International Experience Certainly Agreed With Brian O’Connor

Brian O’Connor got a taste of international baseball this summer in a 22-day stint with USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team. The experience whetted his appetite for more.

O’Connor, Virginia’s longtime baseball coach, was the pitching coach on manager Paul Mainieri’s USA team that went 11-3 in series against Chinese Taipei, Japan and Cuba. The USA swept its five-game series against Taipei, won three of five against Japan, and went 3-1 vs. Cuba, with the final game rained out.

Certainly, O’Connor’s pitching staff did its job. The USA arms were outstanding over the span of 14 games, including a streak of 18.1 innings of shutout ball against Cuba during one stretch. In fact, USA pitchers had a 1.1 ERA vs. Cuba until the last game, when the Cubans brought in reserves to prevent getting swept by the Americans, and won the finale, 15-4.

Up until then, USA’s staff had allowed a mere one run in three games against Cuba, with all of those games played in Havanna.

“I’m so grateful to Coach Mainieri for giving me this opportunity,” O’Connor said this week, back in the States. “I hope that someday down the road that I have the opportunity to do it again as the head coach.

“Maybe sometime in the future, if they ever feel like I’m worthy of doing it, that would be a neat experience,” O’Connor said.

The international series is played every summer, sometimes for a brief 22-day span as the UVa coach experienced, sometimes a six-week commitment as present Louisville coach Dan McDonnell will experience in 2019.

While the U.S. hosted Taipei and Japan this summer and played at Havanna, McDonnell’s teams will do just the opposite. Coaches get one shot at being the head coach and one opportunity to be an assistant coach, which has left O’Connor wanting the full experience at some point in his career.

The Cavaliers coach expressed his appreciation to Mainieri, but the feeling was mutual. Mainieri, LSU’s head coach, hand-picked O’Connor to be his pitching coach for the USA stint. It was a reunion of sorts as O’Connor was once Mainieri’s pitching coach at Notre Dame before leaving South Bend to accept UVa’s job.

“You can’t say enough about what Brian O’Connor has done,” Mainieri said after the USA games concluded. “He is a great head coach at the University of Virginia, but before he was a head coach, he was a phenomenal pitching coach and he has demonstrated that again during the period of time we have been together this summer.

“[O’Connor] is not reinventing the wheel, obviously these kids are very talented, but we are utilizing them correctly, he is calling the games, and he is handling them the right way,” Mainieri continued. “He has worked so hard. He didn’t just put on the USA uniform and go through the motions. He worked hard in preparation for this summer, learning about all the pitchers we were inviting, watching video of them, developing a relationship with them, and they have really responded to his leadership.”

O’Connor’s staff surrendered only 15 earned runs the entire stretch of games until the fourth-game finale in Havanna.

“There were some guys playing for Cuba in game four that weren’t playing in the first three games,” O’Connor chuckled. “They brought in some reinforcements.”

Team USA had never won more than three games in a series held in Cuba, let alone won three in a row. The Cubans were determined not to get swept.

O’Connor found Cuba fascinating. While the four-game set was played in Havanna’s stadium, the best in the country, the Cubans have six stadiums around the country and the roster that faced the U.S. was comprised of an all-star squad from those six professional teams.

“We were treated great, the Cuban people were fantastic,” O’Connor said. “To learn about the culture and history there was a great experience. They absolutely love their baseball.”

All four of the games were on television around Cuba, attracting an estimated seven million viewers for each contest.

“We would walk down the street the next day and there would be people that made specific comments about the game from the night before,” the Virginia skipper said. “The waiter who waited on you at lunchtime absolutely watched the game from the night before. It’s a place I would really enjoy going back to.”

As great of an experience as visiting Cuba was, the highlight of O’Connor’s summer baseball came a little closer to home.

The five games against Japan were contested at five different venues: Durham, N.C.; Charlotte; Savannah, Ga.; Macon, Ga.; and the finale at the Atlanta Braves’ Stadium. That was cool, but the game at the Durham Bulls’ Park was special.

“That was my favorite game of all 14 games,” O’Connor said. “It was July Fourth, beating Japan 1-0 before a sellout crowd and fireworks on our nation’s birthday, really made me proud to be wearing the USA emblem across my chest.”

Virginia’s coach described the summer as a lifetime experience, not only representing his country and playing against international competition in so many stadiums, but to be in the dugout with his two coaching mentors, Mainieri and Jim Hendry, presently special assistant to New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman. Hendry was O’Connor’s head coach at Creighton.

“What a rare experience to get the chance to do that,” O’Connor said. “Actually living that out was awesome.”

After a short break upon his return to Charlottesville, O’Connor will roll up his sleeves and get to work on his next Virginia team and a new set of challenges. After missing the NCAA Tournament for the first time in his career at the helm of the Cavaliers, he is determined to not allow that to happen again.

“It’s a different fall than we’ve ever experienced before,” O’Connor said. “For the first time in 15 years, coming off not playing in the postseason.”

He has spent two months assessing the 2018 season and what went wrong, and putting his entire program under the microscope.

“There are some changes and adjustments that need to be made like every year,” O’Connor said. “Nothing drastic, however, you’ve got to adapt and adjust.

“We have to understand what this program stands for and what the expectations are, and get back to work and get back to Virginia baseball,” the coach said. “If we do that, good things will happen. We’ve got to get back and understand that last year was not acceptable and we’ve got to get better.”

UVa’s coaching staff will be moving into its new offices at Disharoon Park some time this month, which was part of the stadium expansion. The final piece will be the start of construction of the third base line, which will be done before the start of next season. UVa will be adding permanent seating where the old bullpen used to be, and there will also be some reforming of the grass hill down the left-field line to make it more accommodating to fans who enjoy sitting there.

O’Connor wants to give all those fans something to see next season (and fall ball), and believes the incoming freshmen recruiting class has a chance to be special.

“It could be one of our better recruiting classes,” O’Connor said. “We have some kids that decided to come to school that are really skilled. This could be one of those ‘difference-maker’ groups.’”

The Cavaliers lost only one recruit to the Major League Baseball Draft, which was good news to the coaching staff.

“We have some guys that will impact this program right away,” O’Connor said. “But we’ve got to go back to the basics that built this program. It was well-documented this past year that we had a rash of injuries, but we’ve got to move on from that.”