With an 11-2 record in 2020, the Fighting Irish were off to their best start since 2015, which included a three-game series sweep of North Carolina in early March.
The Tar Heels are consistently one of the best college baseball programs in the country, and producing 33 runs against them in three games showed that Link Jarrett’s reboot of the Fighting Irish baseball program was worth paying attention to. But there was still some skepticism regarding whether or not Notre Dame was for real.
“I saw them in Chapel Hill when they swept North Carolina, and it was their coming out party a little bit,” said Aaron Fitt, an editor and national college baseball writer for D1Baseball.com. “I was really impressed with the lineup, but I was worried about the pitching staff. I didn't quite believe that they had staying power.”
The opportunity to prove otherwise was supposed to come the following weekend in a road series against No. 2 Louisville. But the Notre Dame team bus was forced to turn around after arriving in Louisville, Ky., due to the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down all of college athletics in the spring of 2020.
Fast forward a year, and Notre Dame is in a familiar spot. After 13 games, Notre Dame is 10-3 this season and has bested several premier ACC foes, including a three-game sweep of Virginia. Yet the real test will come in the upcoming weekend series against No. 7 Louisville (15-5, 7-2).
The series kicks off on Friday at 4 p.m. ET from within the friendly confines of Frank Eck Stadium.
Back-to-back strong starts to the season have proved to Fitt and other national baseball writers that, under Jarrett’s leadership, Notre Dame is a college baseball team to be reckoned with in 2021 and is a worthy member of the top 25.
Still, how the Irish perform against the Cardinals will go a long way in determining if Notre Dame is in contention for hosting a regional in the 2021 NCAA Tournament.
3 Observations from Notre Dame's 10-3 Start
Niko Kavadas is on pace to obliterate the Notre Dame single-season home run record
Through 13 games, Fighting Irish first baseman and left-handed cleanup hitter Niko Kavadas has belted nine home runs. This ties him for the second-most home runs in all of college baseball. He also carries a top 10 slugging percentage at .957.
The only player ahead of him is South Carolina catcher Wes Clarke, who has 11 home runs in 19 games.
So how far is he from the single-season Notre Dame record? In 1991, Frank Jacobs set that mark by smacking 20 home runs in 61 games. He also hit .333.
Currently, Kavadas is hitting home runs at a rate of 0.69 per contest. With 30 regular-season games left to play, he’s on pace for an additional 20.7 home runs and a total of roughly 30. And that’s without extra at bats in the ACC Tournament or via a potential NCAA Tournament berth.
That means barring injury or an extended slump, Kavadas has a pretty good chance of breaking a record that’s stood for 30 years.
But how would 20-plus home runs impact his draft status? Jacobs was a seventh-round pick by the New York Mets in 1991, and it appears Kavadas has a similar draft projection.
“He has some of the best raw power in the country. Certainly, it's become a power hitters game, at the big league level on down,” Fitt said, a perspective formed from talking with several major league scouts. “I think that gives him a lot of value in the draft. But he's still a first baseman. It's the least valuable defensive profile.
"You have to hit a ton to be a Big League first baseman. Maybe there are still some questions about his approach long term, but the power nobody questions."
The Fighting Irish defense remains stout
A key to Notre Dame’s success against Duke was, once again, team defense. Over the week, the Irish didn’t commit a single error.
This improved the team’s overall fielding percentage to .994, which is the third-best mark in all of college baseball. Notre Dame has also gotten out of several jams this year by turning timely double plays. The Irish are No. 36 in the country in terms of double plays per game.
From the moment Jarrett took the job in South Bend in the summer of 2019, he knew that building a strong defense was going to be key to Notre Dame’s success and to a quick turnaround.
“When I got here, I knew that was something we had struggled with," Jarrett said. "You can watch a little bit of video, you can look at the numbers and see that we were not playing defense at a high enough level to allow the pitching staff to function and perform. When you're playing championship-level teams, the difficulty of scoring against them is high. It's tough to score.
“We talked about that. From day one we've talked about if you're not adept on the mound, and good defensively and athletic, you're going to be chasing the scoreboard every weekend.”
One of Jarrett’s biggest decisions was inserting Jack Brannigan at third base in 2020. A freshman at the time, Brannigan might be Notre Dame’s best athlete and possesses one of the strongest arms on the team.
“There are so many awkward things that happen at third base,” Jarrett said. “If you don't have a really good athlete over there, the position is difficult.”
This allowed Kavadas, who is much less mobile, to move across the diamond to first base. Jarrett also preferred to have someone with Zack Prajzner’s arm at shortstop, and then slide Jared Miller to second base.
The outfield has also been stellar this season, with Brooks Coetzee in right field, the steady presence of Spencer Myers in center and a combination of Ryan Cole, Alex Brait and Jack Zyska manning left field.
Joe Sheridan moves into a starting role
Notre Dame will be without its ace going forward, as left-handed pitcher Tommy Sheehan is officially out for the remainder of the season. A major blow to the rotation, the Irish are now without their two best pitchers since relief pitcher Tommy Vail also won’t pitch in 2021 after undergoing offseason Tommy John surgery.
