W2WF: Clemson/Louisville (ACC Baseball Tournament)
May 21, 2019 | Baseball, #ForBoston Files
The ACC Tournament's chaotic run to Sunday kicks off at 11 a.m.
The 2009 Boston College baseball team is one of the greatest teams ever assembled in Chestnut Hill. It clinched the program's first NCAA Tournament berth since 1967 and advanced to the field of 64 for the first time since the bracket introduced a standardized format in 1999. The Eagles went to the Austin Regional that year, hosted by Texas, and scored a first round win over Texas State before rewriting college baseball history in a 25-inning marathon against the Longhorns.
It gets lost in the shuffle how those games wouldn't have happened without the ACC Tournament. BC entered the final weekend of the regular season in a three-team battle with both Duke and Virginia Tech but won its way into the conference round robin. Still a bubble team on the national radar, the Eagles won two games and nearly advanced to the conference championship, pushing themselves inside the field.
It's a lesson that rang out when the team returned to the Heights last weekend for its tenth anniversary: anything can happen in the ACC Tournament.
"Part of what makes the tournament a crapshoot is that you have 12 teams that could win a national championship," head coach Mike Gambino said. "They're all thrown into one tournament. Anyone can come out of it at any point. It's four games to win the whole thing. We know that we're playing against two really good teams in the pool play, but so is everyone else. We know that we have confidence playing against those two, but we have confidence playing against anyone in our conference."
The tournament format has undergone a number of changes through the years, owing largely to the expansion of the ACC's competitive footprint. The eight-team tournament in 2009 became a 10-team format in 2014, and that lasted three years until it expanded to its current format in 2017.
The current incarnation splits the qualified teams into four pools of three teams where pool winners advance to single-elimination semifinal games. It guarantees each team two games, but still creates a sense of urgency to win right away, and that can favor a team entering the tournament playing its best baseball at the right time. At the same time, there's a concurrent parity introduced by the tiebreaker scenario, which defaults to the better-seeded team.
For BC, that makes the tournament single elimination. The only way the Eagles can advance past No. 1 Louisville or No. 8 Clemson is to beat both in the early, 11 a.m. game on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"The top four seeds have an advantage, but they should because they had great regular seasons," Gambino said. "It's not as grueling for teams as if they were playing six games in a week, and I really love this format. There isn't really an advantage anywhere other than for those top four teams, who, again, earned that right."
Even with the tiebreaker, a top seed hasn't won the ACC since North Carolina in 2013, and there hasn't been a No. 1-vs.-No. 2 final since 2011. Last year, Pittsburgh won its pool as the No. 12 seed to advance to the semifinal round.
All of this operates under the NCAA Tournament's looming shadow. Baseball America recently projected nine ACC teams into the national tournament, with Wake Forest as one of the first teams outside the bubble. In Pool A, Louisville is a lock but is playing for a potential national seed, while Clemson is still playing for its NCAA Tournament life.
"I think everyone is fighting," Gambino said. "Clemson has to make sure that they are still in (the NCAA Tournament), and they still have an opportunity to host a regional. Louisville is a pretty solid national seed, but they don't want to go 0-2 and fall out of the top eight. Plus everyone wants to win that ACC championship."
The ACC Tournament is an annual exercise in elite baseball chaos. It takes 12 of the best teams in college baseball and pits their national title dreams and hopes against one another. It results in some of the best baseball of the year, and it ensures that the best of the best rise to the occasion to play in the final game on Sunday.
Boston College has an opportunity to play in that game. Whether or not the Eagles can advance is a story that will be written on Tuesday and Wednesday against Atlantic Division rivals. Here's what to watch for:
*****
Tournament Storylines
Domino Effect
Dan Metzdorf's 7.2-inning display of pitching wizardry in last Thursday's win over Notre Dame helped clinch BC's spot in the ACC Tournament, but it carried an even bigger downstream impact on the pitching staff because it allowed Mason Pelio to rest. The freshman phenom only faced 13 batters on Friday, throwing 53 pitches over three innings before yielding to his bullpen.
