Everyone was looking around for Ernie Clement. On the first day of 2014 fall workouts, the University of Virginia baseball team filed into the weight room, one by one. The workout was one of those ‘optional’ lifts that everyone knew was actually mandatory — everyone except for Clement.
“The whole team was there,” Virginia infielder Daniel Pinero said. “And we were like ‘Where’s Ernie?’”
Hours later, Clement’s teammates found out why he missed that first fall lift. He’d made friends with his dormmates and joined their intramural flag football team. While his teammates were lifting weights, Clement was catching passes. He never missed a workout again.
“Oh, I got in a lot of s—,” Clement said, “from pretty much everybody.”
It was a tough first impression, but not the lasting one. Clement, 30, is now better known as a postseason hero for the Toronto Blue Jays and one of 2025’s World Series stars.
Maybe none of that would have happened without the horror of being an absent freshman on Day 1.
That missed workout kick-started one of the most important years of the infielder’s life. In his first season at UVA, Clement was screamed at in team meetings, punished for off-day escapades, tackled on the field and hailed as a national champion. It’s the year, Clement said, he grew up. It’s a year that still yields tales of Ernie Clement.
“I look back, and it was so much fun,” Clement said. “I got to learn and grow up a lot in the game of baseball. If I hadn’t done those things, I would not have been who I am today.”
Huddled around a table at a team reunion last year, Clement’s college teammates recalled that workout and their missing freshman. It was a simple mistake, reliever Kevin Doherty joked. Who would think optional meant required?
The 2015 Virginia team has many of those stories — Clement’s accidental antics punctuated one of the best seasons in program history. They love Clement, his teammates say, but the stories are too good not to tell. They’re endearing. They’re Ernie.
“Everybody always thinks about trying to play the game like you’re a kid,” Doherty said. “He literally does that.”
Ernie Clement delivered a walk-off hit for Virginia in a 2015 Super Regional game. Said one teammate: ‘We were going to Omaha, literally on Ernie’s back.’ (Tyler Brain / University of Virginia)
Head coach Brian O’Connor didn’t understand Clement at first. A decade later, he readily admits as much. It took a few months for the epiphany to arrive, 38 games into the season and after a disastrous doubleheader at North Carolina State.
As Virginia’s coach walked out to make a pivotal pitching change in the final innings of the day’s second game, Clement drifted over to the NC State base runner at second base. The Cavaliers were in danger of losing both contests, and Clement began chatting with the player who scored the Wolfpack’s eventual winning run. The pair stood by second base, chuckling together as O’Connor swapped pitchers. Storming back to the dugout, the coach fumed.
“Yucking it up with the guy at second base, their base runner,” O’Connor recalled by phone. “I gotta be honest, it pissed me off.”
After the game, a 5-3 Virginia loss, the coach unleashed. It was not the first time. Every so often, O’Connor laid into the team after a bad week or sloppy practice. The players called them “come to Jesus meetings.” As Clement’s teammates sat silent in the locker room, it was the freshman’s first time in the firing line.
“It’s got to mean more to you,” O’Connor yelled. “You’re talking to the other guy. You’re not focused.”
Clement was mortified. His jaw dropped and his face stuck in a perplexed expression. At that moment, staring at a confounded Clement, it clicked for O’Connor. The coach was confusing joy for apathy. Clement was focused, in his own way. He did care.
“He just loves to play and he loves to have fun,” O’Connor said recently. “It’s not that he doesn’t compete. It’s not that he’s not serious. But that’s when I finally realized with him that I gotta just let him be who he is.”
The day after the lambasting, O’Connor approached Clement at practice. He had a dream that the freshman quit the team. He needed to ask if Clement was alright.
“I’m good,” Clement responded, “Let’s get it.”
Clement remained unwavering. He went right back to using the end of his bat for makeshift hockey games before practice, roping in teammates on the outfield grass and in the locker room. Joe McCarthy was his biggest competition, Matt Thaiss played goalie. Hours later, Clement was always ready for the real game.
