Saturday’s game between the No. 10 North Carolina baseball team and Boston College was supposed to be an afternoon game and for the first four innings it was just that.
The Eagles (20-28, 9-17 ACC) looked to be in much better form than the night before and jumped out to a 5-2 lead before the rains came and turned the contest into a night game.
Four and a half hours after the conclusion of the fourth inning, the Tar Heels took the field in the top of the fifth and blanked the Eagles. In the home half of the fifth UNC tied the score with a three run burst neutralizing the action from earlier in the day.
“Delays can do funny things,” head coach Mike Fox said. “I’ve seen this happen before, where you have these long delays that can completely change the momentum. They obviously had the momentum and they did get a little sloppy.
“They brought in (Matt) Bayuk and he’s their best guy out of the pen and he left some balls up. If you’d told me that we’d score three runs on him in one inning to get back in the game I would have thought, ‘Wow, he’s probably making some mistakes.’”
The Tar Heels (33-13, 15-8 ACC) went on to take the series clinching game 6-5.
Boston College chased freshman starting pitcher Benton Moss in the second inning by scoring three runs on four hits. The 1.2 inning outing is Moss’s shortest since his return to the weekend rotation at Maryland back in March.
“He just didn’t have great command of his fastball,” Fox said. “And not so much a bad match up with all their lefties, but you got to control that fastball and you got to be able to pitch in. I think he needs to develop a changeup, maybe a third pitch.”
The Tar Heels answered with one run in the bottom half of the second as Cody Stubbs scored after leading off the inning with a double. Right fielder Adam Griffin brought Stubbs home with a sacrifice fly to deep left field.
