Second baseman Michael Seaborn prepares to tag out an NC A&T runner.
The Virginia Tech baseball team needed some late scoring to defeat the Aggies of North Carolina A&T Tuesday night.
The win comes on the heels of a four game road winning streak, during which the Hokies outscored the opposition 44-15. The Aggies were 14-25 going into the game versus the red-hot Hokies.
Eddie Campbell was the starting pitcher for the Hokies during the game, which was delayed by lightning. Campbell gave the Hokies four solid innings, allowing only four runs. However, it was the bullpen that really shined in a game that involved six scoreless innings by the Aggie offense.
Despite the stalwart efforts by the bullpen arms, which have been all but dependable this season, the offense was not able to capitalize on all of its opportunities.
The Hokies’ offense did have some bright moments, including a two-run home run by third-baseman Johnny Morales — his first of the season.
The teams were deadlocked at four runs from the sixth inning to the bottom of the ninth, until the Aggies intentionally walked Chad Morgan, a .224 hitter, to put men on first and second base with no outs.
The next batter, designated hitter Chris Kay, drew a walk as well to load the bases for none other than Morales, the 5-foot-5 ball of energy. Morales drove in the winning run with a walk-off single into left field.
“A lot of crazy stuff happened tonight,” said Pete Hughes, head coach. “I’m just fortunate that we won and that we had the right guys up in pressure situation.”
With this win, the Hokies improve their overall record to 24-18, 7-14 in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
When asked about how many wins he thinks the Hokies will need to get into the ACC Tournament, Hughes said, “I think 12 gets us, 11 (is) borderline.”
With nine ACC games left in the season, it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the Hokies make a run toward an ACC Tournament berth.
With the collective efforts of a team that includes a recent ACC baseball player of the week (Andrew Rash), the ACC leader in runs scored (Tim Smalling), and a pitching staff that comes through in tight situations, the Hokies may make it Durham, N.C.
The run toward contention will continue this Friday when the Hokies travel to Durham for a three game series with Duke, the conference bottom feeder.
A version of this article appeared in the Apr 27 issue of the Collegiate Times.
Leave a comment 3 Comments Write a letter to the editor
All letters to the editor must include a name, e-mail, daytime phone number and affiliation to Virginia Tech. Affiliation includes: year and major for students; position and department for faculty and staff; current city for alumni and parents.
"a pitching staff that comes through in tight situations?!"
Yet they can't come through with 4 or 5 run leads such as in the FSU series that resulted in loses by 4 and 6 runs
It is the slugging not our pitching that is behind most of our Ws
Reply to this Top
FYI - It wasn't Johnny Morales who hit the 2 run homerun, it was Gabe Ortiz. You should probably do some proofreading before running the story.
Reply to this Top
Most image forensics are done in a way called "copy and paste", which means part of the image is copied from another part of it. A site named <a href="http://www.pskiller.com/">Photoshopped Image Killer</a> can detect such kind of image forgery very well. It identifies the forgery by detecting repetitions in the digital bits that comprise the imageeven if those repetitions are too subtle for the eye to detect or damaged by image compressions like JPEG.
Reply to this Top