As the calendar turns to May, the Virginia Tech baseball team's NCAA Tournament hopes are on life support thanks to some stumbles in the middle of the season in ACC play. Go figure that they would hit a wall in the middle of the season.
They fought hard to get back over .500 and have put themselves in the conversation for a berth in the NCAA Tournament. They still have plenty of work to do to get on the right side of the NCAA Tournament bubble, but on the West Coast in a huge ACC series in Northern California, they are off to a good start.
The Hokeis kicked off their weekend trip to California for three games with the Golden Bears by convincingly winning the opener on Friday night, 9-1, and then took the second game of the series, 6-2, on Saturday to win the series. They will go for what will be a huge sweep on Sunday afternoon.
Virginia Tech wins first two games of ACC series at California
For the second straight game, the Hokies got very good starting and relief pitching and timely hits to pull away from the Golden Bears. As has been the case this season, Virginia Tech got things going with the home run.
In the top of the third, Sam Gates launched a solo home run to open the scoring, before a three-run shot from Henry Cooke made it 4-0. Cal cut the deficit to 4-1, but an Ethan Gibson RBI single in the seventh and a Sam Grube RBI triple in the ninth put the game away.
Virginia Tech will likely send Griffin Stieg to the mound on Sunday afternoon to try to complete the sweep. The Hokies have evened their ACC record at 13-13 with the first two wins in the series, and they improved to 25-20 overall.
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