Photo by: Matthew Shannon/AU Athletics
Opportunity Comes Knocking In Louisville
March 12, 2021 | Baseball, #ForBoston Files
BC enters Jim Patterson Stadium with a chance to seize national momentum.
The start to the 2021 Boston College baseball season has been nothing short of magical. A three-win sweep at Charleston Southern preceded series wins at Duke and Auburn, the latter of which included a miracle, ninth-inning comeback against a nationally-ranked SEC program. The necessary midweek games haven't been the Achilles' heel of years past, and the Eagles are now a national power ranked 13th by Baseball America and 17th by D1Baseball.com.
It's all evidence of BC's early season achievements and the payoff of the team's determined effort to hard work, but evidence of the success is relatively mum within the halls of the Pete Frates Center. It's there, which is to say it's at least acknowledged, but the Eagles are well aware that the early season victories can quickly turn in a season, sport and year as unpredictable as 2021's college baseball.
"The times that we're breaking through late is just usually pressure," head coach Mike Gambino said following BC's 10-5 win over Maine on Tuesday. "(We) just can't quite get it, can't quite get it and then 'baboom.' I just think it's a really hard lineup to pitch to top to bottom, one through nine. Obviously, we'd like to score more runs early, but all in all you don't really care when you score the runs. When you're putting that much pressure and having that many good at-bats throughout the game with that many good hitters, it's a lot on a pitching staff. At some point, it breaks through and when it does, it tends to be a little bit of a floodgate."
It's a new added power and a new characteristic to BC's traditional flair at the plate and rocketed the Eagles to the front of the ACC's batting numbers. They mashed five homers against the Black Bears on Tuesday, and their 18 long balls on the season lead the conference ahead of this weekend's series at Louisville. It helped push 88 runs across the plate, second only to Georgia Tech's 96, and both the numbers for total bases and slugging percentage are in the top three within the league.Â
Yet BC hasn't changed its mentality at the plate or on the base paths. The Eagles are still aggressively running and stealing bags to the tune of 17-for-20 attempts, second only to the Cardinals' 40 stolen bases, and five sacrifice flies bookend the fourth lowest strikeout numbers in the league. The power gains all of the attention because it's flashy, but it's really just an added component to the team's already-entrenched mentality of chemistry and fluidity through the lineup from the one slot down to the nine hole.
"The one thing about this team is the depth we have on it," junior Sal Frelick said. "I think a big part of that is the fifth year guys that came back, and I think almost all of our bench could fall into a starting role at any point. So anytime somebody goes down, the next guy hops up and we have complete confidence in him. We saw Cam Leary and Travis Honeyman and Dan Baruch step into a role (against Maine). Everybody has complete confidence in them."
The Eagles were always an underdog program punching above its weight class within the ACC, but the hunger is a little different this year. The early success gave them a different swagger, one that took that desire and built it into the different tools in the early games. There's a flair for the dramatic, but the celebrations and emotions are more about the team's desire to prove the sport's elite class wrong in its assessment about proletariat teams winning - especially when they reside in a supposed geographic outlier in Massachusetts.
It's the table setter for a huge weekend of baseball against Louisville, a team ranked in various stages of the top-15 in the country. The Cardinals are 8-4 and dropped two of three to Georgia Tech last week, but still peak higher than BC in the D1Baseball.com poll. The No. 10 in the nation, they are a traditional powerhouse that opened the year well inside the national seeds after they crushed East Carolina in the Super Regionals two years ago.
That respect is commanded for the right reasons. Louisville was the No. 7 overall seed in the 2019 NCAA Tournament despite failing to advance out of pool play - ironically, the pool was won by BC - in the ACC Championship. It was one of only four teams with at least 43 wins on the season and won both the division and overall regular season championship with a 21-9 conference record. Not even a hiccup to third-seeded Illinois State in its hosted regional stopped the bullet train's route to Omaha, and the Cardinals rallied that year to beat the Redbirds twice in the Regional Final before blasting the Pirates by a combined 26-1 score.
Nothing stopped Louisville until Vanderbilt beat it twice in the College World Series, but advancing to the national semifinals reloaded the Cardinals for the abbreviated 2020 season. They finished 13-4 and went 12-1 after a season-opening series loss to Ole Miss, and in a testament to the raw talent on the roster, saw three players selected in the abbreviated MLB Entry Draft.
