In the Thrill Of The Night

The light towers atop Durham Bulls Athletic Park struck the rare glisten through the overnight North Carolina sky. The city had long awoken and gone back to sleep while the Atlantic Coast Conference's revamped baseball tournament churned through its final outs. A four-game first round between eight teams situated in the bottom third of the regular season standings produced a chaotic melee within the newly designed bracket after two lower-seeded teams upended their better-finishing conference brethren, and as the night bore into its darkest hours, No. 14 Boston College represented a potential third.

The Eagles watched an early 4-2 lead evaporate when No. 11-seeded Notre Dame worked a game-tying walk in the bottom of the sixth, but an unexpected postseason ace emerged in the aftermath of that incident when freshman Gavin Soares mowed through DM Jefferson and Carson Tinney. He worked through a scoreless seventh by striking out two more hitters, and he hadn't allowed a hit through the eighth or ninth innings. Now on the mound in the wee hours of a Tobacco Road night, Soares was in a full count against Nick DeMarco with one out remaining in the Fighting Irish's season.

In that moment, the freshman resembled nothing of a rookie pitcher with less than 30 innings on his collegiate arm. Entrusted with finishing the job, he delivered a pitch that DeMarco chopped to third baseman Patrick Roche, and the last throw to Esteban Garcia was worthy of a lockdown performance. Lacking believers ahead of their 2025 ACC Championship debut, the Eagles were headed for the second round after defeating their longtime Holy War rivals with a palpitating 5-4 decision that stamped a wild first day in Durham.

"[He] was extremely confident," said head coach Todd Interdonato after the final game ended around 2 a.m. local time. "That's the best comment we can give somebody, and the fact that we can say that about a first year pitcher [meant] that everybody on the bus and everybody in the dugout didn't want to lose with him on the mound."

College sports didn't employ this year's realignment with baseball at the forefront of its agenda. Four of its most historic championship teams switched leagues, and three teams sent a combined 21 national titles into two different directions when the Pac-12 split apart. Southern California, a team with the sixth-most all-time wins, joined the Big Ten, which had the sixth-highest or seventh-highest statistical power ranking among conferences, and Oregon State was left to play as a formal independent and associate scheduling member of the Mountain West Conference despite winning its second regional over a three-year span.

The ACC absorbed Cal and Stanford as the Pac-12 disintegrated, which in turn meant that the league added the Cardinal's three straight College World Series trips between 2021-2023 alongside a team with five national tournament appearances over a recent 12-year period. Already undisputed among the two best college conferences in the country, the new freight required the conference, which played a 12-team postseason tournament with four, three-team pods, to alter its championship to an all-inclusive single-elimination format for its 16 teams.

"We're in coaching because we like to compete and we want to compete against the best," said Interdonato at the start of the season. "When you add two programs like Cal and Stanford, you embrace it…as far as the tournament goes, I was in favor of all 16 teams [making the tournament] for a few reasons, the number one reason is because the league can get [another] bid to the tournament. If the Pac-12 was getting four-to-five per year, those four-to-five are now up for grabs, and between the Big 12, the Big Ten, the ACC and the SEC, just mathematically, there's a lot of historical data that suggests that the one-team, single-elimination format is better for a postseason resume."

The new format creates a gauntlet for teams relegated to first day matchups, but the one-loss format allows teams to streamline runs through the bracket if they're hot enough to win a game or two in the opening rounds. LSU nearly won last year's SEC Tournament, which admittedly employs a double-elimination format within its pre-championship bracket, after winning four games in four days as the No. 11 seed and was only undone by a one-run loss to top-seeded Tennessee in the championship game. Eighth-seeded Penn State likewise nearly won last year's Big Ten after playing its way to the championship game through a single-elimination format.

The one-game format put BC on a path involving both Virginia and North Carolina after its win over Notre Dame. Neither team fully handled the Eagles during the regular season – Virginia outright lost its home series in early March – but each now have to worry about controlling the damage against an upstart team with nothing to lose. The Cavaliers, especially, can't afford to lose on Wednesday night after being listed alongside Notre Dame as one of the last four teams into the tournament by D1Baseball.com.

"We can't just sit here and say goodbye and hug it out," said Notre Dame head coach Shawn Stiffler. "We're going to go through about six grueling days [because] we got out-executed. But over the last six weeks, nobody's outplayed us in the country, and we had to ride hard. We had to ride everybody really, really hard because we knew where our fate was and where we had to get to. We got there…you had 16 teams in this league and should be getting more teams into the postseason. This league's an 11-team bid, in my opinion."

BC's consideration for the national tournament entered Durham with more longshot potential than the Hurricanes or Fighting Irish, but a win over Virginia arguably establishes the Eagles onto closer footing than the original numbers indicated. They aren't a .500 team without winning the league championship, but BC won a conference tournament game for its third consecutive postseason dating back to 2019. Both 2019 and 2023 advanced to a de facto pod championship after winning the first game against lower-seeded competition, and the 2010 team memorably prevented Miami from earning a national seed in the NCAA Tournament with its 12-10 win in Greensboro.

The Cavaliers are more naturally different than those Hurricanes and combine the third-best overall offense with the third-best overall defense in this year's ACC, but their numbers skew a bit further in conference-only play. The pitching staff, for starters, was sixth in ACC play with an ERA north of 5.50, and its opposing batting average rose by nearly 20 points when removing non-conference play. The team batting average rose from .309 to .315 alongside a natural elevation in the team's slugging percentage, but the on-base percentage very marginally either stayed the same or dipped by a couple of percentage points.

It's impossible to determine if that means anything, but trends and statistical alignments mean virtually nothing in a one-game series. Pitching rotations don't matter, and lineup synergy isn't as important to a team's ability to plate runs. One inning is a difference maker, and with one game already in its books, BC at least enjoyed the added benefit of getting extra sleep before another late-night start against the 'Hoos.

BC and Virginia are scheduled for a 9 p.m. first pitch from the Durham Balls Athletic Park in Durham, North Carolina. The game can be seen on the ACC Network with online streaming available through ESPN's family of Internet and mobile device apps for cable subscribers with access to the channel.

Players Mentioned

Esteban Garcia

Patrick Roche

Gavin Soares

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