CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The Charlotte 49ers baseball team returns to North Carolina for a midweek road contest at UNC on Tuesday (May 3).
 
First pitch is scheduled for 7 p.m. and fans will be able to catch the Niners (28-16, 11-10 C-USA) and Tar Heels (24-17, 8-13 ACC) on ACC Network
 
SCOUTING THE TAR HEELS
North Carolina is 24-17 this season with an 8-13 mark in ACC play. The Tar Heels were not in action this past weekend due to finals, last playing on April 27 in an 8-1 win over Liberty after being swept at No. 11 Virginia the weekend before. UNC has already played six common opponents with the Niners, with wins over Campbell, App State, Coastal Carolina (three-game weekend series sweep), Winthrop, and Longwood, but lost to North Carolina A&T. The Tar Heels have turned the most double plays in the ACC with 36 of them, putting them 24th in the country. UNC is also ranked inside the top-50 in shutouts with three, and in strikeouts per nine innings with a rate of 9.8 to sit 44th in the nation but eighth in the ACC.
 
LAST WEEKEND SERIES
Charlotte made it back-to-back weekend sweeps with a trio of victories up in West Virginia against Marshall. The Niners took the first game 11-4 before walloping the Thundering Herd 25-4 in CLT's second 20-run game of the season. The series finale was much closer and was tied as late as the seventh inning before Charlotte prevailed, 14-12.
 
HANGING 50
The Niners scored a total of 50 runs in the three-game series against Marshall for the most number of runs scored in any three-game series in program history. The previous record of 49 was set earlier this season against Western Illinois, which had one game end after seven innings. The most number of runs the Green and White have scored in any series was 61 in a four-game set with Coppin State to start the 2011 season.
 
HOME RUN HEROICS
Charlotte broke a 37-year-old program record in the middle game of the weekend with eight home runs as a team. David McCabe launched three of them, Cam Fisher added a pair, and Will Butcher, Jack Dragum, and Josh Madole each left the yard once for the most home runs in a single game, surpassing the previous benchmark of seven from the 1985 season.
 
LOVING THE LONG BALL
CLT hit a total of 11 home runs over the weekend to bring the season total up to an even 70 on the year. That's four more than the Niners had in all 61 games a season ago. Charlotte currently averages 1.59 bombs per game, putting them on pace to hit 87 by the time the conference tournament rolls around - which would be the third-most in team history and most since hitting 95 in 1998. The Niners are currently second in the conference in both total home runs and home runs per game and are 19th and 22nd in the nation, respectively.
 
THREE: IT'S A MAGIC NUMBER
McCabe's three home runs in the game to help set the team record equaled an individual record as well, matching the most home runs a Niner has had in a single game in team history. The Canadian became the sixth player in CLT's baseball history to accomplish the feat and the first since Zach Jarrett hit three against UTSA on April 29, 2017, nearly five years prior, to the day.
 
PLAYING ALL THE HITS
McCabe ended the week with at least two hits in all five games and totaled 12 in 22 at bats for a .545 batting average. He hit six home runs in the five games and brought home 18 runs in all and was rewarded with Conference USA's Hitter of the Week award, joining Matt Brooks and Cameron Hansen as weekly award winners from C-USA this year after Brooks and Hansen took home Pitcher of the Week honors earlier in the season.
 
MORE INDIVIDUAL RECORDS
McCabe wasn't the only Niner to tie an individual single-game record on Saturday as Fisher matched the most RBIs any Charlotte player has recorded in a game. Both of his home runs were grand slams with the bases loaded for eight RBIs in the contest. Coincidentally, Fisher was also the sixth Niner to accomplish this feat and was the first since Corey Shaylor against Missouri on Feb. 27, 2011.
 
A GRAND OLE TIME
Fisher's two grand slams bring Charlotte's total up to seven as a team this season. Butcher leads the way with three of them, followed by Fisher's two, while Dragum and Jake Cunningham each have one.
 
FRESH FISH GUARANTEED
Fisher's 13 home runs are tied for the third-most among players with freshman eligibility in the country and tied for 52nd among all players. Only eight freshmen are in the top 110 of all home run hitters this season and among those, only NC State's Tommy White and Mississippi State's Hunter Hines have more than the Niners' right fielder.
 
A MILESTONE APPEARANCE; RECORD IN SIGHT
Colby Bruce made his 16th appearance of the season on Friday, moving his career total up to 100 to become just the second Niner hurler to reach the triple-digit mark, and now sits at 102 after pitching in Sunday's game. He moved into second place on Charlotte's all-time appearances leaderboard earlier this season and he's now only one appearance away from matching the late Eric Walker's record of 103 career appearances.
 
WE ALL ENJOY LONG WALKS TO FIRST BASE
As a team, the Green and White lead the country in bases on balls with 289 this season. Charlotte drew double-digit walks in all three games this weekend to bring the season total up to 11 times this year - something the Niners didn't do a single time in 2021. Charlotte's program record for walks in a season is 323 in 1998, putting the Niners 34 shy of matching the program record with 11 games left to go in the regular season.
 
STRIKEOUTS ON STRIKEOUTS
The Niners' pitching staff tallied 10 strikeouts on Friday to hit double digits for the 20th time this season. Charlotte averages 9.2 strikeouts per nine innings to be one of six C-USA programs averaging over a strikeout per frame in a regulation game. CLT tallied a season-high 16 strikeouts against Winthrop on April 6 for the most in a single game since striking out 17 at FIU last season.
 
TAKING OUR TIME…
The Niners are quite methodical during the course of the game, averaging a game time of 3:31 per nine innings. Five games have reached the four-hour mark, including a 5:41 game against App State that holds the record as the longest game in program history in terms of time elapsed from first pitch to final out.
 
…BUT SPEEDING IT UP
That trend has changed over the past three weeks as the team has introduced an eight-minute 'attack clock'. Charlotte has a timer in the dugout that begins counting down from eight minutes when the pitcher begins his warmup, with the goal being to get out of the inning and off the field before the clock runs out. Since introducing the clock before the Southern Miss series, the Green and White's game time per nine innings is down to 3:14 and has taken 10 minutes off the pre-attack clock average of 3:41.
 
LIMITING THE DAMAGE
CLT has held opponents to five or fewer runs 27 times this season and is 24-3 in those games, doing so in two of the games this weekend. The Niners are 8-1 when conceding two or fewer runs and are 16-2 when the other team scores between three and five times.
 
WORKING WITH A LEAD
Charlotte has only scored first 20 times in the 44 games this season but is 17-3 when getting on the board before its opponent. Additionally, the Green and White are also 14-3 when they score their first run of the game in the opening frame and have outscored their opponents 44-22 in the first inning, 100-53 over the first two stanzas, and 128-62 in the opening three innings.
 
FOLLOW ALONG
Tuesday's game will be aired on ACC Network but can also be streamed through the ESPN app with a valid cable login. There will also be a free Charlotte radio stream as well. All links for each contest can be found online at Charlotte49ers.com.