UNC Pitching Struggles Continue in Series Loss to Georgia Tech
The Tar Heels have posted a 7.20 ERA over the last 15 games
Throughout Friday and Saturday’s postgame interviews, North Carolina head coach Scott Forbes and his players spoke of the importance of staying unified, of position players not blaming pitchers and vice versa amid the team’s recent struggles.
That message remained the same after the Tar Heels dropped their fourth consecutive ACC series with a 11-8 loss to Georgia Tech on Sunday, their 11th in 15 games. But it was overshadowed by Forbes’ evaluation of where his pitching staff stands with just over a month left in the regular season.
“You kind of meet that road where, I’m a positive person and I’m going to remain positive, but you also have to be honest,” Forbes said. “Sometimes honesty is hard, but that’s where we are right now. You just have to state the facts. If we don’t pitch better, we’re not going to play well. … You just try your best to be as positive as you can, but you also have to be real with your team and tell them the facts.”
Entering March 25, UNC ranked third nationally with a 2.07 ERA. But over the last 15 games, in which they’ve allowed five or more earned runs 13 times – including a 15-12 loss Friday and a 10-5 victory Saturday – the Tar Heels have recorded a 7.20 ERA (113 earned runs over 141 1/3 innings).
Walks have plagued the team during this stretch, as it has issued 5.8 per nine innings. So, too, has the long ball, as UNC has given up 32 home runs. Further adding insult to injury, 12 of those homers have followed a walk, a hit batsmen or an error – two came Sunday, with Connor Bovair walking the bases full in the second for a Kevin Parada grand slam and Caden O’Brien hitting two batters and issuing an intentional walk before surrendering a ninth-inning grand slam to Tim Borden.
“I think that’s a sign of lack of toughness,” Forbes said. “I was a pitching coach for 10 years, and that’s where you have to say, as a pitcher, ‘OK, I’m getting this guy out.’ We talked to our pitchers about it, like, ‘OK, if something negative happens – a hit-by-pitch, an error or a walk, whatever it is – the next guy, if you get him out, it’s hard to have that big inning.’ That fact right there tells me a lot – that it’s a toughness factor that we’ve got to improve on.”
Despite their pitching problems over the last 15 games, the Tar Heels have been in just about every one, losing seven by three runs or fewer. Five of those narrow losses have come over their last seven games against Louisville, North Carolina A&T and the Yellow Jackets, a stretch in which UNC’s lineup has hit its stride, averaging 8.9 runs.
Even when accounting for a few missed opportunities Sunday, the Tar Heels’ offensive performance against Georgia Tech might have been their best of the season, as they plated 30 runs, their most in a three-game series loss since scoring 35 against Duke the weekend of March 12-14, 2010.
“We can score at any rate we want, but we’re not going to consecutively win games and be the team we’re capable of being if we don’t pitch,” Forbes said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. There’s not a team that’s going to get an Omaha that’s going to have a great season if it’s not centered on the mound. It’s just not going to happen in baseball. It doesn’t matter if you have the best offense in the country.”
With the Tar Heels sitting at 22-14 overall and 8-10 in ACC play with four league series left against Virginia, N.C. State, Wake Forest and Florida State, Forbes said there’s a sense of urgency for the Tar Heels to turn their pitching problems around. That the staff found as much success as it did early in the year offers hope that they still can.
“I know what it’s like to struggle; I’ve struggled plenty throughout my career,” Danny Serretti said. “It comes down to you and having will power and kind of saying screw it and letting all the hard work everybody has put in kind of show. It’s tough, but at the end of the day, I know the work they’ve put in and how good these guys can be. I still have faith in them, and I do think they’re going to turn it around.”
Schaeffer’s solid start
Although he wasn’t quite as dominant across his first four starts this spring as he was throughout the offseason, Brandon Schaeffer still showed a propensity to pitch deep into games, going at least five innings all four times. Entering Saturday, though, the WVU Potomac State transfer had struggled as much as any of UNC’s starters with giving the team length, going 4 1/3 innings or fewer across his last four starts – including one against Duke that he left early due to back spams.
But with the Tar Heels once again in desperate need of some innings, Schaeffer stepped up, going 5 2/3. The outing might not have been the prettiest, but he did a great job working around some traffic on the basepaths and holding the Yellow Jackets’ potent offense to four runs on six hits, a walk and two hit-by-pitches.
Saturday’s start marked Schaeffer’s second since returning to the weekend rotation from a brief hiatus that included a frustrating midweek start against UNCW and a pair of solid relief appearances against Virginia Tech and South Carolina. The left-hander said his bullpen stint helped him “reset” and stop overthinking things.
“I was getting in my head, especially during the (UNCW) game,” Schaeffer said. “That was probably the worst my head has been in a while. Going to the bullpen was a good change of pace for me, not having to overthink a million different things and just kind of getting back to the basics of doing my job, executing pitches and getting guys out. A couple of times out of the 'pen, I started getting that feel back, and Louisville was a good builder and just continuing it on to (Saturday). Just kind of going back to the basics and what got me here in the first place.”
Shaking things up?
