ND Baseball stays on NCAA Tourney trajectory with sweep of Akron
Even considering the NCAA selection committee’s odd treatment of Notre Dame on tournament selection day the past couple of years, it’s hard to imagine them placing the Irish on the wrong side of the tourney bubble on May 29, Selection Monday (noon EDT, ESPN2).
Then again, Notre Dame flirted all weekend with nudging themselves in that direction against the Mid-American Conference’s ninth-place team in an 11-team race, and team No. 246 in the RPI ratings heading into Sunday’s series finale.
TJ Williams took a fastball to his left calf with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning and Notre Dame walked off with a 2-1 non-conference baseball victory over visiting Akron Sunday to complete a three-game sweep at Eck Stadium.
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The Irish (29-19) came from behind in all three games against a team who’s among the national leaders in one statistical category — and a dubious one at that. Hitting opposing batters.
The Zips (18-33) had plunked 99 batters coming into the series, third most nationally among the 295 Division I teams. They added nine more to that total over the weekend against the Irish, including right fielder Brooks Coetzee’s ACC-record 30th of the season on Saturday.
The Irish were without injured starting third baseman and clean-up hitter Jack Penney for virtually the entire series, leaving very early in game 1 on Friday night. The Notre Dame players also had to deal with final exam week, and will play the rest of the season with no academic demands, unless they reach the College World Series during summer term.
In DI Baseball’s latest NCAA bracketology, last updated Wednesday, Notre Dame was projected as a regional No. 3 seed in the four-team Kentucky Regional. That's one of 16 four-team, double-elimination brackets that make up the early rounds of the 64-team NCAA Tourney.
The other teams projected to be headed to Lexington were regional 1 seed and national 8 seed Kentucky, No. 2 seed Indiana State and No. 4 seed Kent State — the class of Akron’s league.
If the Irish don’t play their way out of the NCAA field in their final four regular-season games and the ACC Tournament, they’ll make an NCAA regional for the third year in a row, and first under first-year coach Shawn Stiffler.
Ironically, the man who led ND to the first two — the classy former Irish head coach Link Jarrett — couldn’t even coax his new team, Florida State, into the 12-team ACC tourney, May 23-28 in Durham, N.C. The bottom two teams in the 14-team ACC are left out
That means the Seminoles (20-30, 7-20) will miss the NCAA tournament after 45 consecutive berths.
That last time Notre Dame even went to the NCAA Tournament two years in a row was a run of eight, from 1999 to 2006, in coaching icon Paul Mainieri’s last eight years in South Bend.
The Irish next face Northwestern (8-38) Tuesday night at Wrigley Field in Chicago before finishing the regular season on the road against 20th-ranked Boston College (32-16), Thursday through Saturday.
The Friday night, Game 2 matchup will be played at Fenway Park in Boston. The other two are scheduled for BC’s campus facility in Brighton.
The Wildcats don’t offer any RPI rewards, but Boston College is 11th nationally, so there’s plenty at stake there. Notre Dame was 44th in the latest RPI rankings heading into Sunday’s games. The Irish are 6-6 against the RPI Top 25, actually an improvement over last season’s College World Series qualifiers (6-8).
As far as ACC seeding, the Irish, winners of 11 of their past 15 games, and the Eagles are both 14-13 in league play, tied for the sixth-best record overall in a tight pack behind No. 1-ranked Wake Forest. The top four seeds earn a huge advantage in the ACC’s quirky pool-play round.
The four winners in pool play advance to the single-elimination semis on May 27. The championship is May 28.
Looking back on Sunday’s game, Akron had taken a 1-0 lead in the top of the sixth on an RBI single by Breydan Cavey off the third of four Irish pitchers on the day, Carter Bosch. Shortstop Zack Prajzner led off the bottom of the eighth with a solo home run to left field, his seventh, to tie the game at 1-1.
Prajzner had two hits to raise his team-leading batting average to .307.
His blast finally chased Akron junior lefty Anthony Fett, who entered the game with an ERA of 8.29. Game 1 starter Sammy Tortorella relieved, and the junior left-hander retired the next three Irish batters to end the threat.
But with one out in the ninth inning, the Irish loaded the bases on a Brady Gumph single, a walk to third baseman and .065 hitter Nick DeMarco, and a single by Estevan Moreno.
Williams worked a 1-1 count before getting plucked on the third pitch to send Gumph home with the winning run.
Jackson Dennies, coming back from an injury with a conservative pitch count for his second straight start, gave the Irish a couple of scoreless innings, an encouraging sign moving forward. Radek Birkholz (2-3) pitched three hitless innings with four strikeouts to pick up the victory.
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