Collegiate Times

The Virginia Tech baseball team played in its first NCAA tournament game since 2000 Friday afternoon and fell to The Citadel Bulldogs, 2-7.

Tech junior pitcher Justin Wright allowed four earned runs in the second inning, and that was all the Bulldogs would need to close out the victory. Bulldogs junior Matt Talley picked up the win to improve to 8-3 while Wright fell to 8-5.

Wright, who pitched a complete game with 15 strikeouts last weekend in the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament against Georgia Tech, struggled to keep the ball down and failed to consistently locate his curveball, a pitch that baffled Yellow Jackets hitters last week.

“I really didn’t have my pitches going today,” Wright said. “I showed signs of it early in the game, but really just didn’t have three pitches I could throw for strikes, and that really hurt me.”

The Hokies only managed to score two runs all game which came off a two-run home run by Sean Ryan in the seventh inning, but Tech was still hitting the ball hard throughout, just right at the defense. In all, the Hokies stranded nine runners, including three in the eighth inning with the bases loaded, despite striking out just three times.

“I think it was just one of those days,” said redshirt senior catcher Steve Domecus. “Sometimes, it’s we’re on fire… we’re just gonna have to make an adjustment tomorrow. We were just hitting balls right at people, and we weren’t hitting balls on the ground. It was a little frustrating, but we’re going to have to come back and do a better job with runners in scoring position.”

With a loss in the first game, the Hokies now face the daunting task of advancing through the loser’s bracket to win the regional. Last season, no team that lost in its first game advanced to the Super Regional round.

Even with the odds stacked against them, Tech head coach Pete Hughes thinks he has the team to make it through.

“I do believe in this group,” Hughes said. “If there’s a group of guys that I’ve coached that can break a trend or a stat, it would be this group. We’ll kind of build on that and how we’ve bounced back from adversity and how resilient we’ve been throughout the course of the season and stay strong with that.”

In the night game, the University of South Carolina Gameocks defeated the Bucknell Bison 9-5, so the Hokies will play the Bison in an elimination game at 2 p.m. Saturday.

Sophomore righty Mathew Price (7-3, 4.59 ERA) is scheduled to start for the Hokies.