with two swinging strikeouts in the ninth inning. The Virginia players looked like they wanted the win almost too much, their hitting discipline blinded by desire.

Will this be the year that O’Connor’s squad breaks through and wins the national title? No ACC team has won the College World Series since Wake Forest in 1955. UVA’s pitching still promises to dominate, but on offense, the team will have to ring the bats more consistently to break that streak.

Eventually, though, chances are that O’Connor’s time will come. He’s only 40, he’s made the NCAA tournament each year since he arrived at UVA, and he continues to recruit the lights out. Four of the top 100 recruits are committed to the Cavaliers for next season.

The bigger question is whether O’Connor’s time comes while he’s still at Virginia.

The Major League isn’t the likely poaching threat. “No interest in it. There’s nothing more rewarding than to see someone coming in at the age of 17 or 18, immature, think they have the world figured out and they really don’t, and…helping them to become a man,” he says. “You don’t get that in professional baseball.”

But there are bigger, more lucrative college baseball programs out there. LSU has 10,000 people show up to games, and has won the College World Series six times, as recently as 2009. Its coach, Paul Mainieri, under whom O’Connor was an assistant at Notre Dame, is guaranteed $625,000 annually and can make almost $1 million with incentives. O’Connor’s base salary is only $140,000 (though it’s supplemented by endorsements and athletic foundation funds). What would happen if LSU or Texas or some of the other big boys come calling? Could O’Connor see himself at Virginia for the rest of his professional life?

“Sure,” he says, but without his usual enthusiasm. “I think my wife would like that. Charlottesville’s a great place to live, that’s for sure. I don’t worry too much about it.”

But then he gets rolling, his eyes light back up, and his hands go in motion. “I think that some people get so consumed in whatever job that they’re in—I’m not saying this about baseball, I’m just talking about all jobs—about what’s next, what’s the next job, what’s the next step for me…that they miss what’s right in front of them and enjoying the situation that they’re in. And a lot of times they don’t necessarily get that next job because they’re consumed with what it takes to get there rather than doing the job that they’re in.

“There’s no dream job for me. This is my dream job.”