Georgia Baseball claims first series of season with Sunday win

ATHENS, Ga. — Georgia Baseball secured its opening series of the season on Sunday with a 10-5 win over Jacksonville State. After the Bulldogs dropped the Opening Day game on Friday head coach Scott Stricklin was upset. Jaden Woods was supposed to take another step forward in his development moving into the Friday night starter’s role. Instead, Woods was on the bench in the third inning having allowed two home runs, three hits, four runs and walked five batters. In total, Georgia pitchers gave up 12 free passes in an 8-5 loss. While walks and hit batters remained somewhat of an issue handing out six a piece on Saturday and Sunday, Georgia’s bats woke up and responding, showing Stricklin the kind of toughness he asked his team for over the weekend.

“To me, Friday night was extremely disappointing for everybody. I just challenged our players,” Stricklin said. “We’ve got a lot of older guys, and asked, ‘What do you want to do? How do you want to go about your business? What kind of a team do you want to be? If you hang your head and pout and feel sorry for yourself, you’re going to lose again.’ We needed to go out and show some toughness and do the things we need to do and we played much better on Saturday and Sunday. It wasn’t perfect, we’ve got a ways to go, but I liked what I saw the last couple of days.”

Georgia responded to a 3-0 deficit on Saturday, tying the game before the inning was over and taking the lead before too long. Charlie Condon played a big part in that, being hit by a pitch to score the go-ahead run and hitting a double in the eighth inning to plate two and open things up even more. Georgia would go on to win 10-3, evening the series.

Then, in Sunday’s rubber game, Jacksonville State took an early 1-0 lead, but Georgia responded with two runs of its own in the first on a Parks Harber home run, his second of the series. That helped Georgia jump out to a 5-1 lead a third of the way through the game. But Jacksonville State wasn’t done. Tying the game in the fourth, the Bulldogs were once again forced to show some fight, getting out of a jam on the mound and retaking the lead in the bottom half of the inning. Condon singled to center to score Harber, putting UGA up 6-5 on its way to the 10-5 win. Condon would bring in another in the sixth, his sixth RBI of the weekend to tie Harber for the series-high and show Stricklin and company just what Georgia has in the middle of its lineup.

“You’ve got Connor Tate, Parks Harber and Charlie Condon all together. Those are three really physical, strong good hitters with power potential,” Stricklin said. “You’ve got Corey Collins and (Cole) Wagner and all these other guys that can go into this lineup. It can make it really tough on an opposing pitching staff. Having Charlie behind Parks gives Charlie a lot of pitches to hit because they might pitch around Parks a little bit. Charlie, he got some hits, he got some RBIs and I think we all know there’s a lot more in there too. We’re excited about it.”

“We put a lot of pressure on Jacksonville State today” he added. “Every single inning we had a scoring opportunity, and we scored in six out of eight innings. Had a lot of guys on base, had some chances to really break it open just like we did yesterday. I think that’ll come as guys get more comfortable, but we had bases loaded a couple times and hit a sac fly instead of putting a double in the gap. Bottom line, I think we put a lot of pressure on them and their defense today.”

Meanwhile, on the mound, the starters showed some struggle in all three games. That’s not all too shocking for freshman Blake Gillespie who made his collegiate debut on Sunday allowing five runs, but for Woods and Saturday starter Liam Sullivan, a pair of juniors, Stricklin has higher hopes.

“I think it’s about focusing in on filling up the strike zone, being able to throw that off-speed pitch,” Stricklin said, speaking about the focus for the upcoming week with his two starters. “Liam’s more of a three-pitch guy and Jaden’s more of a two-pitch guy. He’ll throw the changeup from time to time, but just being able to land that off-speed pitch to get people off your fastball. They’re both going to have bullpens this week, they’ll be in the weight room, they’ll do their conditioning and just need to get their minds right. Hopefully this weekend ticks them off a little bit. That’s kind of the point. How do you bounce back when things don’t go your way? Looking forward to those guys getting back on the mound.”

“They just got really aggressive in the fourth inning, swinging at first pitches and got some fastballs up in the zone. He didn’t throw the breaking ball for a strike. We were able to get him out of there, but I thought the second and third innings looked really good,” he added on Gillespie’s outing. “He’s got a chance to be really, really good for us. Excited he got that under his belt. It wasn’t perfect. It’s never going to be perfect, but we stepped up and found a way to win a series.”

Good news for Georgia and its pitcher though, they’ll get a week of work in before their next outings this coming weekend. Also, the bullpen rose to the occasion and only allowed three runs all weekend – all three of which came in the loss on Friday. Freshman Leighton Finley threw 3.0 innings on Saturday allowing just one hit. He faced 10 batters in his 40 pitches. Kolten Smith and Pace Mercer helped Georgia close out the Saturday win while Nolan Crisp provided a huge presence out of the pen on Sunday, throwing 3.1 innings with five strikeouts both of which are highs for him at Georgia in relief. It was Crisp’s first appearance since a tricep injury cut his 2022 campaign short.

“Nolan was penciled in to be the Sunday starter all along, but to be quite honest, he didn’t pitch very well in January and early February, and we made the decision to go with Blake, and Nolan was really good about it,” Stricklin said. “He handled it well, but he wasn’t happy. I didn’t want him to be happy. I didn’t expect him to be happy. I think what you saw from him today was a little chip on his shoulder. That’s exactly what I hoped to see. He won that game for us.” 

Next up for Georgia is Ivy League Princeton coming to town this coming weekend. The Bulldogs and Tigers will play four games in three days with a doubleheader set for Saturday. Then it’s a midweek contest the following Tuesday meaning that the week of rest will be big for Georgia before five games in five days early in the season.