UNC baseball downs Wright State, stays alive in NCAA Tournament’s Terre Haute regional
Mac Horvath picked the right time to bust out of his own personal slump, and in the process helped snap an ugly team-wide skid to extend the UNC baseball team’s season at least one more day.
Horvath lasered a 1-2 pitch over the left-field wall for a three-run home run in the bottom of the seventh inning, helping the Tar Heels topple Wright State, 5-0, in the teams’ elimination game in the NCAA Tournament’s Terre Haute regional on Saturday.
Horvath was 0-for-3 on the day to that point, and 0-for-7 to that point in the regional tournament with five strikeouts. A .300 hitter who’d hit 22 home runs — a quarter of the team’s total this season — the junior from Minnesota also helped the Heels out of a funk with runners in scoring position.
On Friday, UNC was 1-for-12 with runners at second or third, and was 0-for-6 in those situations Saturday before an infield single by Casey Cook moments before Horvath’s blast moved Johnny Castagnozzi from second to third. Horvat then cleared the bases to extend the Tar Heels’ lead from one to four.
The Heels got off to a decidedly better defensive start Saturday than in their opener Friday, thanks in large part to starting pitcher Max Carlson, who allowed just one hit over 6 2/3 innings. He walked just two and struck out five while facing 23 batters.
On the offensive side, UNC’s trouble hitting with runners on base continued. The Heels left a pair on in each of the first two innings and succumbed to double plays to end each inning.
The Heels broke through in the third, though it took another double play to make it happen. After back-to-back singles to open the inning, Horvath grounded into a 6-4-3 double play, but that allowed Colby Wilkerson, who’d led off the inning, to scamper home from second.
After stranding more runners in scoring position in the fourth, UNC failed to put a player on base for the first time in the fifth, and again in the sixth.
Wright State’s biggest threat in the first half of the game came in the top of the fifth. With Sammy Sass at first after a leadoff single, Julian Greenwell got a hold of a 1-1 pitch and thought he’d given his team the lead, only to watch as Cook leaped and snared the ball over the wall in right, robbing Greenwell of a home run.
Greenwell got a measure of revenge in the top of the seventh, though, when he lined a two-out pitch into right. Cook came on to make the catch, but the ball tipped off his glove and scooted past him, allowing Greenwell to hustle into second base on the error.
That also was the end of Carlson’s day. UNC coach Scott Forbes opted to lift his starter in favor of lefty reliever Dalton Pence. Pence threw two pitches in the seventh, induced a ground ball to short and the Heels got out of the inning unscathed, setting up their important run-scoring bottom of the seventh.
UNC tacked on one more in the eighth for good measure, but Pence shut down the Raiders the rest of the way, allowing no hits in his 2 1/3 innings of work.
The Tar Heels will now face Iowa on Sunday at noon for the right to play against host Indiana State in Sunday’s regional final.
This story was originally published June 3, 2023 at 2:29 PM.
