Virginia took two of three from Clemson with a 5-4 win Saturday at Davenport Field at Disharoon Park. The Tigers had 10 hits and left eight men on base. Danny Nelson absorbs the loss and drops to 1-3. Clemson falls to 25-16, 6-12 in the ACC.
Harrison Didawick was the difference. The Virginia outfielder hit two home runs and drove in two, giving the Cavaliers a lead that Clemson spent the afternoon chasing. Joe Tiroly hit one. Sam Harris hit one. Four home runs, four of Virginia’s five runs.
Lucas Hartman worked deep into the game and improved to 8-0. He held Clemson to one run through seven innings, worked through the middle of the order without letting it score, and handed Tyler Kapa a one-run lead to protect. Kapa protected it. That’s his ninth save.
Clemson scored in the first. Virginia scored and kept scoring. Didawick’s two home runs did the most damage, another Clemson runner kept getting stranded at second or third, and Nelson couldn’t hold up his end. Virginia scored in five different innings and built a three-run lead.
Then the eighth.
Luke Gaffney led off with a solo home run and made it 5-3. Bryce Clavon hit the next pitch out. Back-to-back. The crowd at Disharoon Park, 5,077 on a sunny Saturday afternoon, went quiet. Five-four. Tying run at the plate.
They didn’t get it. Kapa closed the door without drama. Three outs, series over.
Ten hits, eight left on base. Jacob Jarrell had two hits and an RBI. Virginia had the same hit total and scored five. The difference was four LOB to eight. That’s been the arithmetic all conference season.
Thursday opened with a 6-4 loss built around Aidan Knaak striking out 10 Cavaliers in seven innings and walking off with an L because the offense went 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position in the late innings. Friday was the correction, Michael Sharman going eight innings on 100 pitches and Nate Savoie hitting it out twice in a 5-1 win that forced a rubber match. Saturday closed it in Virginia’s favor.
Virginia wins the series 2-1 and moves to 28-13, 12-9 in the ACC. Hartman at 8-0 is the best pitching story in the conference right now. Didawick’s two-homer afternoon was the margin.
At 6-12, Clemson has dropped 12 of 18 conference games. The back-to-back homers in the eighth were the best thing the Tigers showed all weekend. Eight LOB was the rest of it.
Clemson returns home to host USC Upstate on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
