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Tinney, Notre Dame baseball rise to the occasion to take Miami series

The Notre Dame baseball team put a Friday night meltdown behind it and asserted itself right back into the NCAA Tournament discussion with a thunderous performance in its regular-season finale.

The Irish (32-20, 14-16 ACC) roll into a Tuesday night first-round ACC Tournament matchup having finished its regular season with 16 wins in their final 19 regular-season games, punctuated with a 12-2 throttling of Miami on Saturday afternoon in Coral Gables, Fla.

To get on the right side of the NCAA bubble, Notre Dame probably has to minimally win a couple of games in the 16-team, single-elimination league tourney in Durham, N.C., that runs Tuesday through next Sunday, May 25.

Taking two of three on the road at Miami, with a 15-1 clunker sandwiched between two Irish victories, made Notre Dame the 11 seed in the ACC Tournament, and the Irish will play the 14 seed, either Stanford or Boston College, at 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday.

The top four seeds in the ACC receive double-byes into the quarterfinals. The 5-8 seeds get to sit out round 1. Should ND win Tuesday night, they’d play Wednesday night at 9 against the No. 6 seed, which still was up in the air at game’s end.

Ideally, the Irish would like to bottle up all of what they did on a scorching Saturday afternoon in Coral Gables, Fla.

Sophomore catcher Carson Tinney broke a 2-2 tie in the top of the sixth with a solo home run, his 16th of the season, then was part of the dogpiling the Irish did in the later innings with a three-run shot to give ND an 11-2 command in a five-run eighth.

Estevan Moreno’s two-out, three-run home run later in the sixth after Tinney’s first dinger gave ND some breathing room with a 6-2 edge.

Davis Johnson, Parker Brzustewicz, Nick DeMarco and Brady Gumpf each drove in a run apiece for the Irish, who took advantage of 10 free passes — seven walks and three hit batsmen — from seven Miami pitchers.

Brzustewicz reached base four times, with two hits and two walks. Connor Hincks doubled and scored. Tinney, meanwhile, finished 3-for-4 and reached base a fourth time after being plucked by a pitch. He scored three runs.

With 17 home runs this season, only five players in Notre Dame history have hit more homers in a single season than Tinney. Niko Kavadas, currently with the Los Angeles Angels’ organization at Triple-A Salt Lake, holds the school record with 22 in 2021.

Senior right-hander Ricky Reeth (4-2) got the win on the mound with 2 ⅓ innings of shutout relief. Grad senior Jackson Dennies continues to pitch well in the late season, lasting 4 ⅔ in a starting role. Freshman Oisin Lee finished up with two innings of hitless relief.

NOTRE DAME 12, MIAMI 2: Box Score

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