No. 14 Florida State finishes off doubleheader sweep with 8-5 win over Pitt
After getting swept last weekend at Stanford, the Florida State baseball team did some sweeping of its own on Saturday.
The Seminoles finished off a doubleheader sweep of the Pitt Panthers with an 8-5 win in Game 2 to secure another ACC series win. They’ll try to finish off the series sweep on Sunday with Bryson Moore on the mound.
The Game 1 win was a masterful outing by Seminoles ace Wes Mendes. Game 2 wasn’t nearly as drama-free as the 10-1 win in the opener, but it marked yet another victory at home for Florida State, which is now 32-14 overall and 14-9 in the ACC.
Beard might not have been as dominant as Mendes, who became the first FSU pitcher in eight years to throw a nine-inning complete game, but it was mostly an effective outing.
The left-handed starter pitched six innings and five of them were scoreless. But it was the top of the third, with FSU holding a 5-0 lead, that got away from him a bit and gave the Panthers life.
Beard gave up a leadoff homer on the first pitch of the inning. Then, as has been the case recently, kind of let the damage snowball after that. He gave up four more hits in the inning: A double, a single off the screen and a three-run homer to Pitt star Lorenzo Carrier.
From there though, Beard righted himself. He got out of the inning with no further damage and then pitched three scoreless frames after that. Beard finished the outing with eight strikeouts and two walks. He allowed seven hits, but only two outside of the four-run third.
He then gave way to reliever John Abraham, who allowed just one run — a solo homer with one out in the ninth — in three innings of work. He recorded five strikeouts and allowed just two hits as he continued his impressive final season in garnet and gold.
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Offensively, Florida State used some small ball and some long ball to score its runs in Game 2.
The Seminoles scored three in the bottom of the first on an RBI grounder by Nathan Cmeyla that wound up being thrown away by Pitt third baseman Kai Wagner. The error put two in scoring position for Gabe Fraser, who delivered a two-strike single up the middle for a 3-0 lead.
That advantage grew to 5-0 in the bottom of the second when Carter McCulley delivered an RBI single to right and then came around to score later in the frame on a wild pitch.
After Pitt answered back with four of its own in the top of the third, the score remained 5-4 until the bottom of the fifth.
That’s when Florida State’s Hunter Carns and Cmeyla hit back-to-back homers — the first one to left and the second one over the screen in right — to increase the advantage to 7-4.
The Seminoles then made it 8-4 in the bottom of the seventh when Cmeyla drove in another run with an RBI groundout. The senior catcher finished the game with two hits and three RBIs.
Fraser had three hits in the game (and five on the day), and Carns and Brody DeLamielleure each had two hits for the Seminoles, who had 11 in the game against Pitt pitching and 19 on the day overall.
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