Gameday Info

Match-Up: No. 17 Boston College (30-16, 14-13 ACC) vs. Villanova (13-32, 7-10 Big East)
Ballpark: Harrington Athletics Village • Brighton, Mass.
Watch/Stream: Saturday | Sunday
Live Stats: bc.statbroadcast.com

There was a time when the middle of May was a lost wasteland for the Boston College baseball team. Its postseason fortunes largely landed in a pile of lost prayers, and the final days leading up to the conference tournament required a mad dash to the finish to even qualify for the 12-team field. One game in a series against a top-ranked team wasn't enough to register on a national scale, and no reporter or journalist found their way to Chestnut Hill, Boston or Brighton for more than the one-off story or game.

That narrative permeated through a college baseball world where the most hardened expert and most casual observer walked in lock step with a bias against northern teams. The weather and climate lent nothing to a talent pool that couldn't compete with the mighty southern teams, and the chilling effect on anything out of the snow-blasted north quickly froze momentum in its tracks.

Yet last weekend, Boston College reminded everyone how the Eagles are an agent of chaos preparing for a run through the 2023 college baseball postseason when the team earned a come-from-behind, 11-9 victory in extra innings at No. 2 Wake Forest. In all of its splendor and wonder, Birdball handed the mighty Demon Deacons just their second loss of the season at home, and despite dropping the series to the team ascending to No. 1 in the most recent national poll, BC stands to send shockwaves over the last two weeks when it returns home to wrap up its season on the hallowed home grounds of Massachusetts.

"There's no way this team would be able to handle [its success] if we didn't have the failures that we've gone through," senior captain Vince Cimini told Turning Two on the The Podcast for Boston this week. "That toughness comes with losing tight, close games at times [but] also the experience of winning games that maybe you would have lost in the past. That's what makes us so tough to beat, and then with the youth that we brought in, all these young guys, I think it's the perfect combination of that experience with talented youth. So we're fired up. We know we could do something special here."

The Eagles open a six-game home stand to close the regular season this weekend when they host Villanova, but the two-game series represents more than just a series during finals week against a former Big East rival. BC was idle this week after returning home from Winston-Salem, but the midweek impact still wrought damage and chaos around the Eagles' premier standing as upsets and key results began falling over the course of the week's early days.

It started after poll voters minted Wake Forest as a late-season No. 1 overall team despite the one loss on the weekend, and it continued when teams highly rated in both the elective poll and the Ratings Performance Index dropped results against lower-regarded teams. No. 3 South Carolina dropped a 14-7 final to Kentucky to end a weekend in which No. 18 Tennessee lost to Georgia, and Dallas Baptist, a mid-major punching above its weight class as the 16th-ranked team in the nation, committed a pair of errors while surrendering 16 runs on 17 hits in a home loss to Middle Tennessee State.

A couple of days later, No. 10 Duke lost to unranked Rider in a non-conference game while Northeastern battered 19th-ranked Maryland on the road before results stabilized on Wednesday, but a Clemson side installed as the No. 16 team in the country dropped 13 runs against eighth-ranked Coastal Carolina in a huge win for the ACC's ongoing national prospects.

BC didn't have a hand in any of those results, but the Eagles moved up to eighth in the ongoing RPI shift. They remained ahead of Duke, Florida, Clemson and Stanford, all of which were ahead of their No. 20 ranking in the D1Baseball.com poll, and they solidified some standing as a team likely to finish inside the top-30 of that index while Alabama and Connecticut dropped well outside of the top-10 in the statistical index

"Since the beginning of the year, we kind of talked about it, that nobody was really expecting us to do much as far as projections go," Cimini said, "so we just put our heads down, and then at the end of the year, we'll pick our heads up and see where we are. We're kind of coming to that point, and now I feel like we obviously have a chance to do something pretty special here. But at the beginning of the year, we started by winning these games that we weren't projected to win, and we started to think that we had a serious shot at making a run at this thing."

