The Diamond Heels picked a heck of a weekend to buck their recent trend of frustrating series losses, taking two out of three games at rival NC State after splitting a doubleheader on Sunday.

The Tar Heels and Wolfpack evaded the rain all weekend long, with Friday’s first game halted midway through by rain, Saturday’s resumption of the first game barely finishing before the skies opened up, and the game originally scheduled for Saturday being rained out. Nevertheless, UNC will take a series win in any form right now, having gone without one since March.

After dropping the first game on Sunday 9-2, Carolina took hardly any time at all to match its entire nine-inning output in game two, with Vance Honeycutt launching a first-inning, two-run blast over the left field fence to give UNC the lead. As was the case all weekend, NC State responded immediately, scoring two runs in the bottom of the first and then two more in the second, all of which came via the long ball.

Head coach Scott Forbes was forced to call upon his weary bullpen, but the trio of Gage Gillian, Connor Bovair and Davis Palermo held the Wolfpack bats in check the rest of the way. The three arms combined to toss 7.2 innings of relief, allowing just two runs and five hits between them.

Carolina’s bats capitalized, tying the game in the top of the third on RBIs from Honeycutt and Hunter Stokely, then taking the lead back on an NC State error in the sixth. The Wolfpack scored their two runs off Bovair in the bottom of the inning to take the lead once again, but had no answer when Alberto Osuna gave UNC the lead for good with a two-run bomb in the top of the eighth. Osuna’s 14 home runs this season leads the team.

Palermo pitched the final two innings for the Tar Heels, and though he allowed the potential tying run to reach second base in the bottom of the ninth, the Northwood High School graduate made the hometown folks happy by ending the game with a pop out.

To say the Tar Heels desperately needed this weekend series would be an understatement. Carolina is now 27-18 overall and just 10-14 in ACC play, but perhaps a series win on an opponent’s diamond is just what the team needed to spark a late-season push for a postseason bid. Carolina will be back in Boshamer Stadium Tuesday night to take on Gardner-Webb at 6 p.m.

 

Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications

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