Next stop for the UNC baseball team?
The ACC Baseball Championship, which starts on Tuesday at Truist Field in Charlotte, NC.
Postseason baseball is a completely different atmosphere than the regular season, as the margin for error is slim-to-none. You can lose consecutive regular season games with little issue, while two losses in any given round of college baseball postseason can eliminate you.
If North Carolina’s recent hot stretch – and overall regular season outlook – is any indication of how it’ll play in this week’s conference tournament, the odds are in North Carolina’s favor.
The Diamond Heels (41-12, 22-8) took two of three from archrival Duke over the weekend, clinching the ACC’s top seed in the process. UNC won six straight prior to losing Thursday’s series opener, its first in the entire month of May.
North Carolina, which will try to sustain its regular season success in postseason play, is paired up with eighth-seeded Wake Forest (36-19, 15-15) and 12th-seeded Pitt (26-26, 10-20) in ACC Championship pool play.
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As you can see from the schedule above, the Diamond Heels will first face off against Pitt on Thursday at 3 p.m. ET. UNC swept the Panthers in Chapel Hill March 8-10, but its largest margin of victory was three runs.
Regardless of how Thursday’s game goes, North Carolina then has a 7 p.m. ET first pitch against in-state rival Wake Forest on Friday. The Diamond Heels swept the Demon Deacons, who started the year ranked first in the country, over Easter weekend in Winston-Salem.
If UNC wins both pool play matchups, it’ll then play in the ACC semifinals at 1 p.m. or 5 p.m. Saturday.
It’ll be easy to look ahead, particularly for a team playing extremely well like North Carolina, but its primary focus should be on downing Pitt for a fourth time.
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