CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The Charlotte 49ers baseball team is back at Hayes Stadium to host Rice this weekend in the penultimate home series of the season.
 
Originally scheduled to start at 6 p.m. on Friday (May 6), the series between the Niners (28-17, 11-10 C-USA) and Owls (13-31, 6-15 C-USA) will now begin at 1 p.m. due to storms forecasted for the area later in the evening. The rest of the series is still on as scheduled, with a 3 p.m. game on Saturday and a 1 p.m. contest on Sunday.
 
SCOUTING THE OWLS
Rice is 13-31 this season with a 6-15 mark in league play. The Owls picked up just their second C-USA series victory this past weekend after taking two of three from WKU. Their only other series victory in conference play came in the second week of C-USA action with a pair of wins at Marshall. Rice leads Conference USA in double plays, turning 35 twin killings so far this season. The Owls also lead the league in hit batters, plunking a total of 17 opponents at the plate this season - the 16th most in the nation. Rice is led by first-year head coach Jose Cruz Jr. - a 2013 graduate of Rice.
 
MIDWEEK RECAP
The Niners were on the road this week on Tuesday at North Carolina and fell in 10 innings, 4-3. All three of the Green and White's runs came on longballs as Will Butcher hit a two-run homer in the second and Cam Fisher launched a solo shot in the sixth. Butcher now has 10 home runs on the season while Fisher hit his team-best 14th dinger.
 
ON THE DOORSTEP OF A RECORD
Colby Bruce made his 16th appearance of the season last Friday, moving his career total up to 100 to become just the second Niner hurler to reach the triple-digit mark. He now sits at 103 after pitching in Tuesday's game, tying him with the late Erik Walker for the most appearances in program history and could break the record in front of the home crowd this weekend.
 
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, Fisher added a pair, and 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 and added two more on Tuesday to bring the season total up to 72 on the year. That's six more than the Niners had in all 61 games a season ago. Charlotte currently averages 1.60 bombs per game, putting them on pace to hit 88 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 17th and 20th 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. McCabe was also named the NCBWA Co-Hitter of the Week last week, becoming the first Niner batter to win a weekly award from the NCBWA and just the second player in program history to do so, joining pitcher Spencer Steedley from the 2007 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 14 home runs are tied for the second-most among players with freshman eligibility in the country and tied for 37th among all players. Only eight freshmen are in the top 117 of all home run hitters this season and among those, only NC State's Tommy White have more than the Niners' right fielder.
 
WE ALL ENJOY LONG WALKS TO FIRST BASE
As a team, the Green and White lead the country in bases on balls with 292 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 31 shy of matching the program record with 10 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 3:32 per nine innings. Seven 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 3:17 and has taken nine minutes off the pre-attack clock average of 3:41.
 
LIMITING THE DAMAGE
CLT has held opponents to five or fewer runs 28 times this season and is 24-4 in those games, doing so in two of the games this weekend and on Tuesday against UNC. The Niners are 8-1 when conceding two or fewer runs and are 16-3 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 44-23 in the first inning, 102-54 over the first two stanzas, and 130-64 in the opening three innings.
 
TUESDAY SUCCESS
Tuesday's loss at North Carolina was the first loss on a Tuesday this season, dropping the Green and White to 8-1 on the second day of the workweek and 9-3 overall in midweek contests.
 
FOLLOW ALONG
Friday's game will be streamed on CUSA.TV, with the remaining two games streaming on ESPN+. All links for each contest can be found online at Charlotte49ers.com.