Less than a week later, Pelio can now start the first game of the tournament against Clemson, a team that he defeated back in March.
"Once we got in, we held Mason back a little bit to 50 pitches (on Friday)," Gambino said. "It made (a possible sweep over Notre Dame) a little bit harder, but it allows him to have a full start (on Tuesday). We always put the health of our kids as the top priority, so Mason threw what amounted to a hard bullpen in that game. That allows him to be ready for a full start against Clemson."
It's the perfect setup for the Eagles, who can then turn to Metzdorf against Louisville in the second game with only one less day of rest. That will be huge for the senior, who has nine games this year where he's thrown six innings or longer and has thrown over 100 pitches in each of his last nine starts.
All In For The Win
The Tigers enter the ACC Tournament with the second-worst batting average among remaining teams, but it's hard to call this team a "bottom tier offense." The sheer volume of hits were down in comparison to the rest of the league, but they tied Wake Forest - a notorious power hitting team - for most home runs. Their 373 runs were seventh-most in the conference, and they more than made up for any lack of hits by remaining aggressive on the base paths.
"Clemson is always going to be what they are," Gambino said. "They don't have Seth Beer anymore, but they have guys who can do damage throughout that lineup. Their numbers don't jump off the page when you first look at them, but they're a really good offensive team and have one of the best players in our conference (in shortstop Logan Davidson)."
The pitching staff, meanwhile, will hand the ball to Travis Marr, a relief pitcher who hasn't started a game all year. He has 16 trips to the mound this year, but he allowed runs in each of his last two appearances. Last weekend, he entered the game in the eighth with an inherited runner, then walked a batter before surrendering a three-run homer. Clemson had an 8-1 lead at the time but only held on for a 10-9 victory after Wake Forest tagged it for five ninth inning runs.
The BC offense, meanwhile, comes into this game as one of the best-hitting teams in the league. Its .289 average is one point behind Wake Forest for fifth in the league, and its 91 stolen bases are right with Clemson towards the top of the league. For BC, that means the entire lineup is able to approach this game as the first game of a weekend, while Clemson will instead have to, on the mound at least, test its depth.
"You have to go all-in to win the first game," Gambino said. "I'm treating it like I would the first game of an ACC weekend. You can't treat it like a Game Seven because then both Pelio and Metzdorf are available. But everyone in the bullpen is going to be available. Metzdorf is going to go (in the second game), so you do everything you can to win this game, then regroup the next day with whomever is available."
The Looming Shadow
Louisville hasn't announced its starting pitcher for Wednesday yet and likely won't do so until the conclusion of the BC-Clemson game. Reid Detmers is one of the best pitchers in the country, having struck out over 43% of batters faced this year, and his ability to overpower hitters is no joke. Whether or not he faces BC is likely contingent on who wins the first game of the week, though.
Whoever is tabbed will start opposite Metzdorf. The senior threw less than 120 pitches for the first time in three starts on Thursday, but he has been a machine as of late, going no less than six innings in each of his last eight starts and holding opposing teams without a run for over 20 consecutive frames.
The Cardinal offense, meanwhile, boasts five .300 hitters, each of whom lead the team in some offensive category. Tyler Fitzgerald is the team's best hitter at .338, but Danny Oriente has 14 doubles. Logan Wyatt leads the team in runs scored, but Alex Binelas is a power monster with 13 homers and a 1.122 OPS.
"Louisville has a scary lineup," Gambino said. "But at the same time, I love Metz against anybody. He's fired up. He's locked in. Pitching against Notre Dame with a chance to solidify the postseason, he wanted that bad."
*****
Meteorology 101
It's ironic that BC left Massachusetts before the first hot and humid day of the year, especially since the games this week will be played under blazing conditions in North Carolina. Temperatures on Monday reached 90 degrees, and it will likely stay there through the rest of the week.
The two coolest days of the week are Tuesday and Wednesday, and if the Eagles continue playing forward, they'll face conditions up into the mid-90s over the weekend. Humidity should stay down, but it's still going to be hotter than it is back home in Boston.
