CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Virginia moved within one victory of its seventh trip to the College World Series because Evan Blanco and Henry Godbout shrugged off early adversity and came through when it mattered most.
The national No. 12 seed Cavaliers scored their 23rd come-from-behind win of the season when Godbout slugged a tie-breaking three-run homer in the bottom of the seventh inning to power UVa to a 7-4 victory over Kansas State on Friday night. A third straight sellout crowd of 5,919 in Disharoon Park cheered in approval as the Cavaliers closed in on the CWS for the third time in the past four seasons.
NCAA Baseball Super Regional
The Cavaliers (45-15) can punch their ticket to Omaha in Saturday’s 3 p.m. contest, when junior right-hander Jay Woolfolk, 3-1, takes the mound against K-State redshirt sophomore right-hander Jackson Wentworth, 5-5.
Blanco, 8-3, the sophomore left-hander and ace of the UVa staff, pitched seven strong innings but had to pitch from an early deficit for the second consecutive outing in the NCAA Tournament.
In last Saturday’s regional game against Mississippi State, he trailed 4-2 after 3 ½ innings. This time the Wildcats jumped out to a 3-0 lead after 2 1/2 innings, putting Blanco in a position where he had to manage the game.
He was up to the task.
“You know, your job as a starter, even if you fall behind, is to go out there and keep your team in the ballgame,” Virginia coach Brian O’Connor said, “and he kept us in the game enough.
“I really feel that Evan Blanco’s outing to get us to the eighth inning was the difference in the ballgame.”
Blanco ran into some bad luck in the first inning when leadoff batter Brendan Jones hit a routine fly ball but ended up with a triple because UVa center fielder Bobby Whalen couldn’t find it in the sun.
Jones scored one out later on a groundout for Kansas State (35-25).
In the third, K-State’s Kaelen Culpeper doubled home two runs for a 3-0 lead after Raphael Pelletier and Jones singled and were moved up on a sacrifice bunt.
However, after Culpepper’s double Blanco settled into a groove, retiring nine batters in a row and facing only the minimum 12 batters for that stretch into the seventh inning.
“Just kind of locking it with two outs,” Blanco said of his mindset after Culpepper’s big hit. “And then landing pitches, too. I kind of found myself in the middle of the strike zone a little too much earlier in the game. Kind of focusing in on hitting spots and kind of dialed in with two strikes was kind of the key for me.”
Blanco, who was charged with all four runs, allowed five hits while striking out nine and walking only one. Left-hander Angelo Tonas and right-hander Matt Augustin provided perfect relief work, combining to retire the final six batters.
K-State grad left-hander Owen Boerema held the Cavs scoreless through four innings before they pushed across two unearned runs in the fifth without benefit of a hit.
Griff O’Ferrall walked and raced all the way to third when Whalen’s hard grounder went through the legs of third baseman Jordan Parsons, with Whalen taking second on the play.
Casey Saucke’s sacrifice fly to right plated O’Ferrall, with Whalen also advancing, and then Whalen scored on Henry Ford’s groundout.
UVa took a short-lived lead in the sixth. Godbout beat out an infield single up the middle, and Ethan Anderson followed with a line single to center.
With two outs, O’Ferrall greeted reliever Blake Dean with a ground-rule double into the left-field corner, giving the Cavs a 4-3 lead.
The advantage didn’t last long. David Bishop hit a solo homer to center off Blanco in the top of the seventh, his fourth, to tie it at 4-4.
But that would only set the stage for Godbout’s heroics in the bottom of the inning. Saucke was hit by a pitch and Jacob Ference walked before a forceout left runners at the corners. Godbout turned on a 1-0 pitch from reliever Cole Wisenbaker and blasted his ninth home run of the season and second of the NCAA Tournament into the left-field bleachers.
Godbout, O’Ferrall and Ford each had two of UVa’s nine hits. That Godbout ended up the hitting star for the Cavaliers spelled another turnaround. He struck out in his first two at-bats against Boerema but would figure in the two big late-inning rallies.
“I was just looking for a good pitch to hit, staying with my approach,” Godbout said of his home run. “Coach Oak (O’Connor) the at-bat before was telling me, ‘you’ve got to buckle up in the back half of the game and stay in it,’ and that’s what I did and got a pitch to hit.”
He added, “That’s kind of how the game goes sometimes. You’ve got to rally back from those types of at-bats and kind of relying on our approach and what we do in practice, and just kind of selling myself not trying to do too much.”
Godbout owns both of the Cavaliers’ home runs in the NCAA tournament even though the team has obliterated the school record with 115 this season.
K-State coach Pete Hughes has plenty of familiarity with UVa’s program, having served as head coach at Virginia Tech for seven seasons (2007-13). It also wasn’t lost on him that the big hit came from the No. 7 slot in the UVa lineup.
“(They’re) very similar offensively to the last time I coached against them, and that was 2014,” Hughes said. “There’s just no rest one through nine. Anyone can burn you. We saw that tonight.
“There’s no time off. You have to work one through nine, and that middle of that lineup’s really scary. You know, Oak (O’Connor) has had teams that have been built like this. This is a pretty impressive lineup that they’ve put together.”
That being said, Hughes brought in the sinkerballer Wisenbaker in relief of Dean in the seventh because he was playing for the double play. And he nearly got it.
Harrison Didawick hit a comebacker to Wisenbaker, who seemed to double-clutch before throwing to second. Didawick hustled down the line and beat Culpepper’s relay to first.
“The hitter before we thought we had that double play ball, which would have got us out of the inning,” Hughes said, “and we just kind of hesitated on that play on the feed to second base and just were able to get one. That’s what left us with first and third with two outs.”
Wisenbaker’s mistake to Godbout was “he left the pitch up,” Hughes admitted. “That’s your approach against that style of pitching is see the ball up. He saw it and didn’t miss it in a big situation.”
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