Sometimes the bad and the ugly can lead to the good. I wonder if that's the case for the current Miami Hurricanes' baseball team.
The bad occurred early in the season when they lost two games at home against the Florida Gators after winning the series opener.
The ugly came in a series finale at Clemson three weeks ago, a 20-5 loss after winning the first two games.
Since then the Hurricanes have won 10 in a row and have jumped from 17th to 8th in the national rankings. They swept 14th-ranked North Carolina at home and swept pre-season ranked Duke at Durham.
With their 23-6 record, including 10-2 in the ACC, they're the only team in the nation with 20 or more victories overall and 10 in conference play.
The Canes ride this momentum into a three-game series against third-ranked Virginia beginning Friday at 7 p.m. at Alex Rodriguez Park at Mark Light Field.
I asked head coach Gino DiMare if he thought the 20-5 setback served as a catalyst for the winning streak. We're the Hurricanes embarrassed and saying "that's not us"?
"I don't know if I have an answer," DiMare said Thursday in an interview with CaneSport. "Nobody was happy about it. I'm not sure if it was a wakeup call. We played good prior to that winning two games at Clemson, but I would think it's more of one of those games that got away from us. The ball was flying out. It's one of those games, it happens.
"I can remember being on teams - coaching and playing - where they put up 20 runs against us in a game and it didn't affect us. The team went on. I can remember a team putting up 20 runs and and we went on to go onto the College World Series, for goodness sakes.
"That's what I said to the players after the game. I did not like losing and the way they lost but didn't want them burying themselves. We won a good series, and that one game can't ruin everything and leave a bad taste in their mouth. I've been on teams that have gotten beat worse than that. Baseball can do that once in awhile. But you never know, maybe that was an embarrassment that we don't want to happen again."
Three times, in fact, the Hurricanes have endured a lopsided clunker and gone onto the College World Series: 20-8 to Florida State in 1988, 22-3 to Texas in 1997, and 17-2 to Virginia in 2003.
The winning streak has included several lopsided scores: 11-3 and 12-2 over Boston College, 11-3 over Duke, and Wednesday night 17-1 over Florida International.
Asked if pitching, hitting, or fielding - or all three - have been the driving force in the streak, DiMare replied, "I'd say a little bit of everything. Fielding - over the 10 games we're fielding .984, which is very, very good. I say this because our defense had been inconsistent up until then. In this stretch maybe that's something that has stepped up.
"Our pitching has been very good. Obviously it's been a lot of guys. That's been maybe something we weren't getting early on with the bullpen in terms of depth. There are a lot of guys who stepped it up and have done well.
"Our offense has put up big numbers. Double digit runs in quite a few games. One thing definitely I would say that's better is our defense and overall pitching."
No doubt, good defense and pitching will be vital down the stretch in conference and post-season games.
"We put up 11 on Sunday at Duke and one (actually two) other but most ACC games are going to be closer, 4-3, 4-1, 4-2, 5-3, whatever," DiMare said. "The North Carolina games were all close, 8-5, 7-3 and 3-2 14 innings, not lot of offense that game, lot of pitching and defense.
"When you're playing good teams normally, say like a Virginia, those games are probably going to be lower scoring type games. You're not going to put up big runs against really good teams that have good pitching."
The winning streak has included an achievement that none of the great hitters in UM's storied baseball history - not Pat Burrell or Zack Collins or Mike Fiore or Orlando Gonzalez - accomplished. Last weekend at Duke, shortstop Dominic Pitelli became the first player in the 78 years of the program to hit two grand slams in the same series.
"Baseball has so many strange stats and that's one of them," DiMare said. "What's key about it is how important they were. They were not a grand slam when the game was out of reach. It was a grand slam in the eighth inning to win it in the first game. We were down, we couldn't get going offensively. We got their starter out of the game on pitch count, he was throwing well, and were able to load the bases.
"The next one was early in the game. It's deflating to the other team, with two outs four runs in the first inning."
This weekend's series will feature the top two teams in the ACC Coastal Division. The Hurricanes lead with their 10-2 record and Virginia is second at 9-3.
"Virginia is a very well balanced team, obviously they're always well coached," DiMare said. "They've got very good pitching, three lefthanders, certainly going to be a challenge for us. We haven't faced a lot of left-handed pitching. And we're a little bit top heavy with lefthanders in our lineup, probably five and four righters. They pitch, hit and defend, a balanced team."
The ACC is loaded with strong teams, perhaps on a par with the SEC, which usually sends the most teams to the post season.
"Overall the ACC is deep," DiMare said. "I saw a projection the other day - maybe 10 teams in the ACC that right now if the season ended could be in the NCAA tournament, which is one more than the SEC. The depth you just go on and on. And some of them haven't gotten off to a good start, like Duke. They were ranked in the top 25 preseason and they've got a good recruiting class.
"Is there a standout team? That remains to be seen. But the depth of league is as strong as anybody in the country."
And there could be a sleeper as there was last season in North Carolina State, as DiMare remembers well.
"North Carolina State came on slow," he said. "In fact, we we up there early on and beat them two out of three, I think they were 3-9 or something like that and got on fire. In my opinion they were probably the hottest team in the country going into Omaha and unfortunately had the season pulled away from them because of COVID outbreak, they weren't allowed to play. And I honestly thought, and I think a lot of people did, that they were the team to beat."
How good can the 2022 Hurricanes become? The goals, as always, are to advance to the NCAA tournament, which they last did in 2019, and to reach the College World Series, which they haven't played in since 2016.
"Well they can be good," DiMare said. "They've shown we can put it all together with our starting pitching and the guys we can bring in from the bull pen. If we have the right matchups our lineup can be very good. It's young, it's a very young lineup, one that we're still trying to figure out, especially with some positions - the DH and the corner outfield spots that we're platooning.
"But we have a chance, it's not like one guy has 10 home runs, but what you do have is a lot of guys that are hitting solidly, solid RBIs. We've got some guys that can run, guys are getting on base. The on-base percentage is . 400. So you're giving yourself an opportunity to be pretty good.
"There's no doubt in my mind that this is a team that can get to Omaha, we've just got to keep going in the right direction."
