:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60238747/Baseball_Team___Virginia_Media_Relations.0.jpg)
In Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book, Outliers, Gladwell details how something amazingly bad, or amazingly good, can happen. From all the breaks The Beatles got during their formative years that made them what they became, to the countless errors and mistakes that have to be made for a plane crash to occur.
After 14 years at the University of Virginia, Coach Brian O’Connor had established a perennial power. 14 straight NCAA tournament appearances, 2 ACC Tournament titles, 4 College World Series appearances, a national title, and countless other accomplishments.
In the 15th season, UVa baseball missed the NCAA tournament altogether.
Many things went wrong.
The 2018 Virginia baseball season was an outlier.
Over the next three days we’re going to publish a series of articles detailing three of the main reasons the 2018 Virginia baseball season happened: the injuries, the statistical underperformance, and the roster attrition coupled with the 2016 MLB Draft.
To look at three things that went so drastically wrong to create the massive outlier of a season.