UNC’s Walker out of hospital after blindside hit
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Andrea Adelson, ESPN Senior Writer
North Carolina wide receiver Tez Walker has been released from an Atlanta-area hospital, where he was evaluated after taking a blindside hit late in the fourth quarter of a 46-42 loss at Georgia Tech on Saturday night.
The Tar Heels released a statement Sunday morning saying Walker would travel home with the team.
“Tez is doing better, has been released from the hospital, and is flying back to Chapel Hill this morning,” the school said.
Walker made a first-down reception as the Tar Heels were attempting a comeback but was hit without seeing the defender coming and fumbled. He was on the ground for several minutes before eventually walking off with the help of trainers. But as he made his way to the sideline, he appeared unsteady on his feet.
North Carolina coach Mack Brown said during his postgame news conference that Walker was “aware and talking,” and North Carolina later said Walker had been taken to the hospital.
The loss was the second in a row for North Carolina, which opened the season 6-0 with hopes to make it back to the ACC championship game. But the Tar Heels have now blown double-digit leads in both defeats to teams that came into their matchup with losing records.
Against Georgia Tech, the Tar Heels’ defense appeared to revert to the lacking form from last season, particularly early on. Georgia Tech had 635 yards of total offense. In the fourth quarter alone, the Yellow Jackets scored 22 points and had 246 rushing yards. Brown called the defense “awful” in the fourth.
“I’ve never seen anybody just take it and run for 10 yards a crack,” Brown said. “I told the guys I can’t answer what happened right now. I’ll watch it on the plane going home; we’ll adjust. We’ve got to grow up, man up and get ready to play next week.”
What made that fourth-quarter performance even more problematic was the fact that North Carolina had held Georgia Tech scoreless in the first and third quarters.
“I’ve been doing this 35 years,” Brown said. “I’ve never seen two quarters that bad and two quarters that good. I thought we were beyond that on defense.”
Getting off to hot starts then losing has been a knock against North Carolina. Last season, the Tar Heels started out 9-1 before losing four straight to end the season.
“They’re crushed, and I’ve got to pick them up,” Brown said. “Everybody will be down on them. I thought they tried tonight. Started the game 21-7; they checked all the boxes until we didn’t. We’ve got to go back, don’t start pointing fingers, don’t start second-guessing, stay off the Internet, don’t be watching the news and go back to work and get better next week.”
NEW YORK — Jen Pawol was in her hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, when she got the call she had awaited for a decade.
She was going to make her major league debut this weekend, becoming the first woman umpire in a century and a half of big league baseball.
“I was overcome with emotion,” Pawol recalled Thursday, two days before she will break a gender barrier when she works the bases during Miami’s doubleheader at Atlanta. “It was super emotional to finally be living that phone call that I’d been hoping for and working towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full. I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go.”
Her voice quavering with emotion, Pawol talked about getting the news during a Wednesday conference call with director of umpire development Rich Rieker and vice president of umpire operations Matt McKendry.
Pawol thought back to her long road. In the early 1990s at West Milford High School in New Jersey, she had a summer conversation with Lauren Rissmeyer, the third baseman on the school’s softball team.
“‘Do you want to come umpire with me?'” Pawol remembered being asked. “I didn’t think twice about it. Lauren’s doing it, so I’m going to do it.”
Pawol’s pay was $15 per game.
“She took a field and I took a field,” Pawol said. “It was a one-umpire system. I had no idea what I was doing, but I got to put gear on and call balls and strikes, so I was in.”
A 1995 graduate at West Milford, which inducted her into its Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022, Pawol became a three-time all-conference softball selection pick at Hofstra.
After umpiring NCAA softball from 2010 to 2016, she was approached by then-big league ump Ted Barrett at an umpire camp in Binghamton, New York, in early 2015.
“Moreso than any female that I’d seen, she looked like she could handle the rigors of the job physically,” Barrett said Thursday. “But what impressed me was her willingness to learn. She seemed like a sponge, everything that we were teaching her. I’m proud that I made her aware of the opportunity.”
Barrett invited Pawol to attend a clinic in Atlanta and then a MLB tryout camp at Cincinnati that Aug. 15. He invited her to dinner in Atlanta with fellow big league umps Paul Nauert and Marvin Hudson and their wives.
“I warned her: ‘Look, this is what you’re up against. It’s going to be 10 years in the minor leagues before you sniff a big league field,'” Barrett said.
Pawol was among 38 hopefuls invited to the Umpire Training Academy in Vero Beach, Florida, and started her pro umpiring career in the Gulf Coast League on June 24, 2016, working the plate when the GCL Tigers West played at the GCL Blue Jays.
She moved up to the New York/Penn League in 2017, the Midwest League after the first two weeks of the 2018 season, then worked the South Atlantic League in 2019, the High-A Midwest League in 2021, the Double-A Eastern League and the Triple-A International and Pacific Coast Leagues in 2023. She was called in for big league spring training in 2024 and ’25.
“This has been over 1,200 minor league games, countless hours of video review trying to get better, and underneath it all has just been this passion and this love for the game of baseball,” she said. “This started in my playing days as a catcher and transformed over into an umpire, and I think it’s gotten even stronger as an umpire. Umpiring is for me, it’s in my DNA. It’s been a long, hard journey.”
Pawol is among eight women umpires currently in the minors. For her big league debut, she will join Chris Guccione’s crew in Atlanta, where she expects about 30 family and friends. She is to work the bases during Saturday’s doubleheader and call balls and strikes on Sunday.
Pawol was at third base Wednesday night as Jacksonville beat Nashville in the International League when Sounds third baseman Oliver Dunn congratulated her.
“If I make it to the big leagues,” he told her, “we will have both worked all the levels together.”
Pawol repeatedly thanked her minor league umpiring predecessors, mentioning several who exchanged calls or texts, including Christine Wren, Pam Postema and Ria Cortesio. Just after her promotion to Triple-A, Pawol met with Postema in Las Vegas.
“The last thing she said to me when I saw her was ‘Get it done!'” Powal explained. “So I texted her yesterday and said, ‘I’m getting it done!'”
Barrett will be watching from Oregon, where he is attending Northwest League games this weekend.
“The hopes of this are that it inspires,” he said. “Who knows, there’ll be a young lady watching the game on TV and says, ‘Hey, I’d like to try that.'”
PITTSBURGH — It took 47 major league games before Pirates ace Paul Skenes gave up seven hits to an opposing lineup.
Skenes’ record streak of allowing six or fewer hits ended at 46 starts Thursday night in a 7-0 victory over the Cincinnati Reds.
According to OptaStats, the longest such streak to begin a career (excluding openers) previously belonged to Shohei Ohtani, who went 31 starts from 2018 to 2021 for the Los Angeles Angels.
Skenes (7-8) yielded seven hits over six innings Thursday night. He struck out eight and lowered his ERA to 1.94, lowest among qualified pitchers. He extended his scoreless streak at home to 27⅔ innings; he hasn’t allowed a run at PNC Park since June 8 against the Philadelphia Phillies — and that one was unearned.
“His stuff was elite,” Pirates manager Don Kelly said.
Skenes hasn’t permitted an earned run over his past five starts at PNC Park, the longest such stretch for a Pirates pitcher at home since earned runs became an official National League statistic in 1912. Skenes had shared the team record with Bob Harmon (1915) and Zane Smith (1990).
The 23-year-old right-hander is the youngest major league pitcher since 1920 with such a streak.
“Every time he goes out, he’s unbelievable, the way he’s able to attack hitters,” Kelly said.
Skenes has been especially effective against the Reds, with a 4-0 career record and 0.39 ERA to go with 33 strikeouts.
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