He’s Short of Stature, but Not Speed or Desire

BLACKSBURG, Va. —  A 32-game hitting streak and some eye-popping base-stealing statistics have prompted major league scouts to take a second look at Virginia Tech’s Tim Buheller.

The first looks stopped with his 5-foot-7, 144-pound frame.

“My dad played Triple-A ball for years,” Buheller laughs. “He was 6-3, a long-ball hitter. I take after my mom.”

Buheller is tiny, but he compensates with dynamite speed. He can cover 60 yards in 6.5 seconds, but more important, when it comes to baseball, he can get from first to second in 3.3 seconds on a steal attempt.

In fact, if Buheller is hung up on a slow pickoff move, he said it is a 50-50 chance he can break for second, outrun the throw and still get the steal. He has stolen 92 of 101 bases in his career. He’s currently batting .396.

The numbers are impressive, but Buheller worries the scouts won’t look beyond his size. He says he’d love to play in the majors, but adds if he isn’t picked fairly high in the June draft, he’ll stay for his senior year.

His size worked against him coming out of high school, too. He hit .531 with 43 steals in 18 games his senior year at Varina High School near Richmond without attracting any interest. A Tech coach spotted him by accident at a Cincinnati Reds tryout camp.

It turned out well. In the annual high school all-star game, he went 3-for-3 with a triple and scored five times. “Greatest game of my life,” the left-handed center-fielder said.

Buheller has been starting in center field ever since and he’s a big reason the Hokies are in the thick of the Metro conference race. He hit .351 as a freshman, but slipped to .269 last season.

A batting instructor told him to open up his stance in a summer league last year and he took off on a 19-game hitting streak. After a winter’s worth of work in the batting cage, he found a groove in the second week of the season.

He wound up doubling the old Tech record by hitting in 32 consecutive games.

The streak consisted of mostly clean singles, although a couple of bunt singles were thrown in. When the streak ended with an 0-4 day, he had two sharp line drives snared by infielders.

“I got in a couple of good line drives, so I didn’t feel too bad,” he said. “I didn’t want to end the streak with me striking out.”

Buheller said the slump helped him in a couple of ways. It took the pressure off, which let him be more aggressive at the plate. That translated in a 4-for-6 performance in his first game after the streak was snapped.

“The coaches said I was being too timid, that I was patting the ball,” Buheller said. “So I got mad at it in batting practice, and it carried over to today.”

Buheller spends more time studying hitting than working on his base-stealing.