No. 2 Florida State rallies back to knock off No. 4 UNC in series finale and lock up second seed in ACC Tournament

The No. 4 North Carolina Tar Heels had already won the series. And when they took a 4-3 lead in the top of the eighth on Saturday in Game 3 against Florida State, they were on the verge of pulling off the sweep.

The No. 2 Seminoles rallied right back, however, scoring two in the bottom of the inning and then slamming the door in the ninth with three strikeouts from reliever John Abraham to escape with a 5-4 win over UNC.

With the win, Florida State (37-13, 17-10) will be the No. 2 seed in next week’s ACC Tournament in Durham and will play its first game on Friday afternoon.

North Carolina falls to 39-12 overall and 18-11 in the conference. Georgia Tech, which beat Duke two out of three this weekend, will be the No. 1 overall seed thanks to their .633 winning percentage in league play. Florida State finished at .630 and UNC was at .621.

Not that FSU head coach Link Jarrett cared too much about any of that. He just wanted to see how his team would respond to two ugly losses in the first two games of the series: 8-3 in Game 1 on Thursday night and then an 11-1, 7-inning loss on Friday.

“I cannot tell you how difficult it was to walk out of here after those first two,” Jarrett said. “Very few people understand the feeling in that locker room and walking off that field after something like the first two days. We clearly did not play well.

“To try to reset and regroup and come out here and play our style of baseball, I’ve never seen a group respond the way they responded to that. That was very, very difficult the last two days.”

The biggest moment of the game, one of the biggest of the entire season, came in the bottom of the eighth. James Hankerson Jr. led off with a 110 mph single to right. Jackson West then bunted pinch-runner B.J. Gibson to second base, and Gage Harrelson moved him to third on a groundout to second.

It set the stage for probable ACC Player of the Year Alex Lodise to be the hero. But North Carolina head coach Scott Forbes chose otherwise. He intentionally walked Lodise so his hard-throwing right-handed reliever, Camron Seagraves, could face lefty Max Williams with two outs.

Jarrett understood the decision. Not only has Lodise been one of the best players in the country this season, but he said lefties were hitting less than .100 against Seagraves this season.

Well, that number went up on Saturday. Williams lined a ball down the right-field line for a game-tying single. Myles Bailey, who had a three-run homer in the first, then lined a single to center to score Lodise with the go-ahead run.

Drew Faurot’s rocket shot ground ball with the bases loaded was fielded cleanly to end the inning, but the damage had been done and the score had been flipped.

“Somebody’s got to deliver,” Jarrett said. “And today you saw us play our type of baseball. And it was enough.”

Other than Bailey and Williams, the biggest star for the Seminoles on Saturday was starting pitcher Wes Mendes. He pitched into the seventh inning and was charged with just two earned runs against one of the top teams in the country. It was his second straight strong outing, and it came at the perfect time for his team.

Mendes walked four but also benefited from three double plays turned behind him. He allowed just one extra-base hit, and it was a 79 mph double down the left-field line against the shift.

“That’s the best he’s ever thrown,” Jarrett said of Mendes. “He was throwing 95 mph today. And I don’t know that we’ve seen more than a handful of pitches, maybe less than a handful, with that kind of velocity. But it had good life. And then the secondary pitches become more effective.”

And while he left with a 3-1 lead, by the time the inning was over it was 3-3. Peyton Prescott gave up a game-tying two-run homer to pinch-hitter Sawyer Black in the seventh, and then a two-out solo home run to Gavin Gallaher in the eighth as the Tar Heels momentarily silenced the Dick Howser crowd.

It didn’t stay silent for long, though. And it was very loud in the bottom of the eighth after Williams and Bailey came through with their RBI singles.

Florida State won’t know until Wednesday who it will face in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament. There will be four games a day in Durham on Tuesday and Wednesday and then two each on Thursday and Friday.

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