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Tar Heels band together to get similar results

Posted on May 26, 2011May 26, 2011 by Staff

By Eddy Landreth
Staff Writer

This year, there are no Tar Heel baseball superstars grabbing the limelight, no big-time prospects waiting to be selected in the top eight of the Major League Baseball draft in early June.

Even when the team began the year with three huge victories on the West Coast and continued to win with regularity throughout the season, there were doubters. How could there not be? This team did not have a Dustin Ackley, an Andrew Miller, a Daniel Bard, an Alex White or a Matt Harvey.

Levi Michael is a pro prospect who will probably get drafted early, but even Michael has not done what some of the stars did from 2006-09.

There is not likely to be a first-round draft choice from Carolina baseball. Virginia, Florida State, Georgia Tech – those team had the big names. The Cavaliers have the two best pitchers in the country. Entering last week’s series against UNC, the Cavaliers’ Will Roberts was 10-0 for the season, 17-0 for his career, and had an astounding 1.41 earned run average. Former ACC rookie of the year Danny Hultzen had a 1.42 ERA and was 9-2.

But Carolina used the then-No. 1-ranked Cavaliers to prove they can play with anyone on any given day, as they showed when they took two out of three at Florida State and when they defeated Cal State Fullerton and Southern California on the road.

UNC swept Virginia, and it was Carolina’s pitching staff and defense that put on the better show. The nation’s top-ranked team scored three runs in three days, and UNC senior Patrick Johnson shut the Cavs out in the opener to finish the regular season 10-1.

“We pitched exceptionally well,” coach Mike Fox said. “I never thought we would have held them to three runs in three games.”

Carolina has a lot of good baseball players who stick together, compete and have the mindset that they are going to find a way to win. This is what has carried the Tar Heels to a 44-12 record during the regular season, one of the finest records in the nation. They will begin play in the ACC Tournament today (Thursday) at 11 a.m. against Miami (34-20) at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

“Nobody thought we could do it,” senior Greg Holt said of the series against Virginia. “Everybody thought Virginia was just going to come in there and beat us all three games. We played the whole weekend with a chip on our shoulder. In the back of our minds, we knew we could beat them.

“We knew we had the better team. We went out this weekend and proved it. [The energy] comes from the leaders in our locker room. We did it the whole weekend. We played together as one team, one unit and with one goal.”

The confidence is deeply rooted. While Carolina wants to first win the ACC Tournament, the program reached a new level when the Tar Heels went to four consecutive College World Series. So no matter what happens this week, it’s hard to imagine that Carolina will not be ready to go when the NCAA Tournament begins in Chapel Hill the following weekend.

“We feel like we’re one of the best teams in the nation,” said pitcher Chris Munnelly, who earned the victory in the 3-2 series-sweeping victory on Saturday. “This is no surprise to us to beat Virginia. When we’re playing at our best level of baseball, I feel like we’re unbeatable.”

One big reason is the Tar Heels have a superstar in the making. Freshman third baseman Colin Moran was named the Rookie of the Year in the ACC. He leads the league with 68 runs batted in, 38 of those coming with two outs. He did it again in the third game against Virginia, when he took a slider away with two strikes and drove it into the right-center field gap for a double that drove in two runs. He leads the team with a .355 average and nine home runs and he’s struck out only 27 times in 203 at-bats.

It’s the kind of performance that no longer surprises his teammates.

“You could tell as soon as that kid got here in the fall that he was going to be a special player,” Johnson said. “But the way he came out and played at that level the entire season and has not fell off at all and leads the league in RBIs, it is unbelievable. He is unreal.”

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