UNC Baseball will host Pittsburgh this weekend in their home series finale

Jun 7, 2025; Chapel Hill, NC, USA; North Carolina pitcher Jason DeCaro (29) pitches the ball during the first inning of the Super Regionals game against Arizona in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Mandatory Credit: Jaylynn Nash-Imagn Images | Jaylynn Nash-Imagn Images The Diamond Heels come into this we

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What is the story about?

The Diamond Heels come into this weekend having played a fair bit less baseball in the last couple of weeks than they usually have going into a weekend series. After their series win over Duke two weekends ago, they played their worst game of the season against Coastal Carolina, then cancelled a game against Queens College ostensibly due to weather (Queens’ RPI being in the 200’s probably didn’t motivate the coaching staff to try and work around it). They played an exam-weekend nonconference game against Duke that

was over in 7 innings, and then had another midweek matchup cancelled, this one against Winthrop (Winthrop has an RPI near 100 and is in contention to win the Big South — this time, weather doesn’t feel like a convenient excuse to protect the team’s postseason positioning).

Rest versus rust is an open question in a lot of sports, but I tend to feel like baseball, as a sport that relies on a lot of unnatural motions and movements, falls generally on the rust side. Pitchers’ arms need to be working on consistent schedules to minimize injury risk from deviations to mechanical routine, hitters need to see pitches to keep their eyes sharp. Technology, including UNC’s Trajekt machine, is allowing players to come closer and closer to replicating game situations, but it’s still not going to be quite the same. So it’s going to take some work for the coaching staff to have their team game-ready for a Pittsburgh team that has been up and down of late but presents plenty of danger.

Pitt looked like they might be making a late push to be solidly in the Field of 64 after a 23-1 win against West Virginia followed by a sweep of Virginia two weeks ago, but find themselves back on a crowded bubble after losing four straight since then. There’s no shame in being swept by Florida State in Tallahassee, to be fair, but losing a midweek 13-5 against Kent State is not a fantastic look. With the regular season winding down, this series will probably be the Panthers’ best opportunity to renew that push to keep playing baseball through the end of May. With a sweep of Virginia, a series win over Louisville, and a competitive series against Georgia Tech under their belts, this definitely isn’t a team to take lightly, even though their conference record of 10-14 isn’t incredibly inspiring.

Everything for Pitt starts with star right fielder Lorenzo Carrier, who’s having an All-American caliber season. His OPS of 1.360 ranks 2nd in the country, and a look at his stats show a player who doesn’t really have holes at the plate: he’s walked more than he’s struck out, he’s hitting for both average (.378 BA) and power (31 extra base hits including 18 home runs), and while he’s maybe not a dynamic speed threat, he does have 6 steals on the season. He’s been somewhat cold lately; in his last four conference series he’s gone 3/10 (against Cal), 2/10 (VT), 8/13 (UVA, an obvious exception), and 2/11 (FSU). Those two hits against FSU were both home runs, though, so clearly he’s still a danger to change the game in any given at-bat, and his 10 walks over those 12 games show that his approach is as good as ever. Shortstop Caden Dulin is also having an excellent season with a .363/.443/.626 slash line and 12 home runs, while stalwart catcher Sebastian Pisacreta has taken a step up this year with 13 long balls and an RBI total of 43 that ties Dulin for second on the team.

They lead an offense that’s put up gaudy numbers this season — 18th in the country with a .310 batting average, 6th with a 1.000 team OPS, 8th with 92 home runs, 1st in walks with 322, and 11th with 411 runs scored. It’s not Georgia Tech’s lineup where 1-9 are threats to leave the yard — most of the slugging is taken care of by the top 4-5 guys — but they’re all tough outs who grind at-bats and make pitchers work. They’ve made some headlines this year for how well the entire team works in 2-strike counts, and it’s just become their identity that they’ll make pitchers throw enough that eventually they’ll find a mistake and punish it.

With offensive numbers like that, it might be a little surprising that this team hasn’t done better in conference. Part of it is a brutal schedule thanks to the unbalanced nature of conference play, but they also haven’t really had reliable pitching. Their team ERA of 5.90 ranks 6th-worst in the ACC, opponents hitting .277 against them is 5th-worst, and they have fewer strikeouts than anybody else in the conference. They have also allowed the fewest walks, so that’s something, but it almost seems like they could stand to throw a few more pitches out of the zone rather than allowing teams to get good swings off.

Pitt has been shaking up the rotation recently because they haven’t really gotten consistency from any of their starters. Antonio Doganiero has been the Game 1 guy lately, and his numbers have been solid with a 3.89 ERA and a 42:18 K-BB mark in 44 innings. Even so, he hasn’t really been able to last as long in games as a Friday night guy should — until his game against Florida State where he went 5.1 (and gave up 8 runs with 4 unearned), he’d only gotten out of the 5th inning in starts against Kent State and Youngstown State. Drew Lafferty has been the other consistent starter, sometimes going on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays, and the drop from Doganiero to him is fairly steep. Batters hit a whopping .317 off Lafferty, and while he gives them appropriate length for a Sunday starter, he simply has been too easy for hitters to square up, and that’s led to an elevated ERA at 5.51. David Leslie and Vincent Spizzoucco are the other guys who have started a lot of games for Pitt, and they both have ERAs north of 7. The Panthers rely on a lot of guys out of the pen — every pitcher who has made at least an appearance for them has made at least 8, and that’s a total of 15 arms. That tells me that their relievers don’t tend to last very long, with the exception of Freddy Beruvides, who’s been a pretty reliable if not shutdown closer. Freshman Brandon Reiter hasn’t thrown a lot this season, but his numbers have also been very good.

The last time I wrote a preview of a UNC opponent with a dangerous lineup and a weak pitching staff, it was Virginia, who proceeded to embarrass the Diamond Heels for two games straight before the Heels put up a fight to dodge getting swept. This UNC team is very good, but especially against a team that fills the zone to the point of their own detriment, they’re liable to get quiet at the plate, and this Pitt staff, for any of its shortcomings, is not going to bail them out with a ton of walks — the Heels are going to have to swing the bat and hit a lot of baseballs to win this series, the last regular season action that Boshamer Stadium will see this year.