It’s not uncommon for college baseball coaches to make in-season adjustments, but the Cavalier staff has made mid-season tweaks an art form. This season, Virginia’s coaches turned that creative eye to the pitching rotation and it has turned the momentum around for the team.
The coaches did a makeover with the pitching rotation following the Boston College series and it has paid huge dividends. Entering that early April weekend, UVA’s weekend rotation consisted of Connor Jones on Friday, Daniel Lynch on Saturday, and Tommy Doyle for the finale on Sunday. Virginia’s closer was Alec Bettinger.
At that time, the bullpen ERA was 4.99 and the Cavalier starters sported a pedestrian 3.79 ERA. UVA entered the BC series with a 19-12 record and had fallen outside the top 25 in the national rankings.
All the way back to the opening weekend in Myrtle Beach when Coastal Carolina rallied for a 5-4 win in its final two at-bats, the Hoos had seen potential wins slip away with late-inning runs. Coastal, East Carolina, Wake Forest, and ODU all fell in that category. In other situations like games with Duke, NC State, and VCU, early inning troubles led to uphill climbs on the scoreboard and eventually losses.
The coaches did not panic, but started to make some pitching changes.
Doyle moved to bullpen in the Boston College series to try his hand at closing after starting in his first six outings and seven of his first eight. Coach Brian O’Connor moved Bettinger to the Sunday starter position and took lefty Adam Haseley from his established mid-week starting role and moved him to Saturday and replaced him in the mid-week slot with Lynch.
Pitching coach Karl Kuhn says that you go into the season with a plan but with a limited body of work from certain players, it’s difficult to know how the player will respond.
“Any time you think you have a pretty good plan or idea, the kid will invariably tell you whether what you think is right is right or not,” Kuhn said. “We were trying to figure that out and Daniel did really well in the preseason and he had a great first start. It just seemed like the thing we needed to do for the team at the onset and then things changed and we saw that Adam was still strong and that it would be better for our team to make that switch. It turns out that it works out better for [Lynch], but more importantly for the team. It doesn’t put a lot of pressure on Daniel as a freshman and subsequently, you end up taking the pressure off of Tommy as well.”
One player that sees the impact of the changes more than most is catcher Matt Thaiss, who says personality has a lot to do with pitching roles.
“[The coaches] know where guys fit,” Thaiss said. “If anything, it’s more of a personality thing. With Tommy Doyle, his personality fits him as a closer. Alec Bettinger wasn’t personality wise a closer, but he’s done a great job so far as starter. I think they see that in them. Of course, they see stuff. They see how they handle themselves with poise, but I think personality plays a big part in it. You have to have a certain personality for each role in the pitching staff. I think they do a great job doing that.”
Thaiss is also a key component of the team’s pitching success overall and during the recent turnaround. Part of his task is to understand how the changes in roles impacts his pitchers’ psychology.
“A perfect example is Tommy Doyle,” Thaiss said. “When he was a starter, you had to keep him calm, cool, relaxed. It’s turned out that he’s been better as a closer because you can get into him, get him riled up. He gets fired up, comes in, does a great job and shuts the door,” Thaiss said.
The moves have paid off all across the board.
In the five series since Bettinger and Haseley joined the starting rotation, UVA’s weekend starters are 8-3 with a 2.61 ERA in 100 innings (6.7/start). Doyle, meanwhile, has struck out 18 batters in 14 innings in his nine bullpen appearances, earning three saves and posting a 1.93 era. The Hoos own a 14-6 record since the switch, representing a winning percentage improvement from .612 to .700 since the moves. That included an eight-game winning streak that started at then No. 1 Miami in the series clincher and just ended Sunday in a 5-4 loss to Georgia Tech.
With 11 collegiate starts under his belt, including a College World Series start in the championship series last summer against Vanderbilt, Kuhn was confident that Haseley could make the move to the weekend rotation and produce. He said that the switch still requires process and timing to get it right.
“Adam was pitching on Tuesdays, he was getting his pitch count up and one week you dial him back a little bit,” Kuhn said. “Then you move him to Sunday, or Saturday, or however we did it the first time we did it. So it’s not just waving a wand. You can’t just do it because all of a sudden you feel like you need to do it immediately. There has to be some thought and some planning to it.”
