Tar Heels Shut Out Baseball, 7-0

After two victories this week, one had to believe that Boston College's baseball team was maybe starting to grab back some momentum after getting demolished over the past month or so.  If they could maybe build off of their efforts against UConn and UMass, the Eagles could maybe climb out of the ACC's cellar and potentially into a position of respectability.  They'd have that chance against a North Carolina team struggling to get wins over the past month.

In the span of a couple of hours, BC put forth a lackluster effort so resounding, a microscope gets placed squarely on the dugout and clubhouse in its wake.

The Tar Heels scored twice in the first inning and tallied eleven hits off Eagle pitching en route to a 7-0 win.  BC mustered just three hits off UNC starting pitcher Trent Thornton, who took a no-hitter into the fourth inning.  The Tar Heels improved to 17-12 (6-7 ACC) while BC fell to 9-19 (1-12 ACC).

Thornton retired 11 in a row at one point and faced the minimum amount of batters between the fifth and eighth inning.  BC had two hits in the fourth and one in the ninth as the Tar Heels scored all their runs before the sixth inning.  At the dish, Tom Zengel recorded five RBI on his own out of the DH spot, including a three-run homer to right in the fifth inning.

Tyler "Cheese" Hinchcliffe threw three innings of shutout relief baseball as John Gorman fell to 2-5 on the season.  Gorman lasted 4.1 innings, but he gave up five runs on five hits and four walks.

After the game, Gambino spoke with his team for less than a minute.  His postgame comments on the BC Bird Ball YouTube page reflect a coach growing increasingly frustrated with his team's effort, a common trend among the last couple of years.

It's losses like this that raise major red flags about the team.  Before the year, he spoke about how the team was extremely tight-knit with senior leadership.  While that may be the case, this is hardly the first time BC was completely dominated by an opponent.  But where some of those losses can be attributed to a talent discrepancy, this is one of those that looked bad in all facets.

Whenever a team looks this bad in all facets of the game, there has to be a finger that gets pointed somewhere.  Every team is prone to let downs, but the singular drop on the field, coupled with the attitude after the game is pointing to something strange happening in the future.  Either BC will play angry and play their tails off, or this weekend is going to get very ugly very fast.  The fact that the drop off happened as close to victories as it did raises even more red flags since BC looked like a team that didn't show up for this one, whatever the reasons may be.

Andrew Chin takes the hill on Saturday in the second game, but as you can listen from Coach Gambino's postgame comments, there are some definite frustrations manifesting in this game.