Tech is 3-0 after an opening weekend sweep of the visiting William & Mary Tribe. Even with the Saturday Double Header filling the entire day at Atlantic Union Bank Park, the Hokies win 2 big wins and a close one from the visitors from Williamsburg.
College baseball season starts a month and a half earlier than the pros, and that often presents some serious weather issues for the more northern teams. Even MLB operates the pre-season from Florida (Grapefruit League) and Arizona (Cactus League) to stay
away from the winter weather. There are few options for college ball. There will be a couple of tournaments in nicer places, but this season, the Hokies first pitch was at home, and a weather miracle and two mild, dry days cooperated to get the teams on the field in reasonable weather.
W&M usually fields a really competitive baseball team and presents an excellent warm-up challenge for any Division 1 team. Friday afternoon’s 3:00 opening pitch was a bit unusual for a weekend three-game series, but with the potential of cold rain on Sunday the schedule allowed for a Saturday double-header with a bit more rest after the opener.
A Surprising Number of Old Names this Season
Teams are usually decimated at the end of a season, but the Hokies seem to have kept quite a few former freshmen bench players, and they finally got their opportunity to start and play significant innings this weekend. We will go over the New Hokies Roster by next week, as we learn more about the players and see who starts and who becomes reserve or bench players. The biggest thing to note is that most of the Junior and Senior players are transfers from other programs. We did see a couple of legacy pitching names pop up for the games, but most of these players are new, and this Hokie team is mostly different from the last few seasons.
The Games
William and Mary is definitely a good warm-up team to play with some good players and coaching they often give the Hokies fits. In this opening series, the opener for the Saturday double header was made “interesting”. But the Hokies managed to prevail in all three. Thankfully, as noted, the weather cooperated, and Friday night’s smallish (almost 920) crowd was treated to both a solid win, and decent weather.
Game one started out with Junior starting pitcher Brett Renfrow who deferred from the draft to come back to Tech for another season with a new pitching coach, and new hope for a consistent performance before trying his toes in the minor leagues. Renfrow pitched for two innings and gave up two runs. He was pulled for returning relief pitcher Junior Preston Crowl, who pitched an excellent middle relief set of five innings and earned the win for the game. Crowl had a 3 hit, no run outing that included 7 strikeouts. Actually, Renfrow had 4 so his start did have some up sides. Sophomore Chase Swift toed the rubber for the final two innings and threw straight fire for 5 strikeouts. His first audition for closer was a perfect set of goose eggs.
In the meantime, the Hokie offense was generating a steady stream of runs from the 4th inning on. Catcher Henry Cooke returned to the Hokies for 2026 and resumed his quality catching behind the dish. Other than Cooke, though the new names for the position players will have to be learned. They all aren’t Freshmen or transfers, but they are new upperclassmen who have been promoted to starting and immediate substitute status.
Also returning, but now starting for this season are Hudson Lutterman, Nick Locurto, Treyson Hughes and Logan Eisenreich in the outfield. All of them were bench players last season. There were some returning infielders besides Cooke. Ethan Gibson made an appearance (he’s a shortstop). Backup catcher Anderson French was put in the DH spot for the game. We’ll talk about the new faces but based on the first game of the season this group could be very productive.
It was a good way to start the new season, and the returning Hokies and new transfer players who took the field stood out well.
There’s Always a Close Call
But a walk off win is often tonic for a team. The opening game of the Saturday double header started as a pitching duel and ended as a race to the bottom of the 9th inning.
The story of the game beside the last inning heroics was the struggle bus pitching that was probably very characteristic of an early pitch by committee set up for the double header. Thankfully the William & Mary pitching was struggling too, so after the 4th inning, the teams essentially battled until the Hokies loaded the bags in the bottom of the 9th and a Sam Grube single put Anderson French and Ethan Gibson across the plate for the tying and winning runs.
The Night Cap was Smooth This Time
Double headers are always difficult. The players love baseball and play all the time, but two games in a row on short notice even under the lights, becomes a chore. The result is often that they are split between teams that lineup their first-rate players to win, at least, one game of the 2-game set. As it happened, with William & Mary having dropped the series by losing the first two, had to come up with a sterling effort to gain, at least a split, with Tech. That didn’t happen.
The Brooms were out and the Hokies, now with nearly 1,650 fans in the stands tossed the first pitch at 5:40 PM after minimal rest from the day game. The Hokies ruled the nightcap in this one.
Even with the Tribe jumping out to a one run lead in the top of the 1st (which generally means a bit of trouble coming) the Hokies answered with three of their own and a 4th run in the 2nd. That ended up being all that they needed, but Tech did add a solid insurance 4 in the bottom of the 6th to ice out W&M even with their 2nd run coming in the top of the 8th.
Tech’s pitching was solid for this this game. The number of pitchers used, four, seemed more for the reality that it was early in the season, and no one was stretched out enough to go too many innings without fall offs and injuries. Ethan Grim toed the rubber to start for the Hokies and put up 4 really nice innings, even if he did give up a single run. Grim did post 6 KOs for the game. The bull pen closed out the game with Ben Weber getting credit for the win. He did put up a 1 hit, no run 3 inning stint on the mound so it was a well-earned W. Josh Berzonski struggled a bit and gave up a run, but it was inconsequential, and he eventually completed the 8th inning with no further damage done. Peyton Smith looked like another fireballer by striking out the side for the top of the 9th which secured the win.
The Hokie offense generated eight total runs, in two bursts. Henry Cooke had 2 RBI, and Owen Petrich homered in this one. There were several very good performances at the plate, and the team looks like it’s going to be fun to watch this season.
Next Up
East Tennessee State shows up tomorrow for a 4:00PM contest. Then Rutgers comes to Blacksburg for the weekend in a B1G Division 1 game.