Thus far, the rotation has been bolstered by graduate transfers. From Furman, right-handed pitcher John Michael Bertrand is a workhorse for the Fighting Irish as their Saturday starter. With a 3.38 ERA, he’s thrown 26 1/3 innings this season, which includes a bullpen saving start against Duke on Saturday, where he lasted all nine innings and allowed just five hits in a 6-2 Irish victory.
After Bertrand, another graduate transfer pitcher in left-hander Joe Sheridan has eaten up the most innings on the mound. In 14 1/3 innings of work — all out of the bullpen — Sheridan has yet to allow an earned run, which has him ranked first among pitchers in the ACC. He’s allowed a total of 10 hits and has walked just three batters.
On Friday, Sheridan will get his first start of the season against the most talented team Notre Dame may see all season (that is unless the Irish face Vanderbilt or LSU in the NCAA Tournament).
At times, the transition from the bullpen to start can be difficult. But Sheridan is averaging almost five innings per appearance this season. Additionally, in three healthy seasons at UCF, he racked up 27 career starts with an ERA of 3.30.
It’s unlikely he’ll still have an unblemished ERA after facing a loaded Louisville lineup on Friday, but he’s more than capable of leading Notre Dame to victory in his first career start for the Irish.
2 Questions Ahead of Louisville
How will Notre Dame stack up against one of the most talented teams in college baseball?
Prior to the season, D1 Baseball ranked the top 100 college baseball prospects eligible for the 2021 MLB Draft. Not a single Notre Dame player made the cut, including Kavadas, the aforementioned slugger.
Five Louisville prospects, on the other hand, were listed:
• No. 8 — Catcher Henry Davis
• No. 11 — Third baseman Alex Binelas
• No. 18 — Outfielder Levi Usher
• No. 35 — Right-handed pitcher Glenn Albanese
• No. 96 — Left-handed pitcher Michael Kirian
That’s more prospects in the top 100 than any other programs in all of college baseball.
Thus far, Davis is hitting like one of the best players in baseball. Among everyday starters, he leads the team in hitting with an average of .397 and an OPS (on-base plus slugging) of 1.166. Binelas and Usher are hitting well below .300, but such low averages won't last.
Albanese and Kirian are off to strong starts on the mound. Kirian leads the team in innings pitched and ERA, having allowed just two earned runs thus far. Albanese has also been excellent in 15.1 innings of work, with a 1.76 ERA and a WHIP (walks and hits per inning) of 0.78.
But Louisville’s talent extends well beyond its best five prospects. The Cardinals recruit nationally and consistently attract top prep talent.
In past seasons, so much talent has overwhelmed Notre Dame.
“It obviously hadn't been a good matchup for Notre Dame,” Jarrett said. “They're very athletic and run the bases. You could look at our defense. It hadn't been as athletic and maybe as sound defensively, and it looked like Louisville found ways to pick Notre Dame apart. And I hope we can play cleaner and keep this thing more competitive.”
Dating back to 2013, Louisville has won 19 straight games against Notre Dame, and that includes sweeping five series and a 2017 victory in the ACC Tournament.
That last time Notre Dame beat Louisville? A 2-1 win on May 21, 2011. Both programs were still members of the Big East at the time.
Will Notre Dame score enough against Louisville to win the series?
Last weekend against Duke, the Notre Dame offense looked stagnant, relying almost exclusively on home runs for production. Counting Ryan Cole’s inside-the-parker, 10 of the 12 Fighting Irish runs came from home runs.
First off, if Notre Dame averages just four runs per game against Louisville, they’re going to struggle to win. Secondly, against an excellent Louisville pitching staff, the Irish will need to manufacture runs without relying almost exclusively on the long ball.
It’s important for Notre Dame to make solid contact all week, get runners on base and make the Louisville defense work for every out. Lazy flyouts and quick strikeouts won’t get it done against the Cardinals, even with a power hitter like Kavadas in the lineup.
1 Prediction
Notre Dame will win take one game from Louisville and avoid the sweep
This isn’t the type of prediction that makes Fighting Irish fans feel all warm and fuzzy. But the Notre Dame baseball team is about to embark on its toughest test of the season against Louisville with a depleted pitching staff.
I’m predicting that the Irish win either a Friday or Saturday game, but ultimately drop two against the Cardinals.
Without Sheehan, I’m not sure Notre Dame has enough quality arms to keep such a loaded Louisville batting order from having at least a handful of big innings. It doesn’t help that the Fighting Irish offense looked stagnant against Duke last weekend.
The good news? Even if the Irish win just one game this weekend and are competitive in the other two contests, that should be enough for them to remain a top-15 program.
“Louisville is clearly the class of the league,” Fitt said. “If you want to be the best, you gotta beat the best, as they say. Honestly, I think if Notre Dame can avoid getting swept, I think that's a successful weekend when you're playing a top-five team. You'd love to win this series, but with the position that they're in having won their first four series, they've got a little bit of cushion there. It's going to be a test.”
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