It wasn’t worst to first, but you could call it eight to great.
The Georgia Tech baseball team, which two Saturdays ago was facing the end of its season, finished its improbable run through the ACC baseball tournament by plowing Miami 8-5 in the title game Sunday in Greensboro, N.C. Tech became the first No. 8 (lowest) seed team to win the ACC in the tournament’s 39 years.
“That’s a [heck] of an accomplishment when you’ve got seven other great teams that are all going to play in the NCAA tournament, and then you win four and go undefeated,” coach Danny Hall said by phone Sunday. “Not many teams do that.”
To win their pool, the Yellow Jackets beat top-seeded Florida State (also the top-ranked team in the country), Virginia and Clemson and then defeated the Hurricanes for the title. It’s Tech’s eighth in school history and Hall’s fourth.
After a season in which his team has suffered decimating injuries but has maintained its fight, Hall called it the most surprising and gratifying of the four. Two Saturdays ago, on the final day of the regular season, Tech needed either a win or a Virginia Tech loss to make the eight-team ACC field.
Hall figured that if the Jackets didn’t make it, they would be left out of the NCAA tournament for just the third time in the past 28 years. It would have been a meek but just finish to what has been, from a won/lost record standpoint, the second poorest in Hall’s 19-year stewardship of the Tech program. However, Tech got a 2-1 win to earn its way into the ACC tournament, and then swept to the title. Mohawked first baseman Jake Davies was named the tournament’s most valuable player, hitting four home runs, driving in 11 and holding Clemson to two hits in six innings on Saturday. Sunday, Zane Evans threw three innings of scoreless relief and also drove in three. His run-scoring single helped produce a 4-0 first-inning lead that was never overtaken.
“As soon as we scored the four runs in the first inning, the confidence shot up,” Davies said. “It was like, we can’t be stopped.”
The Jackets will learn Monday where they’ll be placed in the NCAA tournament. Five ACC teams –Florida State, Miami, North Carolina, N.C. State and Virginia – will host regionals, as will Florida, LSU and South Carolina. The tournament begins Friday. They go from bubble team to target. The past six ACC champions have gone on to reach the College World Series, a destination that has eluded the Jackets since 2006, the last time they got out of regional play.
Said Davies, “I want to get somewhere next week and beat some more butt.”
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