Tar Heels top Towson in NCAA baseball regional

“I get it…,” Mike Fox said.

He’s being asked about his no. 1 North Carolina baseball team not playing it’s best ball to beat Towson 8-5 Saturday night.

“…But I don’t,” he finished.

“I’m sitting here looking at the box score, and we had 13 hits, we scored eight runs (and) we didn’t make an error.”

There were other positives, too. Eight of UNC’s 10 batters picked up hits, and six of those batters scored runners. Ace pitcher Kent Emanuel struck out eight batters in 7.2 innings – his career high is nine Ks – throwing 124 pitches on the night.

So Fox was not displeased with his team’s performance in its second postseason game. And he didn’t think it was a matter of his team not playing its best ball.

He thought the Tar Heels were simply playing against a hard-fighting team.

“You’ve got a pitcher out there who’s pretty good, and they’re catching the plate,and they’re not walking you for the most part. When you have that combination, you’ve got to earn every run that you get.”

The Tar Heels did earn every run, the first coming from Cody Stubbs’ home run over the right-field fence in the second inning.

The next two runs came for North Carolina in the fourth inning when Michael Russell singled to left field, scoring Landon Lassiter and Skye Bolt, who’d both been walked then advanced on a Stubbs ground out.

Brian Holberton also got a hit in the fourth before it ended, then Mike Zolk and Parks Jordan got hits in the fifth, keeping UNC’s offense going, then Chaz Frank sent a sacrifice fly into left field to score Zolk. Lassiter added a hit of his own to the list to put Jordan in scoring position before Colin Moran grounded out to end the inning.

Russell was the first Tar Heel to get his second hit of the night, singling in the sixth.

Fox said that he expects contributions from nearly every batter in the lineup after the season it’s had.

“We’ve gotten contributions from our lineup all year long,” Fox said. “We’ve never gone through a stretch where we had almost our entire lineup struggling – offensively or in any other part of the game.”

Towson got six hits off Emanuel in his first seven innings, but the southpaw erased the first two of those with pickoffs, giving him 10 this season.

“I don’t know (what makes him effective), but he made one kid mad tonight,” said first baseman Stubbs. “That second kid he picked off looked at me and he said a bad word, I was like ‘I don’t know what to tell you buddy.’”

The rest of the defense showed how it posts a .975 fielding percentage on the year, finishing the game with no errors.

Freshman closer Trent Thornton – the first one Fox can remember having in years – inherited two runners on base in the eighth, but he got UNC out of a bind by throwing 18 pitches, 11 of which were strikes, to record his second consecutive save in NCAA tournament play.

“Everyone’s coming to play,” Russell said. “Coach mentioned this, but in the tournament nobody’s giving up, so if we get up four or five runs early it doesn’t matter, everybody’s fighting.”

Towson did just that, coming alive in the bottom of the sixth to score one run then repeating the performance in the bottom of the next inning after holding UNC scoreless in the top of the seventh.

Russell got his third hit, and Stubbs his second of the night in a two-run eighth inning, and although Towson showed the stay-alive playoff fight, scoring three runs in the bottom of the eighth, UNC capped the game by adding one last insurance run in the top of the ninth, then holding Towson scoreless.

“At this point in the season, a win’s a win,” Emanuel said. “I wasn’t too pleased by my performance, but we won, so I’m just happy as could be.”

“No matter who we’re playing, it’s just fight for your lives out here, so we just want to go out there and win no matter what.”