Nick Mingione raves over resilience of Kentucky after series win over Arkansas

Friday’s series-opener against Arkansas looked a lot like Kentucky’s recent defeats against South Carolina and Tennessee, but the Bat Cats woke up and closed out the weekend strong to make Nick Mingione a very proud coach.

Kentucky was reeling a little bit after consecutive weekend series losses to South Carolina and Tennessee where the pitching allowed darn near 10 runs per game. On Friday, Arkansas cruised to an 10-3 victory and the Wildcats appeared headed towards a similar result as the two prior weeks, this time vs. the No. 2 team in the country.

But no, Kentucky responded by winning 11-3 on Saturday and then 7-4 on Sunday to secure their highest-rated series victory of the season. When reporters asked Mingione after the game about his team’s resiliency following the first game, he thought that was a perfect term to sum up this group.

“Yeah, good word, resilient. A lot of times, I feel like a broken record and I want to be respectful of them and I feel like I almost need to come up with different ways to just describe their overall competitiveness. But I mean, that’s what they do, they compete at the highest level, they have an edge about them and they have a real belief.”

In the Saturday game, even when Kentucky got down, there was no panic and the ‘Cats completely dominated from there.

“I mean, even if you go back to (Saturday’s) game, we go down two, it doesn’t matter, we score 11 unanswered runs against an amazing pitching staff.”

As for Kentucky’s own pitching, well, Mingione had high praise for the job Mason Moore did with his Sunday start limiting the Hogs.

“Our deal starts on the mound and Mason Moore was so much better today. He was fantastic. He made adjustments. He did have a couple walks in a couple innings, but boy, he found his way out of it. I thought Mason got the big double play to end the fourth. I thought that was an awesome job, great turn there in the fifth, he minimized, stayed out of it, and then we got three big outs from Robert Hogan.”

Before closing his remarks, Nick Mingione also made sure to shout out the fans once again, which he’s done after seemingly every home series this season.

“I just want to thank all of our fans. What an atmosphere, huh? I mean, this is awesome. Had a good conversation just even with one of the umpires, you know. It’s just amazing, like, just to see our guys out here. Awesome environment, so thankful for the Big Blue Nation. A good overall win, good overall win all the way around.”