Left-handed pitcher Reid Detmers led that group when the Los Angeles Angels made him the 10th overall selection in the draft, but his departure only opened the door for the remaining arms to step into their own. Junior Michael Kirian is a six-foot, six-inch bulldog with nasty stuff coming off of a six-inning, one-run performance against the Yellow Jackets last weekend, and senior Adam Elliott posted a 0.87 ERA last year with 14 strikeouts in over 10 innings in relief. Fellow senior Luke Smith is best remembered for his eight-plus innings and 10 strikeouts against the Commodores in the College World Series two years ago.
That bookends a lineup with four of MLB's Top 100 draft prospects for the upcoming year. Catcher Henry Davis is one of that group and enters this weekend with a .381 average and a 1.134 OPS. He's one of two catchers in the ACC with a perfect fielding percentage - the other being BC's Peter Burns - but enters this weekend as the team leader in hits, home runs and RBI.
Other members of that group are also going to dot the Louisville lineup. Outfielder Levi Usher is a perfect 13-for-13 on the base paths after opening up with a .233 average, and third baseman Alex Binelas is a guaranteed first round pick ranked inside the top-10 of MLB's top prospects for this year's draft. He's struggled out of the gate with a .143 average and 12 strikeouts but has the tools to turn that around in one game.
Past years indicate the daunting task ahead of the Eagles, but there's an element of the unknown to this matchup. In a weekend series against this team, even this early into a season, it's more of an opportunity to seize momentum within the ACC at a time when the entire conference is grinding out of neutral. Five Atlantic Division teams are under .500 after their first weekends of league play, and four of those teams are under water altogether to start the year.Â
This is also the last time BC will play consecutive road series over a weekend for the 2021 season, and after this weekend, only three conference series will be away from the Harrington Athletics Village.
"I think top to bottom, no matter who is in there, we have guys who are going to take really good at bats," said sophomore Luke Gold. "(They're) going to do what it takes to keep the line moving. Just knowing that everybody's buying in, (there's) a really good team-first mindset that takes a little pressure off the individual to just try and have good at bats. If you don't have a good at bat, the guy after you is going to pick you up and drive the guy in if you don't get the job done."
The top-15 matchup kicks off tonight at 6 p.m. when Boston College's Mason Pelio takes the hill at Jim Patterson Stadium before Saturday and Sunday both start at 1 p.m. All games are available via the ACC Network Extra streaming for cable subscribers with access to the ACC Network.
It's all evidence of BC's early season achievements and the payoff of the team's determined effort to hard work, but evidence of the success is relatively mum within the halls of the Pete Frates Center. It's there, which is to say it's at least acknowledged, but the Eagles are well aware that the early season victories can quickly turn in a season, sport and year as unpredictable as 2021's college baseball.
"The times that we're breaking through late is just usually pressure," head coach Mike Gambino said following BC's 10-5 win over Maine on Tuesday. "(We) just can't quite get it, can't quite get it and then 'baboom.' I just think it's a really hard lineup to pitch to top to bottom, one through nine. Obviously, we'd like to score more runs early, but all in all you don't really care when you score the runs. When you're putting that much pressure and having that many good at-bats throughout the game with that many good hitters, it's a lot on a pitching staff. At some point, it breaks through and when it does, it tends to be a little bit of a floodgate."
It's a new added power and a new characteristic to BC's traditional flair at the plate and rocketed the Eagles to the front of the ACC's batting numbers. They mashed five homers against the Black Bears on Tuesday, and their 18 long balls on the season lead the conference ahead of this weekend's series at Louisville. It helped push 88 runs across the plate, second only to Georgia Tech's 96, and both the numbers for total bases and slugging percentage are in the top three within the league.Â
Yet BC hasn't changed its mentality at the plate or on the base paths. The Eagles are still aggressively running and stealing bags to the tune of 17-for-20 attempts, second only to the Cardinals' 40 stolen bases, and five sacrifice flies bookend the fourth lowest strikeout numbers in the league. The power gains all of the attention because it's flashy, but it's really just an added component to the team's already-entrenched mentality of chemistry and fluidity through the lineup from the one slot down to the nine hole.
