It may be an injustice to simplify a series down to one game, but Game Three of No. 5 Georgia’s sweep of No. 4 Mississippi State in Starkville came pretty close to summarizing the weekend contest as a whole.
MSU was there step for step with Georgia, taking a 3-0 lead early and coming back to tie the game 5-5 late after letting the lead slip. In extra innings, a deflating three-run home run sank the Bulldogs, who fell to 25-7, 7-5 in SEC play. It’s the first time they’ve been swept this year, and the first time they’ve been swept at home since falling to Texas at the start of SEC play a year ago.
“You see it all over the place in this league. People get swept and things like that,” MSU head coach Brian O’Connor said. “I talked to the team about taking each game as its own individual game, and I thought Duke Stone went out today and attacked them and was pitching in traffic quite a bit, like he did last week at Ole Miss, and pitched out of it and managed it and did a really nice job. There’s bright spots, but just not enough. I believe we got away from what got us to this point, for whatever reason. We have to own that, stand up as men and acknowledge what happened, and get back on the right track and play winning, Mississippi State baseball.”
Missed Opportunities
The defining characteristic of the series for the home team Bulldogs was the inability to capitalize in important situations offensively. It was well known coming into the series that Georgia’s batting order was prolific and could hit the team out of trouble in a flash, and MSU struggled to keep up.
MSU’s batters left 10, 13 and nine runners on base in the respective contests over the three-game series. Five of those runners in Game Three were left on in the final three innings and extras.
The team looked as though defeat was inevitable at times, expressing frustration with the home plate officiating and struggles with striking out in big moments. One such moment led to Noah Sullivan’s ejection, for which he will also miss the next game through suspension. It’s those signs of frustration and expression that O’Connor felt the need to address when asked about body language after the sweep.
“I talked to them specifically about that, what a winners’ mentality looks like, and we just have to be better from that standpoint,” he said. “We have to grow in that area. We showed some immaturity this weekend and Georgia exposed that. Georgia’s got a really good team, and today we had opportunities again and just couldn’t get that big hit to take the lead.”
One other cause for the team’s fatigue may have been the timing and scheduling of the series. It ran Thursday through Saturday because of Easter, but there was also limited recovery time between Games Two and Three because of incoming weather over the weekend, prompting a 10 a.m. start on Saturday.
Both Games One and Two ran over four hours as well, and saw MSU work through its bullpen because of an ineffective start on the mound on Friday.
“Certainly, when your starter goes out in Game One and only gets through two innings, you use a lot of guys in that game,” O’Connor said. “Our pen was stretched a bit, and credit to them, they exposed that. What we didn’t do, when se saw their pitchers a second time around, we didn’t capitalize on the opportunities.”
Under the Microscope
It was a first opportunity for Georgia to cement itself as a Top 5 team in the country, which the team did on the home turf of the highest-ranked opponent it faced all season. For MSU, the series was an opportunity to shake a reputation that has begun to define the season a bit.
The Bulldogs are 2-7 against Top 10 teams, with wins against Southern Miss and Arkansas and losses against the same, UCLA and now Georgia.
It is not a cause for panic. None of the losses were down to a gap in quality between MSU and the opposition, and every loss was decided by fine margins. On Saturday, Ryder Woodson saw a potential go-ahead homer robbed at the wall in center field, and Ace Reese had a potential walk-off robbed in left center.
“Those guys have been coming through the weekends before, it just didn’t happen this weekend,” Reese said after the series.
Like many of the batters at the top of the order, Reese had his moments but struggled to deliver the knockout blows when the opportunity arose. He owned that, and chalked some of it up to the nature of the game, but maintained a confidence that it was a series the team can learn from and move on from.
“You can’t dwell on it,” he said. “We’re going to take our off day tomorrow and get away from the field, and then get back after it on Monday.”
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