On the bright side, there's no rain anywhere in the forecast for the first couple of days, and BC doesn't have a game scheduled for Thursday.
*****
Scoreboard Watching
The ACC's postseason format slots teams based on overall conference winning percentage. That theoretically eradicates divisional alignments in the postseason and creates scenarios where Atlantic Division and Coastal Division teams forced to play one another. That was largely successful in the first two years of the 12-team format, where only one pool had all three teams from one division.
This year, though, will serve as unofficial division championships. Three of the four pools feature teams from one division, with Pool A (Louisville-Clemson-Boston College) and Pool C (NC State-Florida State-Wake Forest) exclusively from the Atlantic Division and Pool D from the Coastal (Miami-North Carolina-Virginia). Only Pool B slots an Atlantic Division team (Notre Dame) against Coastal rivals (Georgia Tech and Duke).
The scheduling for the other divisions follows the same format as BC's Pool A. The lowest seeded team has to play the two higher teams on the first two days of the tournament, with the high seed gaining an extra day of rest. The middle seed has a day off, but that last game can be declared irrelevant to determining who moves on by the results on Wednesday.
*****
Pre-Tournament Quote and Prediction
You just got lesson number one: don't think, it can only hurt the ball club. -Crash Davis, "Bull Durham"
Postseason baseball doesn't allow a whole lot of breathing room once it gets started. The ACC Tournament is a particular exercise in chaos, so teams have to simply react to what's happening as best as possible. The format is designed to favor the higher seeds, but teams playing their way into postseason play can turn into buzzsaws for that pretty quick.
"You know it's going to be a tight game," Mike Gambino said. "It's going to be close. I love what we're doing offensively right now, and I love Mason Pelio against anybody. It's not that we don't care who we're playing, but the most important thing is to focus on what you've been doing for yourself."
BC enters the tournament with its two front-end starters intact. Depth wins out over the course of a long season, but postseason baseball tilts the scales back to teams with elite, top-of-the-line starting pitching and timely hitting. It's a formula that's worked for this program in the past, and it's the backbone of why the Birdball way just might lift this team to that next level once more.
The 2019 ACC Baseball Tournament will kick off on Tuesday with Boston College playing at 11 a.m. against Clemson before another 11 a.m. start on Wednesday against Louisville. Both games are televised on ACC Network Extra, which can be seen locally on NESN Plus.
It gets lost in the shuffle how those games wouldn't have happened without the ACC Tournament. BC entered the final weekend of the regular season in a three-team battle with both Duke and Virginia Tech but won its way into the conference round robin. Still a bubble team on the national radar, the Eagles won two games and nearly advanced to the conference championship, pushing themselves inside the field.
It's a lesson that rang out when the team returned to the Heights last weekend for its tenth anniversary: anything can happen in the ACC Tournament.
"Part of what makes the tournament a crapshoot is that you have 12 teams that could win a national championship," head coach Mike Gambino said. "They're all thrown into one tournament. Anyone can come out of it at any point. It's four games to win the whole thing. We know that we're playing against two really good teams in the pool play, but so is everyone else. We know that we have confidence playing against those two, but we have confidence playing against anyone in our conference."
The tournament format has undergone a number of changes through the years, owing largely to the expansion of the ACC's competitive footprint. The eight-team tournament in 2009 became a 10-team format in 2014, and that lasted three years until it expanded to its current format in 2017.
The current incarnation splits the qualified teams into four pools of three teams where pool winners advance to single-elimination semifinal games. It guarantees each team two games, but still creates a sense of urgency to win right away, and that can favor a team entering the tournament playing its best baseball at the right time. At the same time, there's a concurrent parity introduced by the tiebreaker scenario, which defaults to the better-seeded team.
For BC, that makes the tournament single elimination. The only way the Eagles can advance past No. 1 Louisville or No. 8 Clemson is to beat both in the early, 11 a.m. game on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"The top four seeds have an advantage, but they should because they had great regular seasons," Gambino said. "It's not as grueling for teams as if they were playing six games in a week, and I really love this format. There isn't really an advantage anywhere other than for those top four teams, who, again, earned that right."
