Scott Forbes on UNC baseball beating West Virginia
· Yahoo Sports
The North Carolina Tar Heels are heading back to the College World Series Finals. After going 3-0 on their side of the bracket, capped off with a big win over West Virginia, the Diamond Heels officially punched their ticket on Wednesday.
UNC took control of the game 2-0 early in the first inning and really never looked back. At one point, they led 12-1 over the Mountaineers before closing out the game with a 12-7 win. As UNC awaits the winner of Georgia and Oklahoma, they will have a few days off before Game 1 on Saturday.
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Following Wednesday's win, manager Scott Forbes met the media to discuss the game as well as their path forward.
Here is what Forbes had to say via Inside Carolina:
Opening statement
I want to congratulate West Virginia. Heck of a team, heck of a run. Very well coached. They just play the game the right way. That’s a credit to their coaching staff. They come at you a lot of ways — a lot of speed, deep pitching staff. We really had to work in those two games to beat them.
I’ve been in their shoes. I know what that feels like. It’s a stinker, but they’ve got a lot to be proud of. They should be extremely proud of how they represented their university.
Moving on, man, I thought Jackson Rose came in, silenced them pretty quick. I thought he was outstanding. We were joking before the game today, like, man, we need to have one of those games where we get 15 hits and score some runs. So thankfully that happened.
I thought our guys were ready. I felt like they were going after it. We talked about being in the moment, not counting outs and just playing like a Little Leaguer and having a blast doing so. And how can you not?
I mean, this is unbelievable. We’re at the College World Series. We talk about it’s an honor and a privilege to wear our uniform at the University of North Carolina, but it’s also an honor and a privilege to be here playing on that field. And I want our guys to feel that. I want them to play with joy and have a blast playing together. So they did that.
And the fact that they did that, obviously we had one bad inning, but I don’t care about that bad inning, I could care less.
We’re playing in the national championship. And I’m excited for these guys. And I’ll just keep jumping on their backs and watch them when we start playing on Saturday.
On any similarities from 2006-07 teams?
A lot — togetherness. That ’06 team, they loved each other. They had a lot of fun together. This team’s the same. I picked up on that. They’re a tough group. They want to win. They put winning first over everything else. And that team did that.
So there’s a ton of similarities. I can’t wait to text back the ’06 text chain group that I’ll get. And there will be some hilarious texts. That’s why you coach.
But they do have similarities. Built similar type teams. I’m glad that I was there and can look back on that and hopefully use that to help us a little bit.
On lineup switches...
Scott Jackson, that’s why I changed the lineup. I got a text. I already made the lineup last night. I had done all my prep. I dug in pretty hard. I told him to dig in more. He must have dug in more this morning. Got a text — me and him and Wierz just text each other about the lineup; we have a three way text.
He said, I really think we might want to consider this because of how good the starter and Korn, who we thought we would see 1-2, have been against right-handed hitters. They thought it was really tough at-bat. So we wanted to try to pressure them more.
So eventually I just said, all right, they were going back and forth with a bunch of different lineups. I said, just send me the dadgum lineup and I’m going to write whatever you guys tell me. So it was a credit to Scott Jackson and Jesse Wierzbicki.
On pitching decision today
I felt great about Folger Boaz. When you have a deep bullpen — and as a head coach if you see something that you don’t like and you feel like it’s a key part of a game — it just is what it is. And it’s never personal. And our players know it’s not personal.
I thought he had good stuff, but I had the pitch come in. I know where the pitches were called. I just felt like we needed to make a change right there.
But that did go into the thought process. We thought, okay, we can piece this thing together. We don’t need Folger Boaz to go five innings, maybe one time through the lineup, maybe get us into the fourth.
But again, every out is vital. And that was a hard game to win. They made a run at us. We didn’t make a couple plays. And I told Folger, you still got us three outs, so keep your confidence. He’s going to have to pitch for us to win this national championship. But we like Rose coming out of the bullpen, if at all possible.
On winning the bracket by going 3-0
Yeah, I mean, that’s the goal. I told the coaches today, listen, I’m going for it. And if we have a chance to win this game, the only guy — that was still debatable in my mind. I told DeCaro, if I tell you to put your spikes on, you know what that means. Because I know how hard it is to win a game, you get a big lead like that.
And you want those two days if you can get them. Doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to win. But you have a pitching staff like ours, you can recover, you can get tomorrow to also get a lift in.
It’s funny you said that because my wife was, we were talking about being in Omaha, and she remembers the first year very much because we had some off days. And then she also remembers ’07 because we lost and it just felt like we were playing every single day to get back to the national championship.
So you want to recover. You want to have a little bit of rest. The guys used these last two days really well, they’re focused. And I’ve already done it. You know I believed that we were going to win today. And we have a plan and we’ll stay with that plan the next two days to be ready to play Saturday.
On the offense's performance today
You know I agree with that and they don’t get any credit. Every question’s about the pitching staff. And I hope that’s the case, and I hope it keeps being the case because they play with an edge. And I use that as much as I possibly can.
But you know, you look at a guy like Carter French, steps up there. He’s gotta be the best .240 hitter in the country, in my opinion. Gets on base. He rolls the line up over. He’s not scared. And we’ve had some guys struggling.
But it’s been to me — the common theme on this team is, obviously Owen’s been Owen, and we’ve had some guys that have been unbelievable. But we’ve had different guys step up in big moments.
Look at our RBIs, you know, a lot of guys are getting close to 60, distributed throughout the order. Then you got Tyler Howe who doesn’t, he has the least amount of RBIs besides French but he still gets big hits and gets on base and then he scores.
I think there’s length to it. I also think a guy we’ve got some other guys that did not get at-bats these three games, but I got a hunch that they’re going to come up big for us and they’ll be ready.
This article originally appeared on Tar Heels Wire: UNC Baseball: What Scott Forbes said after win over West Virginia