"This thing" is the NCAA Tournament, and it's a place where BC hasn't appeared since the legendary 2016 team advanced to the Super Regionals by winning the Oxford Regional as a No. 3 seed. The Eagles were, by that year's definition, one of the last at-large teams into the tournament, and their bracket was a certified demolition derby that knocked top-seeded Ole Miss off its home field with two straight losses. BC advanced by going undefeated, beating Tulane twice around a second round win over Utah.

Birdball later pushed third-ranked Miami to three bitter games in the Super Regionals, but over the last seven years, the team reinvented itself around college baseball's changing tides. It regrouped to nearly clinch a tournament spot in 2019, and after COVID-19 canceled the 2020 season, a rebuilding process over the 2021 and 2022 seasons enabled BC to enter this year as a different team despite the same core group of players that were part of the last four years.

"You know what you're getting out of this team," Cimini said on the podcast. "Every week, it's pretty much just solid baseball. We're throwing strikes and making all the plays, hitting situationally. We're not, by any means, blowing everybody out of the water. We're just winning games because of the kind of play that we put out there."

Nobody on this team has ever played in a postseason game, and even with the win at Wake Forest, BC still hasn't clinched its spot in the ACC Tournament that begins on May 23. The only team currently stamped on its ticket is Wake Forest, and the Eagles are two games behind Clemson in the loss column despite having one more win than the Tigers in a conference race that grants a tiebreaker advantage to the top four teams.

Even without conference games, this weekend might send BC through to the ACC Tournament before next weekend's season finale against Notre Dame, but the matchups are more likely to have an immediate impact on the national race to a regional. The latest projection from D1Baseball.com is maintaining four New England teams in a regional hosted by BC, which would own the No. 14 overall seed in the tournament, to which Baseball America mildly agreed (BC was the No. 16 seed and Army replaced Central Connecticut as the No. 4 seed in the bracket), but UConn, the Eagles' chief competitor for a regional hosting spot, was higher-ranked in the most recent poll despite backsliding to No. 16 in the RPI.

"It's hard to stay in the moment," Cimini admitted, "because you want to look at those projections and see where we are [or] where we could go. But you try to keep those things to yourself and keep everybody locked in on whatever game you have coming up. It's fun. My four years here, we haven't made the ACC Tournament or the national tournament. So hopefully we can do both of those and make a run."

Even with debate raging, BC hasn't lost an appreciation for the fact that it's in the mix for an unprecedented success story in Brighton. Mike Gambino has long spoken about how he was told to "build a program" over single-year teams, and even though the Eagles haven't been to the tournament in seven years, this program is now a consistent winner among its peers. BC was widely viewed as a lost opportunity for the 2019 tournament that featured deep runs from non-traditional baseball clubs, and the 2016 team was arguably worse than its 2015 predecessor that was in the running for a national tournament berth before injuries conspired against the end-of-season results.

Maybe it's because this team was so lightly regarded during the preseason, or maybe it's the Northeast fire burning a hole through a core built from the New England and New York circuit. Maybe it's the fact that baseball is spreading, and the two markets BC best represents still have the greatest rivalry in the game. Maybe it's the fact that BC knows it stands next to the Boston Red Sox as a team that plays a home game at Fenway Park, and maybe it's because the Eagles know they might just be the best team in the city this year.

Regardless of the reason, the last two weeks of the season are going to prove or disprove several arguments about this year's Boston College team. For the first time in its history, Birdball has a chance to host a four-team bracket for the NCAA's larger field of 64 teams. A trip to Omaha might pass through Brighton, and the path for the Eagles to make their first College World Series appearance of the modern age might not require them to leave anywhere further than their own beds.

All Eyes On Brighton

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Players Mentioned

Vince Cimini

All Eyes On Brighton

Gameday Info

Next Event

Players Mentioned

Vince Cimini

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