Editor’s Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series on Brian O’Connor’s tenure as coach of the Cavaliers as he enters his 20th season at the helm of the Hoos.
When Sean Doolittle arrived in West Palm Beach, Fla. earlier this week, it marked the start of his 15th big-league spring training.
Doolittle, the former Virginia two-way standout and now veteran left-handed reliever with the Washington Nationals, has had two different stints with the Nats and was part of their 2019 World Series championship club. He’s also pitched for Oakland, Cincinnati and Seattle in his career since debuting in 2012 with the A’s — the franchise that drafted Doolittle out of UVa in 2007.
In his decade-plus long stay in the Major Leagues, Doolittle said, the way his alma mater is perceived has changed for the better.
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“It’s so funny,” Doolittle said as he started to laugh. “When I got drafted — and we were good at Virginia while I was there and went to regionals all three years — but when I got drafted and into pro ball, people would ask like, ‘Where’d you go to school?’ And I’d be like, ‘I went to Virginia.’
“And then they’d be like, ‘Oh, like Virginia Tech? Virginia State?’” Doolittle said as he chuckled some more, “and I was like, ‘No, the University of Virginia. We’re in the ACC. We’ve got uniforms and everything. It’s great.’ But as the program has grown and my career has continued and I tell people I went to Virginia, it’s like they garner the same kind of respect that those elite, elite programs in college baseball get. Like the Vanderbilts and schools like that where people are like, ‘Oh. They’re really good.’”
Doolittle credits Cavaliers skipper Brian O’Connor, who begins his 20th season leading UVa on Friday, and the hard work, discipline and determination he’s instilled in his players over the years for that.
To be in the conversation about programs in the upper echelon of the sport, though, UVa had to knock off those in that realm when the opportunity was there. And after earning trips to the College World Series in 2009 and again in 2011, it was finally on college baseball’s biggest stage in 2014 and 2015, the Cavaliers did that during consecutive runs to the College World Series finals.
In Omaha in 2014, UVa beat Ole Miss twice and TCU, and the year after the Cavaliers won games against Florida twice and Arkansas. Both seasons resulted in championship showdowns with Vanderbilt.
“It’s almost like a miracle how two teams ended up playing against one another two years in a row,” Commodores coach Tim Corbin said, “and the reality is we probably could’ve flipped those championships. You don’t have your fate sometimes because there’s so much luck that comes into baseball, but I thought they had an outstanding team in 2014 and in a lot of ways they were better than us, but we happened to have key moments and I think you can say the same thing about 2015. We were very good and better than we were in ’15 than ’14, but they won.”
UVa evened the series at one win apiece in 2014 when Cavaliers starter Brandon Waddell hurled a complete-game effort in a 7-2 Game 2 victory only to see Vanderbilt capture the national title in the rubber match on John Norwood’s go-ahead homer in the eighth inning for a 3-2 win.
The ’14 group O’Connor had won 53 games — second most in the history of the Hoos — only to finish as the national runner-up. And in the following spring, the Cavaliers weren’t nearly as polished of a machine.
“We barely got ourselves into the NCAA Tournament,” O’Connor said. “We were at [North] Carolina the last weekend and we didn’t have a spot in the ACC Tournament yet.”
His 2015 roster returned enough from the prior season with Waddell as well as pitchers Josh Sborz and Nathan Kirby back, but O’Connor said the squad was injury-plagued and could’ve used that as an excuse to not return to the postseason.
The Cavaliers finished 15-15 in the ACC that spring.
“But in ’15 we handled adversity,” O’Connor said. “That pitching staff was decimated with injury at certain times. … At times we were sitting in meetings as coaches and saying, ‘We don’t have enough players,’ and we had to go to the club team and things like that. It was a very, very unselfish group because we had guys that needed to step up for their team that under no circumstance was it predicted that they had to do that.”
O’Connor said Kevin Doherty, a relief pitcher, was one of those players to take on more responsibility in order to keep the Cavaliers afloat. He pitched in 23 games and started as either a right fielder, left fielder or designated hitter in the lineup across 43 games.
Doherty had only pitched the year before.
“It’s interesting how things work because after the 2014 season, he came to see me and said, ‘Coach I could hit really good in high school, would you give me a chance to hit a little bit in the fall?’” O’Connor recalled. “And I’ve had many kids over the course of my career say that and I just sit there and I’ll chuckle a little bit and say ‘I thought I could hit, too,’ but I said, ‘Yeah, sure Kevin, we’ll take a look at you.’
“And you want to have options, but I had no idea that he’d end up having to play left field for us in the Super Regional and College World Series because there were so many injuries and different guys would need to step up. That’s the story behind that team.”
O’Connor said they got healthier later in the spring and he thought if they got into the NCAA Tournament, “we were going to be a son of a gun because a lot of these guys that we knew were superstars for us were finally starting to come back.”
