East Carolina Wins Game Two 7-0 Over Cincinnati On Friday

A big five-run fourth inning catapulted (8)East Carolina past Cincinnati 7-0 on Friday in game two of the AAC weekend series in Greenville.

ECU(20-5/2-0 AAC) got on the scoreboard first with a pair of runs in the second on a Zach Agnos double to left and a Ryder Giles sacrifice bunt later in the inning.

Gavin Williams(3-0) got the start and the victory on the mound for ECU and had another solid outing, giving up just four hits, no runs and delivered 13 strikeouts before Carter Spivey entered in relief.

“He was special and we need him to be special. Their guy was good too. It was a pitcher’s strike zone which Gavin took advantage of,” said Cliff Godwin, “The other guy was keeping it down and just making it hard on our hitters. We just scratched runs across and nothing outstanding, no home runs but just executing some bunts, doing some things and putting some pressure on their defense. That’s what you got to do. You’ve got to grit out wins in the conference and I thought our guys did a really good job of that.”

Williams remained perfect on the season with three victories and that success gives him momentum moving into next week but he is not looking ahead.

“Honestly I feel real good, but you can’t look at your record right now,” said Williams, “You’ve got to be in the present really, so you can’t look forward to anything.”

Left-hander Dean McCarthy(1-2) started on Friday for Cincinnati(11-12/0-2 AAC) and took the loss, giving up six earned runs on seven hits with six strikeouts in 96 pitches. Nick Murray then came on in the seventh for the Bearcats.

Godwin has been preaching to his team to not depend getting started offensively late, but to get off to better starts and the Pirates did that on Friday.

“I feel really good. We won all three phases. We scored five or more runs, we didn’t give up any runs so we gave up three or less and we had one or less errors,” Godwin told PirateIllustrated.com, “When you win all three phases, you’re not going to lose and our guys did a really good job I thought of competing and focusing on what we could control today so I was very happy with our performance today.”

In the fourth inning, Ryley Johnson walked with the bases loaded and Connor Norby reached on a fielding error on third baseman Eric Santiago to score again. Then Thomas Francisco’s laced a hit to right that scored two runs before Seth Caddell’s pop out to left field allowed Norby to score to put ECU up by a touchdown at 7-0.

The Bearcats later managed to load the bases in the seventh frame but came up empty.

The two teams will play a double-header on Saturday to close out the weekend AAC series with the first pitch slated for 1 pm and the second game 45 minutes after the end of the first game.

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