Georgia falls in first round of SEC Baseball Tournament
It would appear the 2023 Georgia baseball season came to a close on Tuesday morning. The Bulldogs fell 9-0 to South Carolina in the first round of the SEC Baseball Tournament in Hoover, Ala.
With a 29-27 record and just 11 wins against conference competition, Georgia is far from likely to hear its name called on Monday when the NCAA Tournament field of 64 gets announced.
Jaden Woods made his first start in over five weeks, returning from bicep tendinitis that has bothered him as of late. Woods was clean in the first inning before being pulled in the second, throwing 31 pitches while facing eight batters.
Woods was replaced by Dalton Rhadans who also threw 31 pitches in his 1.2 innings. However, he was unable to escape the jam he inherited and allowed a pair of South Carolina runs to score in the second.
The Gamecocks kept going. In the fourth, they scored three, doing so off of Luke Wagner and Nolan Crisp. Two straight 1-2-3 innings for Crips though allowed him to extend his outing into the seventh before South Carolina scored once more with a two-out, bases-loaded triple that plated a trio. That made it 8-0.
Zach DeVito and Will Pearson threw the eighth and final inning letting one more run score, but the Bulldogs were able to avoid the run rule coming into play.
It’s just the second time all season Georgia was shut out, the only other time coming on the road in April against Vanderbilt. In fact, just three Bulldog batters managed to get a hit.
Parks Harber and Mason LaPlante each had one a piece while Sebastian Murillo managed to go 3-for-3. Harber and Murillo also drew walks, as did Cole Wagner, the only Georgia players to reach base against South Carolina’s combination of James Hicks and Cade Austin.
“It was certainly a disappointing year. We just didn’t finish the games. When you look at our body of work, we had a lot of opportunities to finish off some games, and in this conference, you have to slam the door and get those three last outs in the 9th inning or the 10th inning or the 11th inning, whatever inning we were in,” Georgia head coach Scott Stricklin said. “That was where we struggled. We struggled late. But like Nolan (Crisp) said, I thought our kids fought really hard. They never quit. They competed every single day. They did everything we asked them to do.”
“You know what, when you look at it on paper, we had a bad year. That’s the way I look at it. This program has a lot of expectations, and it has a lot of pride, and I didn’t feel like we performed up to our expectations,” he added. “That’s on me as the head coach. That’s my responsibility. I take a lot of pride in trying to uphold that expectation here at Georgia, and this year we came up short.”
