University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Exhausted To Exhilarated
April 10, 2011 | Baseball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
April 10, 2011
By Adam Lucas
TALLAHASSEE--After watching his team scratch out a series-deciding 7-6 win at Florida State on Sunday, head coach Mike Fox was the last Tar Heel still sitting on the bench in the dugout at Dick Howser Stadium. His assistant coaches had packed up their bags, his players were headed towards the team bus--where they were greeted by raucous cheers that echoed throughout the quickly emptying stadium from the assembled UNC family and friends--but still he sat there.
Fox had never won a series in Tallahassee as Carolina's head coach. In fact, the Tar Heels had won just one series here since the Seminoles joined the league, a long-forgotten victory in 1995. Since then, they'd found virtually every kind of heartbreak imaginable at Florida State. The two programs are so similar--"Every time we play them, it's like looking in the mirror," said Seminole assistant coach Mike Martin Jr. about the Tar Heels--that it virtually demands close games. Entering the weekend, eleven of the last 20 meetings had been decided by one run.
After the weekend, it's 12 of the last 23. And this time, the Tar Heels ended up on the positive side of the deciding game. It was enough to make a head coach weary.
"I can't get up," Fox said with an exhausted smile as a visitor approached the dugout. "I may have to stay here."
That would have given him plenty of time to rehash an improbable series victory capped with an impossible Sunday win that included UNC offense in only one inning (the Tar Heels picked up seven runs in the third), a Tar Heel starting pitcher who did not retire a batter (Chris Munnelly walked the bases loaded before departing in the first) and three different Tar Heel hurlers who combined to record just one out.
And yes, this was a Carolina victory.
"Our team keeps picking each other up," Fox said. "The pitchers picked Chris Munnelly up today. And someone else will pick up someone else next time."
The initial lifting was done by Greg Holt, who entered the game in the first with the bases loaded and nobody out against the middle of the Florida State order. After he had jogged to the mound, pitching coach Scott Forbes--who masterfully orchestrated a procession of 10 different UNC pitchers during the weekend--had an animated discussion with the senior.
"Pound the zone," Forbes told Holt.
That's exactly what he did, allowing only a single before picking up a pair of strikeouts and a groundout to escape the inning with only one run allowed. The previous night, the Seminoles had left 11 runners on base, seven of them in scoring position. In the series finale, they were immediately once again left thirsty for a big run-scoring hit that never came.
"The key was preventing the big inning," Holt said. "That's what we did all day today, and that's how we got a huge win."
Holt carried the game into the fifth, benefiting from a pair of timely Tar Heel double plays (if you're looking for an underrated weekend stat, try the fact that Carolina made just one error during the weekend and got multiple highlight-reel defensive plays, including Chaz Frank's homer-robbing catch on Saturday) and not issuing a walk until the last hitter he faced. He was followed by a series of four sophomores, with Forbes and Fox shuffling the pieces around the chess board until they found the one they liked.
That turned out to be righty Michael Morin, who had been roughed up Friday night in a 5-3 Florida State win, but rebounded to pitch effectively on Saturday and then entered the game Sunday in the seventh inning with no outs and a runner on second. It was the toughest spot of Morin's career, in a game Carolina needed to win. All season, Fox has championed the philosophy of getting a pitcher back to the mound as soon as possible after a bad outing. Now he was preparing to do it with Morin for the second day in a row, eventually asking him to face the exact part of the FSU order that had hit him hard on Friday.
"We wanted to set it up to have Morin at the end of the game," Fox said. "He hadn't thrown a lot of pitches this weekend, and he was spectacular over the last three innings."
That included Fox making the difficult decision to leave Morin in to face the lefthanded James Ramsey with the tying run on base in the eighth, a carbon copy of a situation on Friday when the head coach later said he perhaps should have gone to lefty specialist Tate Parrish. This time, he had no hesitation about sticking with Morin.
The Kansas native delivered, eventually striking out Jayce Boyd to end the eighth and zipping through the ninth to preserve the win.
Not just any win, but a historic win. Holt, who was on the trip in 2009 when FSU took two of three from the Tar Heels, thought the series summed up Carolina's surprising year to date.
"This team has been resilient the whole year," Holt said. "We get down early and find ways to win. That's what is special about this team. Nobody believes we're going to lose."
Unknowingly, the head coach echoed his senior almost perfectly just a few minutes later. "This team expects to win," Fox said. "And that's a credit to them and to the leaders on our team."
Those leaders don't carry the most familiar names or perhaps even the most raw talent of the Fox era. They don't have Dustin Ackley or Josh Horton or Alex White or Andrew Miller. For that matter, they don't even have Brian Goodwin, who some thought might be an irreplaceable offensive catalyst in 2011. But somehow, the pieces fit. If Jacob Stallings doesn't get a hit, Colin Moran does. If Moran makes an error, Stallings throws out a runner. If Munnelly can't get outs, Holt is there for one of the best performances of his career in one of the most pivotal series of the year.
That dynamic is why Fox eventually climbed off that bench in the Dick Howser Stadium dugout. By 30 minutes later, by the time he'd allowed himself to consider what had just happened and to enjoy at least 10 uninterrupted minutes without having to deal with the relentless succession of Seminole base runners, his mood had gone from exhausted to exhilarated. His team was gathered under a shelter outside FSU's football stadium, eating takeout before boarding the bus for the second happy flight home from Tallahassee in program history.
"Because of how tough it is to win here, this is one of the better feelings I've had at UNC," Fox said.
Soon, he spotted a car loaded with five Carolina fans pulling out of the parking lot. He began to trot across the concrete. The car stopped--there was no choice, really. This was the head coach of the Tar Heels running at them, a silly grin on his face. They rolled down the window and the day's sweltering heat washed into the car.
"Hey!" Fox said. "I just wanted to give everybody in this car a high five!"
Then he jogged off, where he'd have to endure a long wait for the team flight, a connection in Atlanta, and a midnight arrival back in Chapel Hill. But he was where he is happiest on a Sunday afternoon--with his team, after a gritty win, surrounded by a full traveling party of Tar Heels who had each made significant contributions to a crucial series win.
He was, as those close to him were later heard to remark, as happy as they'd ever seen him.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