[tweetthis url=”http://bit.ly/1TiL9gP”]”They have an incredible sense of selflessness which seems to be a standing trait for the players in our program.”[/tweetthis]
Haseley has responded by going six innings or more in four of his six starts with a 2.13 ERA. The southpaw struggled with Georgia Tech’s right-handed heavy line-up Sunday and gave up five earned runs, his highest total in any career start. Haseley’s 2-3 record in these six starts is deceiving as the offensive support has been sparse (3.83 runs per game) and the defense has been shaky with numerous miscues and seven scored errors.
Bettinger’s weekend was more satisfying than Haseley’s as he delivered his best game as a Wahoo. On Saturday night, he tallied a complete game, 103-pitch effort in Virginia’s 9-4 win over the Jackets that sealed the series. Coach O’Connor praised the junior righty for keeping his pitch count down and staying out of hitter friendly counts.
“He’s starting to do a better job commanding his fast ball and he stayed away from the 2-1, 3-1 counts that I thought he had trouble with when we were at Pitt and down at Miami.,” O’Connor said.
While most players aren’t fond of the exam break, Bettinger said 2016’s hiatus gave him a chance to evaluate his pitching mechanics and identify some areas he wanted to correct.
“I went back on film and looked at this fall and the exam break was huge because it gave me plenty of time to go out there and get some live work,” Bettinger said. “I wasn’t moving my feet as fast as I should have and I was kind of going through the motions out there and I wasn’t as quick with my feet.”
Obviously the exam break work made a difference for Bettinger against Georgia Tech.
As successful as these coaching maneuvers have been over the past six weeks have been, for some players it’s been a season-long transition that has finally started to pay off too.
Junior college transfer Tyler Shambora is the clear example in that regard as he certainly emerged as a critical part of Virginia’s bullpen. He’s served in a long reliever role. A starter at St. Petersburg College, O’Connor said the junior pitcher has made the adjustment from starter to the bullpen and proven to be someone the coaches can trust. That could mean he’s needed to face one batter or to help the club recover and eat some innings when a starter is faltering a la former Cavalier Whit Mayberry.
Shambora has worked in 20 games, all in relief, and allowed just one run over his last 18 frames. He’s had 12 strikeouts in that span. Over the last five games in which Shambora has appeared, the Hoos have gone 4-1.
“Shambora was a starter at his junior college and he’s made a nice transition to pitching out of the bullpen,” O’Connor said. “You’ve got to have a guy like that. I’ve always believed that. Mayberry was a great example. If a starter struggles, and that’s going to happen, someone that gives you long relief to get it to your guys toward the end of the game. He’s done a really nice job of that this season. “
Clearly the changes have created some momentum for the Cavaliers.
Entering the 17-game stretch following the Boston College series, the Hoos stood at 21-14 overall and 7-8 in the ACC. They were in the eighth spot for the 2016 ACC Baseball Championship. The schedule over those 17 games would feature 13 opponents ranked in the top 30 of the RPI at the time, while UVA sat at No. 44. Within that daunting schedule, half of the 17 games were part of an eight-game road trip.
Thoughts of hosting another NCAA Regional were a pipe dream.
Since Kuhn and O’Connor worked their magic – not with a wand as Kuhn indicated – the team has really rallied since losing the Boston College series. Over the 17 games since the trip to BC, UVA has gone 13-4 (.765) to get to 33-18 on the season. The Hoos’ ACC mark is now 16-11 (11-3 since changes) and the Hoos are guaranteed at worst the fifth seed in the ACC Tournament and, depending on how the standings play out, they could potentially climb as high as third.
Kuhn said while the coaches certainly move the chess pieces around, he credits the players with the success since ultimately they have to accept the roles and then execute.
“I think we get too much credit and too much blame,” Kuhn said. “I think that [success] is a credit to the kid. All of them. I think they have a commonality, they all share the desire to do what’s best for the team. They have an incredible sense of selflessness which seems to be a standing trait for the players in our program. I think that’s a tribute to our head coach and the culture that he sets and what he does for our group. I think you credit the head coach for that and the kids for really, really wanting to win over wanting things for themselves.”
