I am so bummed that I don’t know what to do?
I genuinely can’t believe that a group of real men could lose to a team comprised of a Parks, Skye, Grayson, Taylore (that is the correct spelling), Hobbs, Landon, Mason, Colin, Benton, Cody, Tate, Korey (yep, spelled that way), Zach, Chaz, Trevor & Reilly. Good God, man!! What type of creature does it take to have a boy pop out of a perfectly good vagina and the parents decide to name him Skye?!?!
Is this just God’s way of adding to the anticipation when the Wolfpack and Tar heels meet in the College World Series next month?
Link to N&O’s story – A night to remember.
It was in the late, long hours of Saturday night, after it’d turned into Sunday morning, when for the first time Mike Fox attempted to describe what he’d just watched and been a part of. What Fox wanted to say, maybe he couldn’t. Perhaps it was a sense of deliriousness or exhaustion. Or both.
After 18 innings and more than six hours, it was over. North Carolina’s 2-1 victory against N.C. State on Saturday night came in the longest game in the history of the ACC baseball tournament, and in front of the largest crowd — or at least what was left of it at Durham Bulls Athletic Park — to watch a college baseball game in North Carolina.
The game began at 7:41 on Saturday night. It ended at 1:51 on Sunday morning. It was past 2 a.m. by the time Fox, in his 15th season as UNC’s coach, walked into an interview room and faced the cameras. He looked tired and happy. He sat down behind a microphone, glanced at a box score and began his opening comments with this:
“I don’t have the words to describe what I just saw.â€
Who could have? Before Saturday, N.C. State and UNC had played 283 times. The 284th might have been the greatest of them all – the kind that will live on when players tell their children about it one day and when spectators, especially those who remained until the end, thumb through a scrapbook and travel back at the sight of a ticket stub.
Even then, where will those stories and those memories begin? With the performance of Carlos Rodon, the N.C. State sophomore left-hander who pitched the first 10 innings, allowed one hit and struck out 14? With UNC’s bullpen, which allowed four hits and no runs in 12 and two-thirds innings?
Will the stories begin with the close calls, and the what-ifs? With how Colin Moran, the UNC junior third baseman who’s one of the best hitters in the country, stranded five runners – four of them in extra innings? With how N.C. State had the tying run on third base with nobody out in the 18th, and left him there? With how two other times in extra innings, the Wolfpack needed just one hit to drive in the winning run from third? With how UNC, one of the best hitting teams in the country, had just six hits in 61 at-bats?
With all of the talk of historically great pitching and under performing hitting you can’t underestimate the impact of a GINORMOUS and inconsistently applied strike zone by the home plate umpire. When hitters don’t know what pitches will be called balls and strikes they have a tendency to have to swing at a lot of bad pitches.