"The one thing about this team is the depth we have on it," junior Sal Frelick said. "I think a big part of that is the fifth year guys that came back, and I think almost all of our bench could fall into a starting role at any point. So anytime somebody goes down, the next guy hops up and we have complete confidence in him. We saw Cam Leary and Travis Honeyman and Dan Baruch step into a role (against Maine). Everybody has complete confidence in them."
The Eagles were always an underdog program punching above its weight class within the ACC, but the hunger is a little different this year. The early success gave them a different swagger, one that took that desire and built it into the different tools in the early games. There's a flair for the dramatic, but the celebrations and emotions are more about the team's desire to prove the sport's elite class wrong in its assessment about proletariat teams winning - especially when they reside in a supposed geographic outlier in Massachusetts.
It's the table setter for a huge weekend of baseball against Louisville, a team ranked in various stages of the top-15 in the country. The Cardinals are 8-4 and dropped two of three to Georgia Tech last week, but still peak higher than BC in the D1Baseball.com poll. The No. 10 in the nation, they are a traditional powerhouse that opened the year well inside the national seeds after they crushed East Carolina in the Super Regionals two years ago.
That respect is commanded for the right reasons. Louisville was the No. 7 overall seed in the 2019 NCAA Tournament despite failing to advance out of pool play - ironically, the pool was won by BC - in the ACC Championship. It was one of only four teams with at least 43 wins on the season and won both the division and overall regular season championship with a 21-9 conference record. Not even a hiccup to third-seeded Illinois State in its hosted regional stopped the bullet train's route to Omaha, and the Cardinals rallied that year to beat the Redbirds twice in the Regional Final before blasting the Pirates by a combined 26-1 score.
Nothing stopped Louisville until Vanderbilt beat it twice in the College World Series, but advancing to the national semifinals reloaded the Cardinals for the abbreviated 2020 season. They finished 13-4 and went 12-1 after a season-opening series loss to Ole Miss, and in a testament to the raw talent on the roster, saw three players selected in the abbreviated MLB Entry Draft.
Left-handed pitcher Reid Detmers led that group when the Los Angeles Angels made him the 10th overall selection in the draft, but his departure only opened the door for the remaining arms to step into their own. Junior Michael Kirian is a six-foot, six-inch bulldog with nasty stuff coming off of a six-inning, one-run performance against the Yellow Jackets last weekend, and senior Adam Elliott posted a 0.87 ERA last year with 14 strikeouts in over 10 innings in relief. Fellow senior Luke Smith is best remembered for his eight-plus innings and 10 strikeouts against the Commodores in the College World Series two years ago.
That bookends a lineup with four of MLB's Top 100 draft prospects for the upcoming year. Catcher Henry Davis is one of that group and enters this weekend with a .381 average and a 1.134 OPS. He's one of two catchers in the ACC with a perfect fielding percentage - the other being BC's Peter Burns - but enters this weekend as the team leader in hits, home runs and RBI.
Other members of that group are also going to dot the Louisville lineup. Outfielder Levi Usher is a perfect 13-for-13 on the base paths after opening up with a .233 average, and third baseman Alex Binelas is a guaranteed first round pick ranked inside the top-10 of MLB's top prospects for this year's draft. He's struggled out of the gate with a .143 average and 12 strikeouts but has the tools to turn that around in one game.
Past years indicate the daunting task ahead of the Eagles, but there's an element of the unknown to this matchup. In a weekend series against this team, even this early into a season, it's more of an opportunity to seize momentum within the ACC at a time when the entire conference is grinding out of neutral. Five Atlantic Division teams are under .500 after their first weekends of league play, and four of those teams are under water altogether to start the year.Â
This is also the last time BC will play consecutive road series over a weekend for the 2021 season, and after this weekend, only three conference series will be away from the Harrington Athletics Village.
"I think top to bottom, no matter who is in there, we have guys who are going to take really good at bats," said sophomore Luke Gold. "(They're) going to do what it takes to keep the line moving. Just knowing that everybody's buying in, (there's) a really good team-first mindset that takes a little pressure off the individual to just try and have good at bats. If you don't have a good at bat, the guy after you is going to pick you up and drive the guy in if you don't get the job done."
The top-15 matchup kicks off tonight at 6 p.m. when Boston College's Mason Pelio takes the hill at Jim Patterson Stadium before Saturday and Sunday both start at 1 p.m. All games are available via the ACC Network Extra streaming for cable subscribers with access to the ACC Network.
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