Five notes from the NCAA baseball tournament, where Georgia Tech will try to stay alive Saturday:
1. After his team’s loss to Campbell in the opening game of its regional, Georgia Tech coach Danny Hall did not reveal who he would start for the Yellow Jackets’ elimination game against Alabama State. He indicated he had yet to make up his mind after Tech’s 15-8 loss to Campbell Friday afternoon.
“We’ll see,” Hall said. “I kind of want to watch this next game a little bit and we’ll make a good decision.”
Had Tech won Friday and played Saturday in a winners bracket game, Hall was prepared to send Marquis Grissom Jr. to the mound. Hall’s reason for holding Grissom back for a potential matchup (and pitching John Medich against Campbell) with the overall No. 1 seed Volunteers is that, in all likelihood, Tech would need to beat Tennessee to win the regional and that Grissom gave the Jackets a better chance to do that.
“We’ve done it both ways,” Hall said of his starting-pitcher strategy in regionals. “I’ve been doing it awhile. So we just looked at it, we needed John Medich to win a game for us, so we chose that he was going to throw game 1 for us. He’s been throwing Friday nights for us the last three weeks for us. Just didn’t work out (Friday), so it’s never an easy decision.”
The Jackets are now faced with a different conundrum. Tech can still save Grissom for a potential matchup with Tennessee, but the Jackets will have to beat Alabama State in order to have that chance. Were Tech to lose the Saturday game with Grissom on the bench, the Jackets would be eliminated without using their best pitcher.
One possibility is Chance Huff, who has started 14 games this season but has a 7.34 ERA and .288 opponent batting average. Logan McGuire had an effective start vs. Akron May 16, pitching three shutout innings with one hit allowed.
Tech used six pitchers Friday – Medich (43 pitches), Sam Crawford (41), Dawson Brown (32), Cole McNamee (11), Cody Carwile (46) and Aeden Finateri (31). It hasn’t been unusual for Crawford and Brown to pitch twice in a weekend.
2. Second baseman Chandler Simpson went 2-for-5 on Friday – and his batting average went down. Simpson, who started the game leading Division I in batting average at .418, saw his average slip slightly from .4185 to .4180.
Simpson’s closest pursuer, Air Force’s Sam Kulasingam, went 0-for-4 in an NCAA regional game Friday against Texas to drop from .414 to .407.
3. Campbell catcher Ty Babin relished taking down a power-conference team Friday, although it’s not new territory for the Camels. They were 8-6 in the regular season against power-conference opponents.
“I think we come into every place with a little chip on our shoulder, being a small-town university,” he said. “It kind of fuels us when people don’t know who we are and what we’ve done even though we’ve been to four back-to-back-to-back (to back) regionals and some final appearances.”
4. Campbell could do nothing against Medich in the first inning, going down in order. But Big South player of the year Zach Neto took Medich to a 10-pitch at-bat before flying out, a sequence that likely provided the Camels with more of a picture of what they were facing.
In the second inning, they were ready for damage, hitting three home runs and three doubles off Medich to get him out of the game 1 2/3 innings into it. Their five-run second provided a lead that Tech could not surmount.
“It looked like he was trying to spin quite a bit with his slider,” Campbell coach Justin Haire said. “I think that’s his go-to pitch. Obviously, I haven’t seen the videos. Our guys were obviously seeing it really well and being able to put the barrel on it and try to start to eliminate some of the exterior stuff, the changeup and some of that stuff.”
Campbell came into the game in the top 10 nationally in home runs per game and slugging percentage.
5. In Friday night’s Tennessee-Alabama State game, Volunteers catcher Evan Russell was conspicuously not in the starting lineup. Russell has started 50 of Tennessee’s 60 games. Volunteers coach Tony Vitello was to address the matter after the game, according to reports. Tennessee won the game 10-0.
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