Preview: Stanford Baseball looks to get even with Cal in ACC tournament

On Tuesday at 10:00 AM PT on ACC Network, Stanford baseball will face Cal in the first round of the ACC tournament on Truist Field in Charlotte, North Carolina. Stanford comes in as the No. 12 seed in the tournament with a record of 27-25 overall and 13-17 in the ACC while Cal comes in as the No. 13 seed at 29-25 overall and 12-18 in the ACC.

Last time out: Stanford fell to Cal on Saturday in Berkeley by a final score of 2-1. Cal won two of the three games of the series to wrap up the regular season.

RECAP: Stanford drops series to Cal in low-scoring affair

On Cal: The Golden Bears obviously enter this tournament with more momentum than Stanford having won the weekend series. That said, all three games were decided by one run, so it’s not like Cal dominated Stanford or anything. Still, having taken two out of three, they do have a bit of an edge in that sense. My preview of the series from last week is here in case you want more of a refresher on what the strengths are of this Cal team.

Teddy Tokheim gets All-ACC Honors: Stanford freshman Teddy Tokheim was named to the All-ACC second team and the ACC All-Freshman team.

GoStanford.com: Tokheim Garners All-ACC Recognition

Keys to the game: For Stanford, the first thing they need to do is get their bats to come alive. Their win on Thursday was a 7-6 victory while their loss on Friday was 4-3 before falling 2-1 on Saturday. Even though the Golden Bears’ pitching absolutely deserves credit for slowing down the Cardinal lineup, the Cardinal still have to take some responsibility for their lineup going as cold as it did. The Cardinal have plenty of bats in guys like Eric Jeon, Teddy Tokheim, Rintaro Sasaki, Cort MacDonald, and others. They just need to make sure at least a couple of those guys heat up. When all those guys go quiet, that’s when there’s problems.

Secondly, Stanford needs to avoid committing errors. An error on Friday that should have been a double play instead led to the Bears scoring the game-winning run. Stanford can’t expect to win this game if their errors continue. They have to play sound defensively if they want to win this game.

Finally, the pitching can’t get discouraged from this past weekend. On the whole, they had a good weekend against Cal. They have to tell themselves that they did their job last weekend and that with better run support, they’ll beat Cal if they keep up their end of the bargain. Stanford is used to tournament style of pitching given how frequently they have used a by committee approach. It’ll be interesting to see if that ends up paying off against Cal and beyond.

“The Reimers of the world, the Petersons of the world, they’re doing fine and giving them opportunities and they’re, you know, they’re coming through,” Stanford head coach David Esquer said of the pitching last week. “Steeves and guys like that are getting chances in big games and you know, we’re gonna need that if we can make a run in that tournament. We’re probably more tournament ready than most because we got everybody who pitches every day.”

Prediction: Given the back and forth nature of this past weekend’s series, I’ll say Stanford gets even with Cal and the bats come alive. There should be some extra motivation having just lost to Cal, too. 8-6 Cardinal advance.

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