Cavs Continue Ride, Eye First Omaha Trip

The Virginia baseball team's introduction to the NCAA postseason was a trip across the country and a meeting with San Diego State's Stephen Strasburg, the best amateur player in the nation who almost assuredly will become the Washington Nationals' top overall selection in next week's MLB first-year player draft.

After deliberation, Cavaliers Coach Brian O'Connor settled on sophomore Robert Morey as the starter against the Aztecs. O'Connor revealed the decision to Morey last Thursday, a day before the nationally televised game.

O'Connor did not notice nerves. Instead, he witnessed confidence and excitement from a 20-year old who was not even a regular starter at the beginning of the season. Morey believed he could match the most decorated college pitcher in nearly a decade, and he did.

Morey held San Diego State scoreless in six innings of work and struck out nine. Strasburg had 15 strikeouts but allowed two runs. Morey earned the win. Strasburg suffered his only loss of the season. Virginia followed with a pair of victories over top-seeded UC-Irvine, the nation's top-ranked team entering the NCAA tournament and the host team of the regional, to advance to an NCAA super regional for the first time in school history.

The Cavaliers enter today's super-regional opener against host Mississippi having won eight consecutive games, including a four-game run to the ACC tournament championship. Two more wins would clinch a berth in the College World Series and further embolden what has become a very confident team.

"We went to the toughest regional, playing the number one team in the country in their own ballpark, facing the best college pitcher in the country, all those things combined, it continues to give our team confidence moving forward," O'Connor said. "I felt like we couldn't get any more confident than we were coming off the ACC tournament. But to go out to California, do what we did and who we did it against, there's no question this team believes in itself and believes it can accomplish anything."

Nobody embodied that attitude more than Morey, who was used in a spot start in April and earned his way into the rotation.

"If we were going to beat Strasburg and San Diego State, I felt we needed someone out there on the mound who had the chance to match him," O'Connor said. "And I felt on our pitching staff, the guy who had the best chance to match him was Robert Morey. He may not have done it, but I knew he had the kind of stuff to potentially do it."

It helped that Morey was the most rested of any Virginia starter. But he also remained calm when stepping into the spotlight that shines when facing a flame-throwing counterpart who soon will be a millionaire.

"My goal coming in was to get out of the first inning and just go pitch by pitch," Morey said. "Facing Strasburg, all year we've been hearing about this guy. For me personally, I love the competition. I can say that I beat him. I may see him again one day."

The first encore came the following night, when freshman Danny Hultzen (St. Albans) limited UC-Irvine to six hits over 7 1/3 innings, and the Cavaliers became the first team to shut out the Anteaters this season in a 5-0 win.

Senior Andrew Carraway followed on Sunday by holding UC-Irvine to one run over seven innings. O'Connor visited the mound during a sequence in the seventh when he ordinarily would have pulled Carraway -- a runner was on second base with two outs and a left-handed batter taking the plate.