ECU Sweeps Charlotte With a 3-1 Sunday Victory
Connor Norby and Josh Moylan launched home runs and (14)East Carolina vaulted to a 3-1 win over Charlotte on Sunday.
While Cliff Godwin characterized his team a looking a little gassed on Sunday, his team continued to grind and got enough quality pitching and hitting to pick up three more wins this weekend.
“Our defense was tremendous and really pitching and defense was the difference in the game,” said Godwin, “We’ll take this win any way we can get it. They’re a very good team. They pitched very well pretty much all weekend and our guys had tough at bats and tough sledding with the pitching they ran at us.”
It was ECU’s eleventh straight win over Charlotte and their seventh straight win overall with the weekend sweep of the 49’ers in Clark-LeClair Stadium. It is the Pirates’ third sweep of the season.
“They’ve done a good job at this point. They’ve showed up every day. It’s tough to keep everybody engaged. The guys have been very consistent up to this point, but we never wanted to be just 13-2. That was never our goal. Our goal was to get better every day and continue to focus on our craft,” Godwin told PirateIllustrated.com, “We’ve got to get better offensively. We weren’t very good today but they need a day off tomorrow so they can get their legs back under them.”
Aaron McKeithan got Charlotte on the scoreboard first for a 1-0 lead when he grounded into double play with the bases loaded to score a run. It was the first time in a hundred innings against ECU(13-2) that the 49’ers held a lead.
It didn’t take long before ECU answered on Ben Newton’s fourth RBI of the weekend on a base hit to left that scored the Pirates’ first run of the game.
In the third frame, Connor Norby smoked a Matt Brooks offering into the right field jungle for a home run to make it 2-1 ECU. Norby extended his on-base streak to 22 games dating back to 2020 in his twelfth multi-hit game of the season.
Sunday starter Tyler Smith was lifted two outs into the fifth inning for ECU and Matt Bridges(2-0) came on in relief to pick up the win. Smith gave up one run on five hits with four strikeouts. Smith four and two-thirds innings on the mound with four strikeouts and one earned run. Matt Bridges got the save in relief for the Pirates.
“We just tell each other every week that we’re just kind of playing ourselves and if we play our brand of baseball we can compete with anybody in the nation,” said Bridges, “That was kind of our mindset this weekend. Kind of a next man up mentality and just doing what we need to do on the field.”
Bridges talked about his objectives on Sunday and what he was trying to do overall on the mound for the Pirates.
“Today mainly I was just trying to get the ball in the zone and trust my delivery and stuff that Coach Dietrich and A.K.(Austin Knight) and I have been working on,” Bridges told PI, “That’s just the main things. Trusting what we do as a team every day. I was filling up the zone and let my defense work and I tried to do that today and then hand the ball off to Cam and the rest of the bullpen and it’s the next man up and we’re going to execute our plan.”
Matt Brooks(1-1) went six innings on the mound, giving up six hits, three earned runs with eight strikeouts before a succession of relief pitchers came on for Charlotte. Brooks took the loss for 8-5 Charlotte.
The Pirates were at it again in the sixth inning when Josh Moylan solo homered to left field to improved the East Carolina lead to 3-1.
