Two bad innings were enough to sink it for Carolina, as they gave up a 4-0 lead on a Kole Calhoun grand slam in the fifth only to be shellacked for eight runs in a dismal seventh inning. It was ASU pitcher's Josh Spence second win against the Heels in Omaha, as he again pitched seven innings, while the Heels went through seven pitchers in the course of the game. UNC finishes the season 48-18; Virginia is the last ACC team  still in contention. 

The bats that failed the Heels in their opener against Arizona State came back with a vengance this afternoon, as UNC rattled off twenty-three hits en route to an 11-4 win. Pitcher J.R. Ballinger was put in a hole early after giving up five runs in two and two-thirds innings, including Dustin Ackley's 23rd, 24th and 25th hit in the College World Series. The 25th was a new CWS record; the team's overall twenty-three tied another record mark.

Adam Warren pitched for the Heels, going seven innings and giving up only three runs. UNC will next face the loser of tonight's Texas-ASU matchup Thursday at 6 pm.

Ben Bunting has a frustrating afternoon at the College World Series. Photo from Big 12 Hardball.

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Carolina's fourth consecutive trip to the College World Series didn't start as smoothly as the other three, with the Heels dropping their first game 5-2 against Arizona State. The game was primarily a pitching duel between Alex White and ASU's Josh Spence; White went nine innings giving up only one run and seven hits, while his opposite number went seven with one run and eight hits. It was under the Heels' closers in the tenth where things went off the rails, as the Sun Devils got four runs that UNC just could not make up.

The Heels face the loser of tonight's Texas-Southern Miss game on Tuesday at 2 pm in an elimination game.

UNC Baseball doesn't need any distractions going into the College World Series, so it's nice to know at least two players have solid postgraduate employment opportunities. With the second overall pick in the MLB draft tonight, the Seattle Mariners chose first baseman Dustin Ackley, followed soon by the Cleveland Indians selecting pitcher Alex White at 15th. Ackley and White are both juniors, making this their first year of eligibility in the draft.

Dustin Ackley had been the prohibitive favorite to go second in the draft for quite some time, behind San Diego State pitcher Stephen Strasburg. He was widely considered the best hitter in the draft (Quote GM Jack Zduriencik, "We think this kid was the best hitter in the Draft.") and has excelled in the postseason to date, including a 10-14 performance in two games against East Carolina. Mariners fans are understandably pleased.

From what I can gather, Indians fans were surprised Alex White was still on the board at fifteen, and are quite happy their team picked him up. White was initially drafted in the 14th round out of high school by the Los Angeles Dodgers, but elected to attend UNC instead, a decision that appears to have paid off handsomely.

While I spent the weekend walking around various parts of D.C., the Carolina baseball team was ripping through its NCAA regional in three straight games, earning a trip to, well, Chapel Hill, and a best of three series with East Carolina. Along the way, they brought misery to Jayhawks fans everywhere, so there's that at least.

Having just gotten used to North Carolina being a baseball powerhouse, I'm most certainly not prepared to consider East Carolina one as well. Happily, they're not yet at that stage. The Pirates needed a ninth-inning rally and an extra inning of play to squeak by South Carolina Monday night in Greenville. On the season they're 46-19, and winners of the Conference USA regular season title. The Tar Heels (45-16) and ECU have met twice this season, with Carolina taking the first game in Chapel Hill, and East Carolina returning the favor in Greenville. This weekend's games are already a sellout, which with overflow crowd should lead to attendance of over 5,000. The game in Greenville drew 5,581, so expect a fair number of Pirates fans in attendance.

So who wins the weekend? It's tough to say without seeing the pitching matchups, but UNC has more Super Regional experience and a better record against a tougher conference slate - of the six ACC teams to make the tournament four advanced, and as the fourth overall seed, UNC is, in the NCAA's view, the best of the bunch. With the home field advantage, the odds are in the Tar Heels' favor, and they should make it back to Omaha for the fourth straight year.

