OMAHA, Neb. — Omaha is courage. Omaha is pain. A windswept Tuesday in the Men’s College World Series featured both, as Florida State survived and North Carolina didn’t, which is a recurring crossroads here in June. To understand such a moment and its emotions 180 degrees apart, here is a tale of two players.
The winner is an unlikely hero, the loser a superstar of college baseball, who had finally run out of time.
We come to you from Charles Schwab Field where …. grunt! . . . the Seminoles defeated the Tar Heels 9-5 . . . grunt! . . . in an elimination game . . . grunt! Don’t mind the loud noises coming from the TV. That’s just Andrew Armstrong pitching for Florida State. It was gusting to 38 miles per hour when the game began with a storm front blowing in but it was still easy to hear whenever Armstrong delivered his next fastball because every pitch came with a grunt!
He began Tuesday with a 6.98 earned run average. He hadn’t thrown a pitch in a game in more than three weeks and back then he had given up three runs to Wake Forest 1.2 innings. “There’s a reason I wasn’t pitching. I’ve been struggling,” he said. “It was kind of hard, more of a mental battle than a physical battle. These guys have been telling me my time’s going to come. It was awesome when it finally did.”
He was out there at the start and things were going fine, but why was he wincing? And why did his fastball suddenly lose a big gob of velocity? An old oblique had popped up near his ribs. It wasn’t his arm at least, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t pain. “It was hurting pretty bad,” he said later. “Everybody’s kind of going through something at this point of the year. Pitchers, hitters, something’s bugging them. Nobody feels 100 percent. Those guys have been picking up for me all year when I’ve been struggling so it felt good to be able to do that for them.”
Noticing the expressions of discomfort and the drop in velocity, coach Link Jarrett was out to the mound in a hurry in the second inning.
“You have to tell me. You’ve earned the right,” he said to his pitcher. “If you think you can figure this out and settle in, then you can do it. But if you can’t we have a responsibility to everybody else involved in this to get somebody else in the game.”
Armstrong wasn’t about to leave the mound if it was up to him. “He wasn’t really loving the idea,” he said later of Jarrett, “but I told him to let me throw a couple more warmup pitches and it’ll feel better.”
Later, Jarrett described the dilemma of a team in the loser’s bracket with absolutely no margin for error.
“Tough dude that had waited a long time,” he said of Armstrong. “You wait your whole baseball life for this moment. So when we saw an 83 (mph fastball) flash on the board and it goes from 91 to 83 and I saw him with the little wince, I was worried.
“You’re walking a fine line and clearly he was able to manage it. Maybe it kept him from trying to do too much. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. He earned the chance to be out there and deliver.”
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For a team badly in need of effective innings, Armstrong was able to get his team into the fifth with a 4-3 lead. Not lights out, but it did the job, accomplished with sheer will and changing speeds since his ribs were tapping on the brakes of his fastball. “I was just trying to throw strikes and get ahead with the way the wind is blowing in today,” he said. “Sometimes that's all have you to do.” The bullpen could take it from there. Armstrong had come from inactive frustration to a moment in the sun – and the wind – at the MCWS. Even if every pitch was accompanied by the same sound effect.
Tennis star Maria Sharapova, once infamous globally for her grunts, didn’t make that much racket on her forehand.
Jarrett didn’t hear them with the crowd noise but said afterward “if the grunts got him through it then he can grunt every time he pitches from now on.” But what about the fact those noises reflected a pitcher willing to hurt every time he threw the baseball? “Then he’s way tougher than I even give him credit for.”
There was pain on the other side, too, but not from muscles. The centerfielder sat on a bench in the North Carolina dugout, staring straight ahead with glistening eyes. They call the College World Series the "Greatest Show on Dirt," and he certainly had a lot of that on his No. 7 jersey. It had been a hot and heartbreaking day for Vance Honeycutt.
“Just soaking in the last minutes with this group, still wearing the uniform,” he said later of those hard moments. “I’ve been doing this with these guys since August. For it to come to an end, you don’t want that.”
His bat has been as feared as anyone’s the past three weeks as he led the Tar Heels on a magical surge. He had six home runs in the NCAA tournament, and twice delivered walk-off wins to North Carolina. He had been responsible for 38.6 percent of all Tar Heel runs in the tournament. On this very day he had gone 3-for-5, homered and driven in three runs. Between his power and his speed and his defense, he was undeniably one of the faces of college baseball, and Omaha 2024. But it was over.
Tuesday was his 176th game for North Carolina. There would be no 177th. The draft is next for this native son of North Carolina and son of a father who once played here for the Tar Heels himself. The future is exciting, but not on this darkening Tuesday afternoon as the storm clouds rolled into eastern Nebraska. It was not just his skills that Vance Honeycutt had invested all this time in North Carolina’s program, it was his heart.
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So he sat there a long time afterward, while the winners from Florida State were gathered in celebration on the other side of the field. He said nothing, showed no expression. Just . . . . gazed straight ahead. Finally, he got up to hug a long line of teammates and coaches, picked up his gear and made the last walk up the ramp to the clubhouse. Coach Scott Forbes had come by, enduring the poignant five minutes that nearly all coaches eventually must after a season ends – shaking the hands of his players, some of who had just played their last game for him.
One team dogpiles in Omaha. For everyone else, there are such painful goodbyes.
“It's hard because I just care about the guys. I hate to see them hurting,” Forbes said. “I've been in their shoes. It was only a Division III World Series, but to me that was a big deal. But there's also so much joy,, If you're going to have to shed some tears, you would rather share them in Omaha than share them somewhere else.”
Later Forbes would try to quantify what Honeycutt had meant to his program.
“He is the definition of a leader. He has integrity, he works, he puts winning first. He's also just a kid, and he plays like that and he plays free and easy. I'm going to miss not just watching him play but I'm going to miss seeing him every single day. But, man, he's something else, isn't he? He was one of the best I've ever coached.”
Before Honeycutt left Charles Schwab Field, he pondered a final question. What would he remember most about this special month, his individual feats or the fact the Tar Heels came up just short?
“I don’t think it’ll be either. I won’t remember the success, the failure, anything like that. I’ll remember this with these guys, the moments shared, the experiences shared. I won’t remember the individual stuff. You won’t remember your best series, you won’t remember your worst, you’ll remember the journey you went on together.”
The All-American with tears in his eyes was going home. The little-known pitcher who had worked to the sounds of his own painful grunts was staying. Just another day in Omaha in June.
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