Even with the tiebreaker, a top seed hasn't won the ACC since North Carolina in 2013, and there hasn't been a No. 1-vs.-No. 2 final since 2011. Last year, Pittsburgh won its pool as the No. 12 seed to advance to the semifinal round.
All of this operates under the NCAA Tournament's looming shadow. Baseball America recently projected nine ACC teams into the national tournament, with Wake Forest as one of the first teams outside the bubble. In Pool A, Louisville is a lock but is playing for a potential national seed, while Clemson is still playing for its NCAA Tournament life.
"I think everyone is fighting," Gambino said. "Clemson has to make sure that they are still in (the NCAA Tournament), and they still have an opportunity to host a regional. Louisville is a pretty solid national seed, but they don't want to go 0-2 and fall out of the top eight. Plus everyone wants to win that ACC championship."
The ACC Tournament is an annual exercise in elite baseball chaos. It takes 12 of the best teams in college baseball and pits their national title dreams and hopes against one another. It results in some of the best baseball of the year, and it ensures that the best of the best rise to the occasion to play in the final game on Sunday.
Boston College has an opportunity to play in that game. Whether or not the Eagles can advance is a story that will be written on Tuesday and Wednesday against Atlantic Division rivals. Here's what to watch for:
*****
Tournament Storylines
Domino Effect
Dan Metzdorf's 7.2-inning display of pitching wizardry in last Thursday's win over Notre Dame helped clinch BC's spot in the ACC Tournament, but it carried an even bigger downstream impact on the pitching staff because it allowed Mason Pelio to rest. The freshman phenom only faced 13 batters on Friday, throwing 53 pitches over three innings before yielding to his bullpen.
Less than a week later, Pelio can now start the first game of the tournament against Clemson, a team that he defeated back in March.
"Once we got in, we held Mason back a little bit to 50 pitches (on Friday)," Gambino said. "It made (a possible sweep over Notre Dame) a little bit harder, but it allows him to have a full start (on Tuesday). We always put the health of our kids as the top priority, so Mason threw what amounted to a hard bullpen in that game. That allows him to be ready for a full start against Clemson."
It's the perfect setup for the Eagles, who can then turn to Metzdorf against Louisville in the second game with only one less day of rest. That will be huge for the senior, who has nine games this year where he's thrown six innings or longer and has thrown over 100 pitches in each of his last nine starts.
All In For The Win
The Tigers enter the ACC Tournament with the second-worst batting average among remaining teams, but it's hard to call this team a "bottom tier offense." The sheer volume of hits were down in comparison to the rest of the league, but they tied Wake Forest - a notorious power hitting team - for most home runs. Their 373 runs were seventh-most in the conference, and they more than made up for any lack of hits by remaining aggressive on the base paths.
"Clemson is always going to be what they are," Gambino said. "They don't have Seth Beer anymore, but they have guys who can do damage throughout that lineup. Their numbers don't jump off the page when you first look at them, but they're a really good offensive team and have one of the best players in our conference (in shortstop Logan Davidson)."
The pitching staff, meanwhile, will hand the ball to Travis Marr, a relief pitcher who hasn't started a game all year. He has 16 trips to the mound this year, but he allowed runs in each of his last two appearances. Last weekend, he entered the game in the eighth with an inherited runner, then walked a batter before surrendering a three-run homer. Clemson had an 8-1 lead at the time but only held on for a 10-9 victory after Wake Forest tagged it for five ninth inning runs.
The BC offense, meanwhile, comes into this game as one of the best-hitting teams in the league. Its .289 average is one point behind Wake Forest for fifth in the league, and its 91 stolen bases are right with Clemson towards the top of the league. For BC, that means the entire lineup is able to approach this game as the first game of a weekend, while Clemson will instead have to, on the mound at least, test its depth.
"You have to go all-in to win the first game," Gambino said. "I'm treating it like I would the first game of an ACC weekend. You can't treat it like a Game Seven because then both Pelio and Metzdorf are available. But everyone in the bullpen is going to be available. Metzdorf is going to go (in the second game), so you do everything you can to win this game, then regroup the next day with whomever is available."
