We’re deep into the 2023 Notre Dame baseball season and the Irish are looking solid.

High Level Takeaways

With 34 total games played through April 18, the Irish have tallied up 19 wins and lay claim to a 55.9% win record. For their 18 conference games, they’ve claimed 8 wins and have a 44.4% win record.

For their 11 home games (the first of which was played on March 21 because South Bend is the Arctic tundra), they’ve got a 63.6% win rate. On the road (away or neutral), where they’ve played the bulk of their games, they lay claim to a 47.6% win rate.

Conference Standings

The Irish baseball squad is ranked 5^th in the ACC Atlantic division.

I spend most of my time invested in Notre Dame football affairs, aka Independent land. Because of that it’s always weird analyzing the other sports because of the conference standings thing in general as well as just how little of a geographic fit ND is for the ACC. As a former East Coast resident there’s a ton of alumni/fan base reasons that ACC membership makes for Irish sports. But when you look at the Atlantic and Coastal division names, two geographic things that are completely unrelated to South Bend, the arrangement seems really odd.

While they’re 5^th in their division, it’s not as far back as it may look like at surface level. Notre Dame’s conference record is 8-10, compared with NC State (8-9), Boston College (9-9), Louisville (8-7). The division’s outlier by a long stretch is Wake Forest who has a 14-3 conference record and 31-5 overall record. Important Note: In their most recent matchup the Irish dealt the Demon Deacons one of those 3 conference losses.

Trend Summary

March was the first full week of play for the program. They played 15 games in that month and racked up a 53% win rate. The season got started to a rocky start, only winning 2 of the 6 non-conference games they played that month. But things got a lot better in March and 18 days into April things are continuing to trend upwards. For the 11 games played so far in April, the Irish have a 55% win rate.

Game Outcomes Summary

The Irish baseball team has played 10 series so far and 5 one-off games.

Their first 3 series were played against non-conference opponents, Lipscomb, UNCG and UAB. After dropping 2 games to Lipscomb the team came back to win 2 out of 3 games against both UNCG and UAB. They kicked off conference play in their 4^th series against Georgia Tech where they lost 1-3. In the next series against St. John’s they made their first and only full series sweep against an opponent. The asterisks are that Saint John’s is a non-conference opponent and there were only 2 games in the series.

Series 6-10 were all against conference opponents. They lost the bulk, winning only 1 game out of 3 played against Wake Forest, North Carolina and Clemson. They achieved majority 2-1 wins against Louisville and Pitt. Louisville is currently ranked 2^nd in the division and Pitt is ranked 6^th in the Coastal division.

For their one-off games, Notre Dame has won 4 out of 5. The only loss came to Michigan State at home in a 6-7, 11-inning matchup. The Irish have racked up two at home victories against Valparaiso and wins against other nearby opponents Butler and Northwestern. News also recently broke that the team will be meeting up again with Northwestern in May, this time with the action playing out in Wrigley Field.

Scoring Details

The team’s offensive output has been pretty varied up to this point the season. They’ve averaged close to 6 runs per game, including losses. In the games that they’ve generally struggled to put up more than 2 total runs. When the bats are going it can be a real feast though. They laid claim to a season high of 17 runs in Game 3 against Georgia Tech and averaged around 7.5 runs scored in games that they’ve won.

Notre Dame baseball’s most significant loses came in the first part of the season. Even though they’ve continued to struggle to pull together win streaks, the point differences in opponents’ favor have been notably trimmed down.

Final Thoughts

There’s still a lot of baseball to play this season. The Irish’s last, scheduled regular season game is on May 20 against Boston College. If the Irish can get things going in a more consistent manner this could be a good follow up campaign for 1^st year head coach Shawn Stiffler coming off a deep run into the College World Series in 2022.

Cheers and Go Irish!!