3 up, 3 down: No. 8 FSU bounces back with sweep of Notre Dame

Brayden Dowd has been stepping up in Bailey’s absence. But he needs help for FSU to remain competitive without its best hitter. He finally got that this weekend and it transformed the offense.

• Pitchers (largely) step up

Unlike the pitching staff, Notre Dame’s offense is not a weakness. After the Florida State series, the Irish bats rank ninth in the conference in batting average (.288) and 10th in slugging percentage (.475), both narrowly ahead of FSU’s bats.

That makes what the FSU pitching staff did for most of the weekend series quite impressive.

Friday starter Wes Mendes set the tone, delivering his fourth start of the season of five-plus innings and no runs allowed. He allowed just 3 hits and 2 walks over 6 innings, striking out 7.

Trey Beard largely followed suit. He allowed 2 runs on 3 hits with 7 strikeouts and no walks over his first 5 innings. But FSU elected to send him back out for the sixth and things went off the rails a bit as he allowed 4 more runs, tying his season-high with 6 runs allowed.

Sunday may have been the most impressive pitching performance given the circumstances. With FSU being safe with Bryson Moore after he felt something last week, that left the Seminoles with a bullpen game in pursuit of their sweep.

It wasn’t perfect by any means, but five FSU pitchers combined to allow 4 runs on 7 hits, striking out 10 and walking 5. That includes the final three pitchers, Cade O’Leary, Brodie Purcell and Chris Knier, allowing just 1 run on 2 hits and a walk with 5 strikeouts over the final five innings, allowing the offense to awaken and rally for the win.

The pitching staff is definitely going to have to set the tone for this team the rest of the way and it did that against Notre Dame after a tough test against perhaps the best offense in the country the prior week.

• A significant sweep

A series win after Saturday was already a positive, relatively speaking. But sweeps against overmatched teams are the type of thing that could prove to be the difference with FSU trending towards being right back on the bubble for a top-eight national seed this season.

In the standings, FSU essentially made up for its sweep at the hands of Georgia Tech by sweeping Notre Dame, effectively making the last two weeks a 2-1 series loss and a 2-1 series win.

With only four weeks left in the regular season (crazy how time flies!), FSU is sitting in a tie for third in the ACC standings at 12-6 in conference play. The Seminoles are also 10th in the NCAA’s RPI rankings, up one spot from where they were entering the week at No. 11.

Last week, D1Baseball had FSU as the No. 10 seed and Baseball America had FSU as the No. 11 seed.

It’s entirely possible that Sunday win over Notre Dame — or another sweep-finishing win or two in the next few weeks if that’s how the season plays out — could be the difference between a path to Omaha through home games and once again needing to hit the road.

3 down

• Abraham showing fatigue?

After a sweep, it feels a bit harsh to have more than one down in this story.

And mind you, this “down” isn’t even a negative. It’s just something to be wary of over the next few weeks.

Is John Abraham — far and away FSU’s best reliever this season — starting to show some signs of fatigue after how heavily he’s been relied upon as a high-leverage reliever?

His numbers haven’t really fallen off. He’s sitting pretty with a team-high 0.78 ERA over 34 2/3 innings and has allowed just 1 earned run in his last two extended relief appearances against Georgia Tech and Notre Dame.

But some of the control issues from his first two seasons he seemed to be past have returned the last two times out. In his first 12 appearances spanning 29 1/3 innings, he walked a total of 9 hitters, hit 1 and struck out 43.

He’s walked 3 batters each of the last two weekends and also allowed a combined 6 hits after he had allowed just 16 on the season entering the Georgia Tech series.

He largely limited the damage against the Yellow Jackets — although his wild pitch in Game 1 proved quite costly — and came away with his fifth save against the Irish despite a ton of traffic on the bases against him.

But if he’s indeed showing signs of fatigue as he passed his innings total from each of his first two seasons at FSU on Saturday, that certainly changes the complexion of the bullpen.

Something to monitor going forward. A return to form this weekend at Stanford would be a big confidence boost for the perception of the bullpen as a whole.