FSU baseball set to begin ACC play at home vs. Notre Dame

Florida State head baseball coach Link Jarrett will begin ACC play this weekend against a familiar face.

Quite a few of them, in fact.

The Seminoles, who are 15-0 for the first time since 2013, begin ACC play this weekend at Dick Howser Stadium against Notre Dame (11-5, 0-3 ACC). For Jarrett, it'll be a reunion of sorts for the second straight year after he left his post as ND head coach after three seasons to take over at his alma mater ahead of the 2023 season.

"For me personally, some of the things accomplished there were pretty unique. Some of the guys on that team had a hand in it. We had a pretty good run so you do reflect on some of those moments and experiences..." Jarrett recalled of his time at Notre Dame. "It's just a lot of neat moments that I remember. A lot of those players are gone, but there are still some that we recruited that are still there so you still have that piece to it."

Jarrett amassed an 86-32 record over three seasons leading the Irish from 2020-22. He led Notre Dame to its first ACC regular-season championship in 2021 and to its first College World Series since 2002 in 2022, leading his team to a significant Super Regional upset at No. 1 overall seed Tennessee.

The FSU head coach returned to South Bend, Ind., last April for a three-game series at his former school, with the Irish winning two of three games to take the series. This will be the first time FSU has hosted Notre Dame since poaching the Tallahassee native and former FSU shortstop to be its head coach in July 2022.

Notre Dame heads to Tallahassee coming off a midweek sweep of Radford. Before that, the Irish opened ACC play last weekend on the wrong side of a sweep at Virginia Tech. ND's pitching staff allowed 10-plus runs in each game of the weekend series and the Irish were outscored 32-16 over the three games.

Entering the FSU series, Notre Dame's 6.73 ERA ranks second-worst in the ACC and 194th out of 295 Division I teams nationally. That could prove challenging against an FSU offense which has scored seven-plus runs in each of its first 15 games this season entering ACC play.

Coming off Tuesday's 12-8 win at rival Florida, Jarrett admitted he's extremely pleased with what he's seen from his team in the first quarter of its regular-season schedule.

"They've got good trademarks. I've seen a lot of championship teams and they have some of those trademarks," Jarrett said of his team. "The intensity, the attention to the in-game details, the confidence because they feel that they have the capability to execute a lot of these asks from us coaches, they work very hard. The alignment of the traits of quality teams, I see it and yes, it is fun to watch that. Their enjoyment of their own execution and their performance and their physicality and their intensity, these guys feed off each other and feed off of that. That is a really good piece of a team and it is unique that there are so many new guys on this team.

"It is important that we got off to a nice start out of the gate, things kind of built. Can you maintain this level of play throughout a 60-game season? I don't know. I will tell you I like the way the guys have engaged and played, I like the intensity and I like the execution. There are still things I see everyday, we'll go practice here in a minute and I'll walk out of here probably upset about certain things. But all in all, I've told them how proud I am of their engagement and how they have stayed the course. Regardless of where we've gone, what we've done, who we've played, they've been consistent with their delivery."

This three-game set vs. Notre Dame will be the Seminoles' fifth weekend of the 2024 season.

So long as things go according to plan weather-wise, it'll be the first time this season that FSU will throw its announced weekend rotation of starting pitchers coming into the season.

Expected Sunday starter Conner Whittaker didn't start a game in the opening weekend vs. Butler due to one game being canceled because of weather and FSU decided to move Whittaker to the midweek starter spot after he missed his first weekend start.

The junior right-handed pitcher stayed there for the first three midweek games of the season, posting a 3.63 ERA over 17.1 innings in wins over Jacksonville, South Florida and FGCU. However, he did not start Tuesday's win at UF — although he was available out of the bullpen — as Jarrett and pitching coach Micah Posey decided the start of ACC play was the right time to move him back into the weekend rotation.

Whittaker is now expected to make his first weekend start of the season in Sunday's 1 p.m. series finale vs. Notre Dame, joining Friday starter Cam Leiter (3-0, 2.70 ERA) and Saturday starter Jamie Arnold (4-0, 0.00 ERA) to give FSU one of the more formidable weekend rotations in the ACC.

While there are some lingering questions about the FSU bullpen, the Seminoles' 2.93 ERA this season is the best in the ACC and seventh nationally. FSU enters ACC play as the only team in the conference with three pitchers who have made three-plus starts this season and have ERAs below 4.00.

"When you go into this and you have that luxury of three capable starting pitchers, it's a good feeling," Jarrett said. "Because of those three guys throwing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the bullpen leverage guys, every one of these outs is important and you just hope by doing this, you're shrinking some of the outs that are probably more important late in the game than early in the game. You're shrinking that because the starting pitchers are capable of getting you length out of their starts. I've talked about that since day one, it's really important...

"We need the starters to give us length, they have to be efficient, positionally we have to back them up with solid defense, fundamental defense, above-average plays to maximize what these three capable starters are doing."

When: Friday, 6 p.m.; Saturday, 3 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m.

Where: Dick Howser Stadium

TV: ACC Network Extra

Radio: 100.7 FM in Tallahassee or Seminoles.com everywhere

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