Kirby missed nine weeks after straining a lat muscle against Miami, but returned to pitch in the College World Series. First baseman/catcher Robbie Coman missed time with a knee injury in the early part of the year and then with a facial injury in the middle of the season, but over the last 35 games, batted .333.
“What we had done by that time was create tremendous depth,” O’Connor said, “which you have to have to win in the NCAA Tournament because if you fall in the loser’s bracket, you need it.”
UVa rolled through the Lake Elsinore Regional with two wins over USC and another over San Diego State before sweeping Maryland in the Charlottesville Super Regional and winning over the Gators and Razorbacks to set up the rematch with Vanderbilt in Omaha.
The Commodores took Game 1, leaving UVa having to get the performances it got from a few freshmen — another key component to simply reach the NCAA Tournament that year — to erase the deficit and take the crown.
Freshman pitcher Adam Haseley combined with Sborz for a 3-0 shutout victory in Game 2, and in Game 3 freshman Pavin Smith smacked a game-tying two-run homer and drove in the eventual winning run with an RBI single to send Haseley, who also played in the outfield for the Hoos, across the plate.
“Players just stepped up and got better and better,” O’Connor said, “and our team was finally healthy when we got to Omaha. It was incredible.”
O’Connor said he’s always admired Corbin’s program and Corbin the same about UVa.
Corbin’s head-coaching start began one year earlier with the Commodores than O’Connor’s did with the Hoos, so O’Connor said he felt like their careers have been parallel to one another.
“And there’s a really short list of college coaches that when you say you played for them, people really take note of it,” Doolittle said, “and Oak is probably on that list. Corbin probably is, too, and rightfully so because I played for him one summer with Team USA and I know a lot of Vandy guys, am friends with Vandy guys and have learned a lot about their program. They compete for recruits quite a bit and the programs are very similar.”
Said Corbin: “We always surrounded ourselves with academic kids. I think Oak and I probably had the same thought that when we took our positions that Notre Dame was really good, Stanford was really good, Wake Forest was really good, Rice was really good and so we probably looked at those schools and said, ‘The advantage might be just to recruit intelligent, smart, tough kids,’ and if you get that you’ll get the chance to build smart, tough baseball programs. We probably both looked at Virginia and Vanderbilt in the same way.”
In the years since those memorable College World Series finals, UVa made its fifth trip to a College World Series in 2021 and similarly to how the ’15 team had to scrap to get into the tournament, so did the team two years ago.
That group overcame an 11-14 overall and 4-12 ACC start to get there.
But as O’Connor has done throughout his tenure, he inspired his bunch enough for them to turn their season around. That spring, he brought in firemen helmets to make an analogy to his players that they were at a pivotal point in the year.
“I’ve always been intrigued by firemen,” O’Connor said. “They do something no one else will do. Everyone else is running away from something that they’re running to. So, I said, ‘We are in this situation and we’re either going to run into the fire or run away from it.’”
That’s no different from various years in his career, when he turned to other motivators like a Golden Dump Truck Award to get the best out of his athletes. It’s an award that was initially given to Scott Morgenthaler, a pitcher on one of O’Connor’s earliest teams, who O’Connor said was being so tough during an outing against Old Dominion that he had to point out Morgenthaler in the postgame huddle with the entire squad. Morgenthaler’s teammates got such a kick out of it, they turned it into an award and O’Connor has used the award in the years since.
Those who have played for O’Connor — and he’s coached 29 Major Leaguers — say what he teaches sticks with them regardless of whether or not they play pro ball. Doolittle said, though, those that continue their careers into the pros are set up for success because of O’Connor.
“I don’t think anybody has had a bigger impact on my career than Oak,” said Doolittle, who has played for accomplished managers like Dusty Baker and Davey Martinez in Washington and Bob Melvin in Oakland, “because of the foundation that I got at Virginia helped me so much moving forward in my career.”
Said Los Angeles Dodgers’ Chris Taylor, a former UVa shortstop, about O’Connor and his staff: “They treat you like adults for one, and they’re not going to babysit you. They expect a lot out of you and they hold you accountable, which I think is important.”
Doolittle said the work ethic O’Connor and company taught him to have, is one of the reasons why he’s been able to stay in the big leagues for so long.
“In pro ball there’s no coaches coming to hold your hand,” Doolittle said. “There’s no practice plan like there is in college baseball, so by the time guys have graduated from Virginia, they know what it takes to be a great baseball player, they know what it means to work hard and they’re used to putting the work in every day.”
As for the triumphs of a championship, five trips to the College World Series, annually reaching the NCAA Tournament and producing big leaguers, O’Connor said he couldn’t have done it without his staff or without the way he worked in unison with former Cavaliers athletic director Craig Littlepage while ramping the program up.
He said he’s not content entering Year 20 either and that this year’s team has some of the same characteristics the 2015 group had.
“It’s been a fun journey so far,” O’Connor said. “And we’ve got a lot more work to do. And I feel even after 19 years of coming here every day that every day is a new day and opportunity to continue because I look at this program as a constant building process.”
