University of North Carolina Athletics
Turner's Take: Mound of Rebound
May 20, 2015 | Baseball, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
It's been a rough May for Carolina baseball. After an April stretch in which the Tar Heels won 12 of 14 games, they'd dropped six straight ACC contests entering Tuesday's ACC tournament match-up with Virginia Tech. What had been a 31-16 record had turned into a 32-22 record and a 13-16 conference mark in the span of eight days on the calendar. But on Tuesday, it was simple: Beat Virginia Tech, and the Tar Heels would get three more chances to prove their worth on the field. Lose, and they'd go home and cross their fingers for Monday's NCAA Tournament Selection Show. So if Tuesday's game wasn't officially a 'must-win' game, it was surely a 'would feel a lot better if won.'
And so the Tar Heels turned to Zac Gallen. Though the sophomore right-hander strugled in Blacksburg in mid-April, he'd been magnificent of late, tossing a complete game shutout against Boston College, then earning a pair of hard-luck no decisions at Notre Dame and against Virginia. With a season potentially on the line, Mike Fox needed Gallen to deliver – and to get some run support.
Gallen worked around a leadoff single in the first to strike out three straight. The Hokies scratched in the second, but for just a run, as Gallen trusted his stuff and allowed his defense to make plays behind him. He'd spent the last week watching film on the Hokies, looking for weaknesses. Virginia Tech hadn't seen his changeup in Blacksburg, and he used it effectively. Midway through the game, he kept the hitters off-balance by relying on his cutter. “I tried to dissect their swings (on film), see what kind of holes I could get, and I just tried to make better pitches,” he said.
Gallen knew that with a win, the Tar Heels would play at least four games this week, so he was determined to make a quality start and go deep into the game. After a mound visit by associate head coach Scott Forbes in the second, he retired 13 of the next 16 hitters. “Early in the game, you're just trying to limit the big inning, so you're just trying to get an out,” Gallen said. “As the game goes on, you're looking for a strikeout. The main thing to me is to just keep my composure. I know that if I make my pitches, most of the time they're going to get themselves out. I just try to stay out of the middle of the palte and make them hit my pitches.”
In the fourth inning, Carolina took advantage of timely hitting and Hokie miscues to strike for three runs. They added another in the fifth thanks to another misplay.
When Virginia Tech scored a two-out run in the seventh, Gallen handed the ball to Trevor Kelley. The senior sidewinder from Wilmington has been the Tar Heels' go-to guy out of the pen, and Tuesday he made his NCAA-leading 40th appearance of the year. Kelley struck out Erik Payne to limit the damage.
Kelley had seen two lightning bolts in the distance when he'd begun his warmup, so he thought the game might be delayed due to weather. So as not to overtax his arm, he didn't throw a slider in the bullpen. “(Then) I come out and throw six in a row, so it works out,” he said afterward. Indeed, after the strikeout, lightning in the area and a flash rainstorm delayed the game for 40 minutes. While the Tar Heels were unable to cash in a bases-loaded, one-out opportunity when the game resumed, Virginia Tech used a pair of singles and an error to pull within a run in the 8th. With just one out, the bases were full of Hokies, with the go-ahead run on second.
Kelley worked quickly for out number two, getting Andrew Mogg on a 1-2 pitch. Pinch-hitter Phil Sciretta was a different story. While the batter got behind a 1-2 count quickly, he fouled off a pitch and then watched two balls go by out of the strike zone. The most important pitch of the game would come next.
“I was just being aggressive,” Kelley said later. “I knew I was going to get a slider in there. The inning before, I got out of it with a slider for strike three, and I was just feeling very confident out there with that pitch and that's what I wanted to throw, in the back of my head.” Kelley's side-arm delivery makes it particularly tough for a right-handed hitter to pick up the ball visually; it seems to start out at a hitter's hip before hurtling toward the strike zone. The action on the slider makes it even more difficult to put a bat on. Kelley delivered, and Sciretta swung right over the top of the ball. “I just threw it at him and it breaks right over the plate,” Kelley said, “and the result came.”
Carolina added a run in the bottom half with a prime bunt laid down by Eli Sutherland ( or 'Li'l Eli,' according to Fox), and Kelley worked around a one-out single with a strikeout and a groundout to seal the victory.
The Hokies got the tying run to the plate, and the Tar Heel fans held their collective breath, but Gallen and Kelley got the job done, and the team lives to play another day. The road isn't easy: Carolina will face top-seeded Louisville (7 p.m. Wednesday), Florida State (7 p.m. Thursday) and Clemson (3 p.m. Friday). Of the three teams, Carolina has faced just the Tigers, going 1-2 in Clemson, but Louisville was a dominant 25-5 in conference play and Mike Martin's Seminoles are always tough. But baseball is baseball, and with good pitching, sound defense and timely hitting, the Tar Heels will give themselves a chance.
