Vanderbilt baseball are a strong team with a great ace in Sonny Gray, but they didn’t even need him to be at his best to defeat the North Carolina Tar Heels this afternoon, as their bullpen and bats came up big late in the game. The UNC baseball team looked great in the first six innings of the game, but the Commodores eventually took over, sending UNC down to the loser’s bracket after winning by a final score of 7-3.
College World Series 2011, Vanderbilt Vs. North Carolina Final Score: Commodores Win Game 1
Gray and Patrick Johnson both got off to fairly strong starts, but were let down by questionable control and poor defense. Both teams were able to score multiple times in the beginning of the game, mostly through bad defense and smallball, and the game was tied up at 3-3 at the end of the 3rd inning.
UNC would take the lead in the 4th inning when Gray allowed a run by hitting Colin Moran with the bases loaded, but that would be the last run they would score. Gray got into a tough jam an inning later, but Corey Williams got out of the jam by getting a strikeout with the bases loaded. From then on, the Tar Heels bats struggled.
Vanderbilt went on to take the lead 5-3 with a good top of the 6th inning, then they extended their lead to 7-3 in the 8th, making the potential comeback even tougher. UNC had an incredible seven strikeouts with runners in scoring position and played poor defense, making things easy on a Vanderbilt team they should have been able to push much harder.
For more on the College World Series, keep it on our 2011 College World Series section. For more on these two teams and their CWS journeys, UNC baseball fans should head over to Carolina March and Vanderbilt baseball fans should check out Anchor Of Gold.
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