CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina stopper Dalton Pence knew he had to mix up his pitching arsenal coming into regional play.
Pence, the hard-throwing lefty who has relied on a heavy dose of fastballs this season out of the Tar Heels’ bullpen, has focused on utilizing his secondary pitches during course of the past week. The increased comfort that has returned with those off-speed pitches helped Pence shut the door in UNC’s 6-2 defeat of LSU on Saturday at Boshamer Stadium.
The victory moves Carolina within one win of advancing to super regional play in the NCAA Tournament. The Tar Heels now have two chances to secure that clinching victory, beginning Sunday night. UNC coach Scott Forbes said after Saturday’s win that Pence only threw off-speed pitches in practice on Monday, working through cutters and change-ups during the live throwing session.
“I knew I was gonna have to use it,” Pence said of his secondary pitch selection. “The more I use it, the better it gets.
“(My) main focus was kind of work on the off-speed stuff, the secondary pitches (this week). And that helps. That helps take pressure off the fastball and that’s a credit to (the coaches). They notice stuff that we need to work on and get better every week.”
Across his 2⅔ innings of relief work on Saturday, the second-longest outing of the season for Pence, he held the reigning national champion Tigers hitless while recording two strikeouts. He picked up his team-high seventh save of the season for the Tar Heels, the No. 4 national seed in this NCAA Tournament.
While Vance Honeycutt’s two moonshot home runs certainly supplied the loudest of key moments against LSU, the collective pitching effort from UNC (44-13) played a pivotal part, too. The trio of starter Shea Sprague, reliever Ben Peterson and the closer Pence held the red-hot Tigers (41-22) to just two runs, their lowest scoring total since falling at Tennessee 3-1 on April 13. Across the 26 games since that Tennessee loss, LSU had averaged 7.2 runs per game, including 8.4 runs over the past seven outings.
