Clemson’s pitching couldn’t get an out without a fight Sunday, and North Carolina made them pay over and over. The Tar Heels had at least one runner on base in every inning, scored in six of them, and ran the Tigers through seven pitchers on the way to a 12-5 win at Doug Kingsmore Stadium.
That drops Clemson to 5-10 in ACC play. UNC takes the series 2-1 after the Tigers grabbed Friday’s opener 9-5 behind Jackson Moore’s four-RBI night.
UNC (30-6-1, 13-5 ACC) did it without even being that clutch. They went 6-for-23 with runners in scoring position. Left 17 on base. Still scored a dozen. The math wasn’t elegant, but when you’re piling up eight walks and six hit-by-pitches on top of 16 hits, you don’t need clean at-bats. You need traffic.
Titsworth wore the loss. Three innings, six hits, four earned, and he was out in the fourth with two on and nobody down. The damage was already real by then.
Start there. Jake Schaffner singled to open the game, swiped second, and Gavin Gallaher pulled the next pitch over the left-center wall. 2-0 before the first out. Titsworth somehow held it together through the next two innings, even after UNC loaded the bases with nobody out in the third (Erik Paulsen single, Owen Hull single, Tyler Howe plunked). Three runners, zero runs. He stranded every one.
But the Heels weren’t going away.
The fourth was where the floor gave out. Jadyn Nunez and Schaffner got back-to-back singles to start it, and Titsworth was done. Reliever Allen took the ball, coaxed a Gallaher fly out, then hit Paulsen to reload. Macon Winslow lined a single to left. Nunez scored. Schaffner scored on the left fielder’s error. Then Hull finished the sequence with a three-run homer down the right-field line. 7-1, seven batters into Allen’s outing. He had one out to show for it.
Hull, frankly, was the entire problem.
Five hits, six at-bats, five RBI. He went through four Clemson pitchers and didn’t care which. Single in Winslow in the fifth. Double in the seventh to set up Howe’s run. Single in Gallaher in the eighth for number 12. Whenever the Heels needed something, Hull gave it to them.
Clemson did rally. Once. The sixth got interesting fast: Bryce Clavon tripled to right to plate two, Nate Savoie punched a single through with a left field error tacked on, and suddenly it was 10-5. Kingsmore got loud. Then Jack Crighton grounded out, and Howe doubled Hull in during the top of the seventh to make it 11-5 again.
The bottom of the seventh had one more opening. Luke Gaffney walked. Tyler Lichtenberger singled. Jason Fultz got plunked. Bases loaded, one out, still down six. Jay Dillard struck out swinging, and the inning was over. Three runners left standing.
“We started to gain some momentum, but not scoring in the seventh with the bases loaded seemed to put a damper in that significantly,” Clemson head coach Erik Bakich said. “Once we got into a deficit, we needed to cash in on every opportunity that we got.”
They didn’t get another one.
The bullpen line reads rough. Seven pitchers, 16 hits, 12 runs, eight walks. Fowler got through two-thirds of an inning without trouble. Frusco worked a clean ninth. Everyone in between gave something back. Miller? Two runs in two-thirds. Simpson walked two batters in a third of an inning before getting pulled for Samol. Bennett gave up Hull’s eighth-inning single.
Bakich wasn’t inclined to spin it.
“It doesn’t matter who you play, you can’t pitch like that,” he said. “They had 30 base runners, eight walks, six hit by pitches, and 16 hits or something. So we certainly didn’t pitch to the level we needed to in order to come out today and have any success.”
And the issue wasn’t that UNC hit everything they saw. It’s that Clemson couldn’t close an inning cleanly. Not one. The Heels stranded 17 runners on the bases and still dropped 12. Bases loaded in the third with no score. Three walks to open the sixth turned into one run on a fielder’s choice. A HBP and a single in the ninth went nowhere. UNC wasted plenty. Still put up 12.
When that kind of traffic shows up every frame, you don’t need clean at-bats. You need the other side to keep making mistakes, and the Tigers did.
Boaz took the win. Five innings, three earned, seven hits. The kind of start that doesn’t have to be pretty when your offense is banging out 16. McDuffie followed with three zeros.
Clemson sits at 23-14. Saturday’s loss in 14 innings was the kind you live with. Sunday was not. The ACC has been a different animal, and Sunday laid that out in detail. Until the staff finds a way to string some clean innings together, afternoons like this one keep happening.
The Tigers head to Charlotte on Tuesday for a 6:05 p.m. first pitch at Truist Field.