The Looming Shadow
Louisville hasn't announced its starting pitcher for Wednesday yet and likely won't do so until the conclusion of the BC-Clemson game. Reid Detmers is one of the best pitchers in the country, having struck out over 43% of batters faced this year, and his ability to overpower hitters is no joke. Whether or not he faces BC is likely contingent on who wins the first game of the week, though.
Whoever is tabbed will start opposite Metzdorf. The senior threw less than 120 pitches for the first time in three starts on Thursday, but he has been a machine as of late, going no less than six innings in each of his last eight starts and holding opposing teams without a run for over 20 consecutive frames.
The Cardinal offense, meanwhile, boasts five .300 hitters, each of whom lead the team in some offensive category. Tyler Fitzgerald is the team's best hitter at .338, but Danny Oriente has 14 doubles. Logan Wyatt leads the team in runs scored, but Alex Binelas is a power monster with 13 homers and a 1.122 OPS.
"Louisville has a scary lineup," Gambino said. "But at the same time, I love Metz against anybody. He's fired up. He's locked in. Pitching against Notre Dame with a chance to solidify the postseason, he wanted that bad."
*****
Meteorology 101
It's ironic that BC left Massachusetts before the first hot and humid day of the year, especially since the games this week will be played under blazing conditions in North Carolina. Temperatures on Monday reached 90 degrees, and it will likely stay there through the rest of the week.
The two coolest days of the week are Tuesday and Wednesday, and if the Eagles continue playing forward, they'll face conditions up into the mid-90s over the weekend. Humidity should stay down, but it's still going to be hotter than it is back home in Boston.
On the bright side, there's no rain anywhere in the forecast for the first couple of days, and BC doesn't have a game scheduled for Thursday.
*****
Scoreboard Watching
The ACC's postseason format slots teams based on overall conference winning percentage. That theoretically eradicates divisional alignments in the postseason and creates scenarios where Atlantic Division and Coastal Division teams forced to play one another. That was largely successful in the first two years of the 12-team format, where only one pool had all three teams from one division.
This year, though, will serve as unofficial division championships. Three of the four pools feature teams from one division, with Pool A (Louisville-Clemson-Boston College) and Pool C (NC State-Florida State-Wake Forest) exclusively from the Atlantic Division and Pool D from the Coastal (Miami-North Carolina-Virginia). Only Pool B slots an Atlantic Division team (Notre Dame) against Coastal rivals (Georgia Tech and Duke).
The scheduling for the other divisions follows the same format as BC's Pool A. The lowest seeded team has to play the two higher teams on the first two days of the tournament, with the high seed gaining an extra day of rest. The middle seed has a day off, but that last game can be declared irrelevant to determining who moves on by the results on Wednesday.
*****
Pre-Tournament Quote and Prediction
You just got lesson number one: don't think, it can only hurt the ball club. -Crash Davis, "Bull Durham"
Postseason baseball doesn't allow a whole lot of breathing room once it gets started. The ACC Tournament is a particular exercise in chaos, so teams have to simply react to what's happening as best as possible. The format is designed to favor the higher seeds, but teams playing their way into postseason play can turn into buzzsaws for that pretty quick.
"You know it's going to be a tight game," Mike Gambino said. "It's going to be close. I love what we're doing offensively right now, and I love Mason Pelio against anybody. It's not that we don't care who we're playing, but the most important thing is to focus on what you've been doing for yourself."
BC enters the tournament with its two front-end starters intact. Depth wins out over the course of a long season, but postseason baseball tilts the scales back to teams with elite, top-of-the-line starting pitching and timely hitting. It's a formula that's worked for this program in the past, and it's the backbone of why the Birdball way just might lift this team to that next level once more.
The 2019 ACC Baseball Tournament will kick off on Tuesday with Boston College playing at 11 a.m. against Clemson before another 11 a.m. start on Wednesday against Louisville. Both games are televised on ACC Network Extra, which can be seen locally on NESN Plus.
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