Canes on the rise, crack Top 25 polls

With about a third of the regular season left, the Miami Hurricanes baseball team is on the rise and, barring a complete collapse, appears to be headed toward its first NCAA tournament in three years.

The Canes (25-12, 10-8 Atlantic Coast Conference) swept Virginia this past weekend on the road to jump into the Top 25 rankings for the first time since Feb. 26, 2018, when they were No. 24. D1Baseball has Miami ranked No. 23 and Collegiate Baseball has the Canes at No. 22.

More important than the ranking, UM has won seven of its past eight games, including the past five and two of three from Florida State the first weekend in April. The Hurricanes’ RPI is now No. 20 of 299 Division I teams. At season’s end, 64 teams go to the NCAA tournament, which culminates with the top eight advancing to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.

UM, which won national titles in 1982, ’85, ’99 and 2001, hasn’t qualified for an NCAA tourney berth since its last one in 2016, when it went all the way to the College World Series. Miami had its nationalrecord, 44-year postseason NCAA tournament streak snapped in 2017 and again missed a tournament berth in 2018.

“This is the right time,” UM coach Gino DiMare said in UM’s report Sunday after the sweep over Virginia. “We talked about it before the series began that now is the time to make a move. We have been sitting kind of on the outside looking in in terms of rankings, and our goal is to try and host [an NCAA regional].”

Miami is now third in the the ACC’s Coastal Division behind Georgia Tech (24-12, 11-7) and North Carolina (27-10, 10-8).

It leads the league in team batting (.296) and is second in pitching (3.69 ERA). Its weakness: fielding, as the Canes are 12th of 14 teams in the ACC with 48 errors.

UM is sixth nationally and tops the ACC in home runs, with 50, 14 of them by Alex Toral (seventh best in the nation).

The Canes meet Florida Gulf Coast (24-12) at Mark Light Field at 6 p.m. Tuesday, then travel to Louisville (28-8, 13-5 ACC), ranked seventh nationally by Baseball America, for a threegame series Thursday through Saturday.