“I was always me,” Clement said. “I never took the criticism personal. I think I never lost sight of the fact that I love baseball and I love being around my teammates and I could have fun, still be myself.”
Six weeks later, Clement’s teammates mobbed him in the very same spot where he drew O’Connor’s ire for chatting with the opponent.
With Virginia down a run in the bottom of the ninth, and two Cavaliers on base, the 19-year-old turned on a pitch in Virginia’s Super Regional game against Maryland. Clement connected for a liner, over the infielder’s head and bouncing along the outfield grass. It’s the sort of hit Clement has since replicated often with the Jays, but at the time it was the biggest liner of his life. The infielder rounded first and slowed to a jog, watching as his hit drove in two runs and sent Virginia to the College World Series.
Clement recognized he had some growing up to do while at Virginia and responded well to some tough love. (University of Virginia)
Piling out of the dugout, Doherty was the first teammate to arrive at Clement near second base. Unable to stop his momentum, Doherty’s hug turned into a tackle, slamming Clement’s head on the infield dirt. The rest of Virginia’s roster piled on. When the mass of bodies finally peeled off Clement, the infielder had a streak of blood across his face. Clement got up and smiled.
“He had a bloody forehead,” Doherty said. “But we were going to Omaha, literally on Ernie’s back.”
That’s where Clement’s postseason heroism was born. A decade before he posted a record-setting October for Toronto, notching more hits in a single postseason than any player in MLB history, Clement lifted an injury-plagued Virginia squad all the way to the College World Series.
That hit was, at the time, the pinnacle of Clement’s freshman season. But there were still more memorable moments to come.
Virginia had a few days off at the College World Series tournament in Omaha. Practice was supposed to be light. Thanks to Clement and a couple of his teammates, it was anything but.
That morning, as Clement and his teammates dug into scrambled eggs, assistant coach Matt Kirby stormed into breakfast at the team’s hotel. He pointed at a handful of players, including Clement, and they immediately knew they were screwed.
“Fake IDs in my room now,” Kirby screamed.
Clement, Pinero and a few other teammates had snuck across from the hotel the night before to have a few drinks at an Omaha bar. They thought they’d gotten away with it.
“We showed up back at the hotel after staying out all night,” Clement said, “got to our rooms and everything was good.”
To this day, the players don’t know how they got caught. They paid for it.
It was well over 30 degrees Celsius that morning. When they arrived at practice, they started to sweat. The pair of pitchers who were caught out the night before were tasked with running the entire two-hour practice. They ran until O’Connor said stop. Clement and Pinero, the team’s middle infielders, were told to stand at their positions.
O’Connor began ripping groundballs, over and over. It wasn’t infield practice. The grounders weren’t meant to be caught. They were relentless bullets. O’Connor yelled the entire time, getting louder for every botched grounder. The hits, Clement said, didn’t seem to end.
“It was actually a great lesson I learned,” Clement said. “If I go out hanging out with my buddies till two in the morning, I’ve got to show up and do my job the next day, no matter what. I’ve carried that with me.”
For the rest of the tournament, curfews were enforced. They couldn’t even go out for a late dinner. Clement’s Virginia teammates, for a few days, were not pleased. But then the games began again.
Don’t be fooled: Ernie Clement’s sense of humor masks a ferociously competitive side once the game begins. (University of Virginia)
Clement hit .292 in seven College World Series games. He scored the clinching run in the semifinal against Florida and drove in the winning run in Game 2 of the final. After Virginia toppled Vanderbilt to win it all, Clement jumped on his piling teammates as they huddled around the national champion trophy. Clement was named to the all-tournament team.
That is what made Clement great, Doherty said. When you show up big, nobody can stay mad at you.
That year, few players showed up more than Clement. So now his teammates — forever national champions — can laugh, sitting around a table at a 10-year reunion. They can joke about the missing freshman, the NC State blow-up and the sweaty Omaha practice. They can take turns recalling the tales of Ernie Clement.
“Even though I’m an idiot,” Clement said. “I helped the team, so I’m their idiot.”