FSU baseball wins its 7th ACC title – Tallahassee.com
Florida State took down No. 2 seed North Carolina to win its seventh ACC Championship on Sunday afternoon.
The Seminoles (39-20) defeated the Tar Heels 7-3 at Louisville Slugger Field to take the tournament after starting out as the No. 8 seed.
Freshman first baseman Drew Mendoza came up big in the game with two home runs, two walks, and four RBI in the game. His three run homerun in the eighth put the Seminoles up by four.
“I faced them in my first series of the year,” Mendoza said.
“I’ve had trouble laying off low pitches. I knew they were going to come at me with change-ups. I was looking for it… I was lucky they stayed up enough to get a good barrel on it.”
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Starting pitcher Andrew Karp gave up three runs, two earned, in three innings, but it could have been a lot worse if not for freshman lefty Drew Parrish.
Parrish came in with two runners on base and a 2-0 count with no outs in the fourth. He threw two balls to load the bases, but then struck out the next three Tar Heels he faced to keep the UNC lead at 3-1.
“I walked the first guy, and I knew I had to get ahead of the next guy,” Parrish said.
“So I was just hitting with my curveball and getting ahead in the counts. Putting pressure on them. Making them hit the ball. It just so happened they swung through three curveballs. It was a pretty good moment.”
Parrish threw 2.2 hitless innings with five strikeouts to keep the ‘Noles in the ball game.
FSU trailed 3-2 heading into the eighth inning, but got the bats going. The tying run came across after back-to-back wild pitches, and the go-ahead run was brought in by a Cal Raleigh RBI single to make it 4-3.
“If someone had said what was the key to the inning I would have said it was a tie,” FSU coach Mike Martin said.
“Dylan Busby getting hit to give us first and second and one of the wild pitches… It was just an inning that we just took advantage of every opportunity.”
Mendoza crushed his second homerun of the day to give the Seminoles some breathing room and a 7-3 lead.
Drew Carlton came in for FSU, and kept the Tar Heels off the board over the final two innings.
FSU has now won its second ACC Championship in the last three years. The Seminoles defeated N.C. State 6-2 in 2015 as well.
Left fielder Jackson Lueck was named the tournament MVP, and Mendoza, third baseman Dylan Busby, and pitcher Tyler Holton joined him on the All-tournament team.
FSU will find out if their run through the ACC tournament, which included eliminating No. 1 seed Louisville and No. 2 seed UNC, was enough to earn them a host site tonight at 8:30.