UPDATE: Ohio will now play doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday, as rain has moved all Friday games to later in the weekend.
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This weekend, a snowstorm won’t keep the Ohio baseball team out of North Carolina.
The Bobcats will head south to play four games, with two contests each against Liberty and UNC-Wilmington at Brooks Field in Wilmington, N.C. as a part of the “Battle at the Beach.”
Last weekend, Ohio was scheduled to play in the Tar Heel state, but weather cancelled the series, causing coaches to scramble to find a team to play and a facility on college baseball’s opening weekend.
At 1 p.m. last Friday, coach Rob Smith managed to fill the open void in the schedule with a Sunday doubleheader against Murray State in Columbia, Tenn.
“We secured a field at Columbia State College in Tennessee,” Smith said. “And then we were looking for an opponent. We had been talking to a couple of other schools earlier (on Friday), mostly non-Division I schools. But then Murray State, with their situation, popped up.”
The Bobcats split the doubleheader against the Racers, winning the first game 7-6 and dropping the second game with the same score.
Ohio was led by freshman outfielder Mitch Longo, who finished the weekend six for seven with five runs batted in.
Longo said after the cancellations that he and his teammates were eager to finally hit the diamond.
“Guys were chomping at the bit,” Longo said. “We had a lot of energy throughout the entire day, which was great. We never gave up and battled the entire day, and a lot of that comes from being locked up in the gym.”
This weekend’s set of games has met no such delays. The Bobcats will have a large task at hand, facing two teams that made an appearance in NCAA Tournament regionals last season.
The first two games of the series are against a Liberty team that won the Big South Tournament for the first time since 2000 to earn a bid in an NCAA regional, winning two games against Clemson before being eliminated by South Carolina in the regional final.
Liberty’s season has started out slowly, losing three of its first four games with each of its losses coming to non-tournament teams.
But the Flames were picked to win the Big South’s North Division and have the conference’s second best Major League Baseball prospect in pitcher/outfielder Ashton Perritt, according to Baseball America.
Perritt appeared in 40 games last season and batted a team-high .343 last season with a .387 on-base percentage and a .512 slugging percentage.
The junior also appeared in 22 games on the mound, sporting a team-low 2.09 earned run average, a .199 batting average against and 8.71 strikeouts per nine innings.
In the second set of games, Ohio will face a UNC-Wilmington squad that managed to win one game in their NCAA regional last season against Army before being eliminated by Elon.
This season, the Seahawks have dropped games to perennial powers No. 4 Virginia and No. 30 Kentucky, with their lone win coming against Virginia Military Institute.
Baseball America rates UNC-Wilmington pitchers Jordan Ramsey, Christian MacDonald and Evan Phillips as the No. 1, No. 7 and No. 8 ranked prospects in the Colonial Athletic Association, respectively.
Ramsey and MacDonald, along with 2013 CAA pitcher of the year Mat Batts make up one of the stronger rotations the Bobcats will face next season, holding opponents to a .244 batting average last season.
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