DURHAM, N.C. — Forget that the ACC Tournament schedule says that Virginia’s baseball team has another game to play Thursday.
Even before the Cavaliers met Florida State on Tuesday afternoon at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, it would have been a good idea to start packing their belongings.
For the first time in 15 years, Virginia won’t be playing in the NCAA Tournament after losing to Florida State 3-2 in 11 innings.
UVa (28-25) never led but kept things close behind the pitching of junior Daniel Lynch and freshman Andrew Abbott.
It was Abbott who gave up a two-out run-scoring double that sent the Seminoles (40-17) sprinting onto the field in celebration.
Both teams will play again. On Thursday, 10th-seeded UVa plays third-seeded North Carolina State (40-14) at 3 p.m. The Seminoles get the Wolfpack at 7 p.m. Friday.
The Cavaliers needed to go 2-0 in Pool C to be playing past Thursday, and needed to win the tournament to be get the conference’s automatic NCAA tournament berth.
An RPI that was in the 80s before Tuesday would not have yielded an at-large bid.
“We don’t immediately respond to things and have emotions like, ‘Hey, maybe we won’t be going to the NCAA tournament,’ ” UVa coach Brian O’Connor said.
“We’re here to play baseball; we’ve got another game Thursday, and that’s what we’ll be consumed with. We’ll analyze that when we’re done and analyze where we go from there.”
O’Connor could not have asked for a better performance than he got from Lynch and Abbott — both left-handers.
Lynch, likely to be selected in the early rounds of the upcoming Major League Baseball draft, pitched into the seventh inning for the fifth straight game and 10th time this season,.
He struck out seven batters and exited with the score 2-2.
“It’s just starting to sink in that this will probably be my last start,” said Lynch, who had 105 strikeouts in 88 2/3 innings. “I tried not to think about it like that. I just tried to treat it like a normal game.”
Virginia had several opportunities to take the lead but was plagued by base-running miscues.
Freshman second baseman Alex Tappen, whose fourth-inning double off the left-field fence drove in Andy Weber to make the score 1-1, subsequently strayed off second base and was picked off by FSU catcher Cal Raleigh.
Tappen’s fly ball had come within 2-3 feet of the yellow railing that would have given him a home run.
In the seventh inning, UVa’s Nate Eikhoff decided to take off from second on a ball hit to shortstop and was easily thrown out at third for the second out of the inning.
“They need to be held accountable for those decisions that they made,” O’Connor said. “Alex Tappen getting picked off second base [is] uncharacteristic for him. He’s grown into being a pretty mature player. He understands that that can’t happen.
“We’ll discuss it. Were they putting pressure on themselves? I don’t know. It’s uncharacteristic of our program to do that. We haven’t done much of those kind of things the whole year.”
One bright spot was Abbott, who, despite giving up the walk-off, game-winning double, allowed two hits in 3 2/3 innings and struck out five, including the batter before Reese Albert stroked his decisive two-out hit.
“I wasn’t starting to feel any fatigue,” Abbott said. “I just think it was a matter of they were coming up with a game plan against me since they had seen me one time through the order, so this was the second time through.
“They definitely had some idea of what I’d thrown to them in the first at-bat. I messed up one pitch and [Albert] put a good swing on it. My outing can’t be defined by one pitch.”
O’Connor knew ahead of time that the tournament and the season were unlikely to have a wonderful final act.
“I thought Abbott was locked in,” O’Connor said. “He was great. In this game, when you’re playing a good opponent, you make one mistake, it can cost you, and that’s what happened.”