As encouraging as Schaeffer’s start was, it fell in between a pair of mediocre starts by Max Carlson on Friday and Bovair on Sunday. Both pitchers failed to pitch out of the second inning, with Carlson allowing five runs (three earned) on three hits and four walks over 1 2/3 and Bovair giving up three runs on one hit and four walks over one.
Including Schaeffer’s outing, UNC has received just nine starts this season of five or more innings. With the Tar Heels needing to end that trend, Forbes said Sunday that changes to the rotation – as well as the staff as a whole – could be on the horizon.
“I’m thinking we have to make some changes,” he said. “We’ve got to start going to somebody else in this situation, maybe shake up the rotation to get more innings. Schaeffer threw into the sixth, so he threw five and something. Carlson went, I don’t know, he didn’t even go basically – it wasn’t even a start. And the same with Bovair. You’re looking at, ‘OK, are you going to keep staying with the same thing? Or do we have to make some adjustments?’ And we’ve got to make some adjustments and start going to some other guys, and hopefully they can get it done in those roles.”
Super Serretti
After hitting .299/.373/.424 in 61 games as a freshman in 2019, Serretti entered his sophomore year with lofty expectations. The shortstop, however, got off to a slow start in the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, then followed that up with an up-and-down 2021 in which he hit .249/.332/.488 with nine homers and 18 doubles.
As difficult as those two seasons might have been at times, Serretti is being rewarded for his perseverance.
In going 7-for-12 with a double and two triples this weekend, Serretti is slashing .345/.425/.552 with a team-best .977 OPS this season. He’s currently riding a 10-game hitting streak, in which he’s batting .450/.558/.750 with 12 RBIs, seven multi-hit games and 10 walks compared to just four strikeouts. For Forbes, Serretti’s breakout is due to one thing: maturity.
“When we talked about the draft (last July),” Forbes said, “I said, ‘You don’t need to come back if you’re coming back to improve your draft stock. You have to come back because you want to be back at UNC, you want to help the team win and you want to leave with your degree.’ He has another year of eligibility, but he’s probably going to be too good for that. I see him just having a blast.”
Madej providing spark
Upon transferring to UNC from Northwest Florida State College in the fall of 2019, Mikey Madej made such a strong impression that the coaches thought he’d likely be drafted after one year in Chapel Hill, due in large part to his advanced bat-handling skills and mature approach at the plate.
Things ultimately didn’t play out that way, as Madej hit .183/.261/.250 in the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season and then saw limited playing last season. But almost three years after his arrival, he’s starting to deliver on the promise he showed.
Since becoming the Tar Heels’ full-time starting left fielder on April 2, Madej – who began his collegiate career at Purdue in 2017 – has batted .343/.489/.486 in 10 games. That includes a 3-for-9 showing against Georgia Tech this weekend, highlighted by back-to-back three-RBI games Friday and Saturday.
“I guess mostly just enjoying the game,” said Madej when asked what he attributes his recent success to. “It’s my last year playing baseball, so going out there and having fun and trusting the work I do off the field, in the cages and all that stuff. Just staying with it and trusting it, and stuff is going to work out. I’ve been getting good pitches to hit, and I’ve been been having good swings.”
None might be more memorable than the hack he took in the first inning Friday, when he drove a 92 mph fastball over the right-field wall for his first UNC homer.
“It felt good,” Madej said. “We were talking about it all the time in the locker room, like, ‘Who is going to hit the next home run, me or (Hunter) Stokely (who hit his first homer of the season in the sixth inning Friday)?’ Everybody was saying me, and I was like, ‘100% it’s going to be.’ It’s so funny that’s when it came. It was awesome because my parents were sitting out in right field and it was right next to them. My dad got the ball and everything.”
New-look lineup
With Madej, Mac Horvath and Alberto Osuna heating up and Tomas Frick and Vance Honeycutt struggling, Forbes opted to shuffle the lineup Friday, moving Angel Zarate to the leadoff spot, Horvath to the two-hole, Osuna to the cleanup spot, Madej to the six-hole, Honeycutt to the seven-hole and Frick to the nine-hole.
The decision to remove Honeycutt from the leadoff spot was notable, although not particularly surprising – the freshman entered Friday hitting .175 (10-for-57) with six walks compared to 24 strikeouts over the previous 12 games.
“We just felt like we need to get Vance out of the leadoff spot and take some pressure off of him. …” said Forbes after Friday’s game. “The on-base percentage has got to improve. He’s just striking out more than he needs to, and until he can learn to do that, he’s going to have to hit seven through nine and learn how to bunt and learn how to move the ball. And he will. … Having him down there, too, can be a bonus if he can get back going because he can get on base and score from wherever he is.”
After going 0-for-5 with four strikeouts Friday, Forbes dropped Honeycutt down three more spots in the order to the nine-hole. That decision paid off Saturday and Sunday, as the star freshman put together back-to-back multi-hit games for the first time in his career, going 4-for-7 with two homers, a double, three walks and zero strikeouts.
What’s next?
The Tar Heels will welcome Campbell to Boshamer Stadium for an 8 p.m. tilt Tuesday. The preseason favorite in the Big South for the fourth straight year, the Camels (22-12) are coming off a three-game sweep of North Carolina A&T – which defeated UNC 7-6 last Tuesday.