Dawg Sports points to an Athens newspaper article blaming Nike for Georgia's CWS loss to Fresno State. (Blaming is probably too strong a word, as the article is couched in your standard good sportsmanship, Fresno State was of course the better team talk, but let's just say "concerns were raised.") FSU, an Easton school, was using technologically advanced composite bats, while Georgia, using Nike aluminum bats, was only getting warning track power in the larger Rosenblatt Stadium. The implication, of course, is that UNC sufferred from the same handicap, and while I don't buy it - neither of the two UNC-FSU games seemed to hinge on distance hitting - this quote is just fascinating:

Georgia's players were hoping that North Carolina, a fellow all-Nike school, would make the championship series because the bat would've been a non-factor, [Georgia third baseman Ryan] Peisel said. 

There's so much to unpack from that one sentence. First of all, if that's an accurate representation of what the Bulldogs were thinking at the time, they were halfway to losing the series before they took the field. Once you decide your opponents have magic bat powers, you're in a bit of a psychological hole.

The other fascinating point is that Georgia knew UNC's athletic gear provider. That seems to be a common skill in college athletics. We're constantly reading about future NBA stars picking their vacations in the NCAA on the basis of the shoe company a school has shacked up with, as said shoe company is the longest relationship the player has had in basketball. There are the worries that unregulated shoe-sponsored camps are shepherding kids in one direction or another based on the logo on their footwear. This boggles the mind a bit. I mean, I know UNC is under contract with Nike, because I was on campus for the third world labor protests of the nineties, and that when I go to buy some gear with the UNC logo, if it's overpriced (and I'm not in Santa Barbara) chances are it has a swoosh on it. And I know Oregon's a Nike school, because they're America's Test Kitchen for ugly uniforms. Beyond that, I really have no clue what's on which athlete's foot. But they all seem to know, in disturbing detail.

Finally, I'm interested to see how long the school-wide athletic sponsorship lasts and more and more strains such as this appear. And they are. The current debate over Speedo's new patented swimsuit technology looks to crash into the NCAAs next season. With a lot of fans already irritated by apparel decisions coming out of corporate headquarters and not campuses - most notably with the Carolina Blue Kentucky uniforms of the nineties - if they start to see the games controlled by technology and not by talent, things could get ugly.

After all, neither UNC or Georgia are the recipients of Nike's largess on the strength of their play on the diamond. And the campus-wide contract is a relatively new invention. UNC didn't sign their first until the mid-nineties, and even then the women's soccer was exempt until their Adidas contract expired in 2001. Carolina has the clout to push back against some of the stupider shoe requests - the nike lapel pin on caches seems to have fallen by the wayside at least - but anything that turns the tide away from the balkanization of schools by shoe company can only be a good thing.

(Or maybe I'm just bitter that my one intramural championship came at the height of the Nike era, and thus my championship T-shirt is generic advertising pap and not the classic everybody knows and loves. Stupid Nike.)

Folks in Louisiana may be debating for a while the wisdom of walking hitters in the top of the order in a tie game in the top of the ninth. I'll admit I was wondering it myself. After Ryan Graepel got a double to start things off from the bottom of the order, LSU decided to walk Dustin Ackley. They got Mark Fleury swinging, but not until a wild pitch had advanced both the runners; that was followed by a second intentional walk of Tim Federoff, leaving the bases loaded.

This would turn out to bite them in the ass when Tim Federowicz hit the first College World Series grand slam in seven years.

It was a good ending to a frustrating evening. Up to that point UNC had only managed one run off of seven hits since the rain delayed game had picked up from the previous day. LSU meanwhile had tied the game at three on only four hits, and the momentum was tilting their way, with pitcher Coleman having struck out five batters in two innings prior to the, well, slight momentum changer.

UNC now gets a rematch against Fresno State, a team they'll have to beat twice to make it to the finals. The first game is tomorrow at 7 pm.

Small ball.

UNC pretty much perfected that sort of play over their first game of the College World Series, hitting nothing but singles until a scoring double in the seventh that put the Heels up 8-2. The Heels brought in a run apiece on walks and passed balls, but in between that managed seventeen hits and seven RBI's. Aex White only gave up four hits in seven innings - two solo home runs, to start each of the first two innings - and generally restrained the normally hot-hitting Tigers.

Carolina meets Fresno State in the next round, Tuesday at 7 pm.