(8)East Carolina continued its winning ways with a 5-3 game two win over Memphis to sweep the Friday AAC double-header to move their win streak to seven.
With the victory the Pirates remained perfect at 6-0 in American Athletic Conference play and move to 20-1 at home.
“I thought we did a really good job in game one. We played really good. We pitched well. I didn’t think Gavin had his best stuff but he was able to maneuver though it,” Cliff Godwin said afterward, “I thought Saylor and Kimmel did a good job. We strung a ton of quality at-bats together and played really good defense.”
“Game two was much different. Memphis is not bad. They’re competing. They’re winning pitches at the plate. They’re not a bad team,” said Godwin, “Once we had that little lightning delay I though our position players were dead. Some of them have aspirations to play major league baseball. There’s a lot of games like the Yankees against the Orioles where they had an extra inning night game and had an early start the next day so we’ve got to be able to figure out ways to continue to play positionally.”
Godwin had words of high praise for the work of his bullpen on Friday in game two.
“I thought our pitching was outstanding out of the bullpen in game two with Bridges, Cam Colmore, Mayhue. We had to go to all three of those guys to secure the second game and I thought our guys were awesome.”
Keeping the streak alive and remaining level headed as a team will be at a premium in order to get the most out of the remainder of the weekend series against Memphis.
“It’s not easy. It’s stressful because to make 18 to 23 year olds believe that anybody can beat you on any given day is hard,” Godwin stated, “When you win games in all different ways, they think well hey if we’ve only got a two-run lead then the bullpen will take care of it, but we’ve got to continue to add on offensively and I’m we won but we’ll need to play better in game three tomorrow.”
Matt Bridges moved to 3-0 with the win for ECU while Blake Wimberly falls to 2-4 with the defeat.
Bryson Worrell’s second home run of the day in the second inning was good for three runs and got East Carolina off to a solid start in game two on Friday in a 4-0 contest.
“It felt really good. We’ve really been putting in the work in practice. I haven’t really been hitting the ball all that well but a lot of guys in the lineup have been picking me up like Norby, Franny, A-Mac has been hitting the ball well so a lot of guys have been really picking me up,” said Worrell who had words of wisdom about what this ECU team has to do to remain successful for the remainder of the weekend.
“I don’t think we have to do anything differently,” Worrell told PirateIllustrated.com, “We’ve been playing well and as long as we go out there and play our game then the rest should take care of itself.”
A wild pitch and an error on Seth Caddell resulted in a Memphis run to get the Tigers on the scoreboard.
Then Zach Wilson’s three-run home run to right in the top of the fifth inning cut the Pirate lead to 4-3.
Cam Colmore put out a potential fire in the seventh when he got the Tigers out after they got a man on second base with no outs.
In the bottom of the seventh, Ryder Giles smacked his second career home run off of Memphis reliever Takota Metoxen that went off the glove of Zach Wilson at the wall in right center to give the Pirates a 5-3 lead.
C.J Mayhue came on at the end to shut Memphis down to pick up his sixth save of the season and ECU improved to 24-5.
ECU(23-5/5-0 AAC) had little difficulty defeating Memphis in game one of the Friday double-header by a score of 12-2.
Three runs in the third inning and five more in the fifth sparked by Bryson Worrell’s RBI double and a Connor Norby three-run homer put the Pirates in the driver’s seat.
Worrell added a two-run home run to left in the bottom of the seventh in the win.
“I think we just had a good approach and we just stuck to it,” said Worrell, “When you have an offense like that, you really feed off of each other and when you have a lot of good at-bats together you just keep it going.”
Gavin Williams(4-0) threw nine strikeouts in his five innings of work and just one earned run to remain perfect on the year with his fourth victory.
Memphis dropped to 11-16 and 1-4 in AAC play as starting pitcher Jackson Cothren 1-4) absorbed the game one loss for the Tigers.
Cothren went four and a third innings, giving up ten hits, eight runs, five of which were earned with four strikeouts.
