Chansky's Notebook: Another Close Call

Art Chansky’s Sports Notebook is presented by The Casual Pint. YOUR place for delicious pub food paired with local beer. Choose among 35 rotating taps and 200+ beers in the cooler.

For the second straight weekend, Carolina came up inches short from staying alive.

At the NCAA men’s golf tournament, the Tar Heels starred on national TV before a couple of putts that went in and out left them short of the national championship match.

This weekend, the Diamond Heels scrapped through the NCAA regionals for three days without their injured star player Vance Honeycutt and nearly pulled out a win that would have brought them a little closer to the Super Regional next weekend.

Mac Horvath, who followed Honeycutt as the only UNC players to hit more than 20 home runs and steal 20 bases in a season, blasted a dramatic homer in the bottom of the ninth to force extra innings and give the back-and-forth momentum to the guys in baby blue.

In the opener Friday, Carolina left too many men on base and fell to Iowa 5-4 despite a rally in the ninth inning that cut 5-1 deficit to a single run after they had gone 5 for 30 with men on base. Alberto Osuna clubbed a two-run jack and Jackson Van De Brake laced a one-out RBI double before Iowa fanned the last two batters to end the game.

On Saturday, when Max Carlson and Dalton Pence one-hit Wright State, Horvath snapped out of a minor slump to launch a three-run homer over the left field wall and sealed the 5-0 victory to force a rematch with Iowa in the elimination game.

On Sunday, the Heels left the bases loaded in the first inning but took a 2-0 lead in the second when Casey Cook homered after Colby Wilkinson had a lead-off walk. Iowa took a 4-2 lead in the fifth on a three-run homer and added another run in the seventh that put the Heels back in hot water.

Freshman Dylan King, in his 12th at-bat of the season, roped a double down the right field line that scored two runs and created that familiar 5-4 score that Horvath knotted up in the ninth with a towering drive just over the left field wall as the UNC dugout and the outnumbered Carolina fans went wild.

The Hawkeyes went ahead on a long triple in their 13th inning that Horvath could not quite track down in deep left center. The Heels went quietly in their last at bat and returned home with a 36-24 record in another good, but not great, season for Scott Forbes’ team.

Good props continued for Carolina as one of the Big Ten announcers calling the game for the ACC Network referred to the Tar Heels as “one of the storied programs in college baseball.”

Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications

Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our biweekly newsletter.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Chansky’s Notebook: Another Close Call

On Air Now: 97.9 FM