17-10 Tech over Notre Dame. That sounds like a primo football score, doesn’t it? Well, it most certainly wasn’t a football game. Neither team seemed to manage to pitch well, and the lumber was out for both sides. Tech just brought more to the game.
The ACC Tournament is becoming less and less of a factor in determining who gets into the final NCAA Tournament seeding chart, but the one thing that it can shape, besides the winner getting an automatic bid, is the perception regarding a bubble team, and Tech certainly fits that description this year.
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The Hokies’ Might Have Gotten Lucky
Neither Clemson nor Notre Dame had the sort of record that they would have liked to have had for the 2026 season. Both teams were good enough, both over .500 overall, but just couldn’t manage to get better than hovering around par for their ACC records. The Golden Domers managed to hold off the Clemson late game rally to pull off a first round ACC Tournament win. That set up a big faceoff between the Irish and the Hokies for the quarterfinal round. Tech, getting the bye for having a .500 ACC record. The reality was, though, that there was little performance difference between the three teams, and certainly between the Fighting Irish and the Hokies.
No Pitchers’ Duel, Here
We certainly won’t be going into heavy detail on the pitching effort for either team, both of them might want to forget those numbers because the end result looked more like a close football game, than 27 run “bat fest”.
Team/Inning
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
9th
Runs
Hits
Errors
Notre Dame
4
0
1
0
0
1
4
0
0
10
14
2
Virginia Tech
0
3
3
0
2
4
1
4
0
17
19
1
Notre Dame knocked Hokie starter Ethan Grim off the mound in the first inning. Sometimes, you just have to pat your pitcher on the tail and send him to the clubhouse, and this was one of those times. Of course, some bleeding had to stop because few mid-relievers are up and ready to throw that early in a game, but the coaching staff got Logan Eisenreich warmed up enough that he put up a high quality 5 hit, one run and 6 strikeout 4.2 inning relief. That also netted him the win when the Hokie’s found their bag of good bats in the bottom of the second.
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Freshman Ethan Ball (ACC Rookie honors there) got the Hokies off the schneid with a 409-foot tater in straight away center field. The Owen Petrich managed a nice deep double that scored Hudson Lutterman and Nick Locurto. That narrowed the score to a single run and got the team breathing again. Eisenreich would give up his only run in the top of the 3rd, but Ethan Ball smashed a 416 foot homer, chasing his first and beating it. This time it was a two-run shot. Nick Locurto got a bit greedy trying to stretch a double into a triple, and was thrown out at 3rd, but before that happened Hudson Lutterman crossed the plate to put the Hokies ahead 6-5, and they never gave up the lead from there.
The scoring story of the game for the Hokies, though, wasn’t the hammer, it was the nibble and the big bite. Tech just kept making the Sabermetrics people smile with their smart base running, getting on base, taking advantage of errors, and advancing to score runs. Every member of the lineup managed to get a hit in the game, and 8 of the 9 managed to score at least one run. Ethan Ball crossed the plate an amazing 4 times and Ethan Gibson 3.
We do have to mention that there were some excellent defensive plays in the game, and we’ll let Evan Hughes’s call and the visual replay give you an idea of what sort of talent Coach Szefc is managing to find in his recruiting runs. Shortstop Pete Daniel just nails this one from deep in the hole.
It was an offensive smash hit for the Hokies.
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The Hokies take on North Carolina in the semi-finals at 1100 today in weather that does not look particularly promising. It should be a really good game if the Hokies can hold on to that offensive momentum. But this is baseball, and your averages always catch up to you.