UNC baseball gets back on track with a 10-5 win over UNC-Asheville

After being swept at Miami in a series that included two shutouts and a 14-inning heartbreaker, No. 8 North Carolina’s Wednesday night game against UNC-Asheville could have been an easy, morale-boosting win.

UNC earned the victory, 10-5, but it wasn’t what coach Mike Fox would call easy. The Tar Heels jumped out to a 6-1 lead in the first six innings, only to have that lead cut to one in the seventh and eighth frames.

“This team, they’re not going to make it easy on themselves,” Fox said. “We’re not going to have an easy game all year, and I’m going to have to expect it as we go. We could have a 10-run lead. We seem to make it hard on ourselves.”

But UNC played an inspired first three innings of baseball, holding UNC-Asheville hitless as Hobbs Johnson made his first career start.

In the second inning, he struck out the side, setting the stage for a booming home-run shot over the center field wall from Cody Stubbs. A sacrifice bunt from Adam Griffin and a Parks Jordan sacrifice fly advanced and then scored Michael Russell to put the Tar Heels up 2-0 coming out of the inning.

In the bottom of the third, UNC scored another two runs, again on the back of savvy sacrifice hitting. Neither Jacob Stallings nor Russell got on base in his third-inning at-bat, but both brought a run home by putting the ball in play. UNC led 4-0 after three. Instead of swinging for the fences, the Tar Heels looked to advance runners methodically.

“We really worked the last two days … on staying through the ball and not trying to do too much,” said Jordan, who started at first base and had one hit and two sacrifice flies. “Just to try and square up on as many balls as possible, do our job when we’re called on.”

Asheville’s batters went three up, three down in both the fifth and sixth innings. Feeling secure, UNC seemed flustered in the seventh and eighth innings when Asheville’s bats heated up.

The Bulldogs put up three runs on four UNC pitchers in the seventh, and another on R.C. Orlan in the eighth. It was 6-5 when Asheville’s Jordan Lurie hit a wildly bouncing grounder to the right corner of the infield. Jordan again came up big with the lead on the line. The ball hit him in the chest, but Jordan chased it into foul territory and grabbed it in time to make the throw and catch Lurie at the bag. The parable of Jordan, as told by Fox, represented what allowed UNC to pull away from Asheville for good.

“He didn’t look great fielding that ball,” Fox said. “But what’d he do? Didn’t panic, a good athlete, went over and picked it up and threw a strike to first. Some guys are going to rush to go get that ball thinking, ‘If I don’t make this play, they tied it.’ And what are they gonna do? Throw the ball away at first.”

As UNC came up to bat in the bottom half of the eighth inning, the offense seemed to have taken a page from Jordan’s book. A string of hits and aggressive base-running — including a suicide squeeze that allowed two runs to score on a bunt — led to a five-run onslaught.

Though it wasn’t carefree, Wednesday’s win was a healing experience for a team trying to forget its season’s first truly dismal weekend.

“It’s a step forward because it’s a ‘W,’” Fox said. “It’s a ‘W’ instead of an ‘L.’ Any time you win, we’re happy. We’re not going to over-analyze things.”

Contact the Sports Editor at sports@dailytarheel.com.