Virginia Tech baseball opens season with impressive shutout of Charlotte

Coming into the 2024 season, there are a lot of questions surrounding the Virginia Tech baseball team. After losing nearly their entire pitching staff, their season-opener against Charlotte Friday started by a true freshman, Brent Renfrow. What a first collegiate start for the right-hander.

Renfrow went five innings, allowed just one hit, and was helped by some good infield defense, he struck out seven of the 17 batters he faced and just walked one. He set the tone on the mound while his teammate's bats got hot as the game went along to cruise to a season-opening win.

Virginia Tech scored a run in the top of the first inning without the benefit of a hit. Carson DeMartini drew a walk, went to second on an error, got to third on a groundout, and scored on a wild pitch to give Renfrow a lead before he threw his first pitch as a Hokie.

From there, Virginia Tech's bats got hot and used the long ball to build their lead against the 49ers pitching staff. The Hokies belted three home runs in the game, Christian Martin, DeMartini, and Henry Cooke. Tech only had seven hits in the game and aside from the three homers, they got hits from Garrett Michel, Eddit Micheletti, Ben Watson and Sam Tackett.

David Shoemaker worked the final three innings for Virginia Tech, striking out six, walking one and needed 40 pitches to get the final nine outs.

Defensively the Hokies made one error, but Clay Grady turned in the defensive gem of the game in the fifth inning. Diving to his left to stab a ground ball, he quickly got up and threw the Charlotte batter out at first on a bang-bang play.

The two teams will play Game 2 of the series Saturday at 2 p.m., before closing out the series Sunday at 1 p.m. in the final game.