Jarren Advincula looked giddy as he rounded first base. He even threw a celebratory skip into his step after smacking a home run over the right field wall, securing No. 3 Georgia Tech baseball’s first run of the evening.
About three-and-a-half hours later, his team was on the field at Harrington Athletics Village, celebrating a 14–1 win while holding up the ACC regular-season title trophy.
After shutting out No. 23 Boston College (36–19, 17–12 Atlantic Coast) 9–0 in Thursday’s late-night series opener, the Yellow Jackets kept the fire going immediately on Friday. It all started with Advincula’s first-inning solo shot, which put Georgia Tech (44–9, 24–5) on top for good.
BC trailed 3–1 heading into the seventh, but back-to-back three-run innings in the seventh and eighth sealed the game for good as the Yellow Jackets clinched the series with a 14–1 win. Georgia Tech also clinched the ACC regular-season title with the victory.
It wasn’t steaming hot bats that got the Yellow Jackets the early lead in Brighton, Mass., on the crisp and cloudy Friday evening, though—it was pitching.
“Their offense gets a lot of attention, rightfully so, but I also think they defend really well,” BC head coach Todd Interdonato said. “They defend really well in the infield—they haven’t really made a lot of mistakes.”
Except for a Nick Wang double in the first inning, the Eagles didn’t register a hit until the sixth as starting pitcher Carson Ballard allowed just two hits and one run in six innings.
“Our offense is predicated on creating a rhythm … and I just felt like we just never really quite got in that rhythm,” Interdonato said.
BC’s pitching staff matched Ballard for a while, and Georgia Tech posted three straight scoreless innings as Tyler Mudd threw five strikeouts in his 4.2 innings on the mound.
“Tyler Mudd threw an exceptional game and gave us a great start—the only two runs he gave up were the two solo home runs,” Interdonato said. “It was exactly the start we needed.”
But the Eagles’ struggles began in the fifth as the Yellow Jackets returned to their bread and butter: the art of the home run.
The Yellow Jackets average about two home runs per game—the fifth-best mark in the country. They met that average in the top of the fifth when Carson Kerce hit a 414-foot blast into left field, doubling Georgia Tech’s lead to 2–0.
Cesar Gonzalez went in for Mudd and closed out the fifth without allowing any more runs. But he issued back-to-back walks to start the top of the sixth, and Georgia Tech built its advantage on a Parker Brosius single that bounced into center field, sending Alex Hernandez sprinting home for a 3–0 lead.
Wang gave the Yellow Jackets a taste of their own medicine in the sixth as he sent the ball bouncing onto the hill beyond left field, cutting Georgia Tech’s lead to 3–1 with his team-leading 16th home run of the season.
That was the last bright spot for the Eagles, though. After that, pretty much everything went downhill. John Kwiatkowski had a brief stint in the seventh inning, during which he recorded a hit-by-pitch and a walk, both while the bases were loaded, to hand Georgia Tech back-to-back runs.
“[It] just kind of felt like it took the air out of us,” Interdonato said of the sequence.
Georgia Tech scored 11 runs in the final three innings as BC went through five different pitchers and found little success.
But Interdonato said he saw improvement in his team compared to Thursday’s performance. He wants them to take that into Saturday’s finale.
“The score is obviously worse, but I did feel like our focus and our competitiveness—the dial started to trend back up,” Interdonato said.
