Sixth inning the undoing for Ole Miss, Riley Maddox in series-opening loss to No. 1 Arkansas
Two pitches were the difference in the Ole Miss baseball team taking the opening game of the series against No. 1 Arkansas.
That is the finite difference in playing the consensus number one team in the country. The tight rope is even smaller and while Riley Maddox was doing his best balancing act of the season he was short two batter from a masterful performance in the Rebels 5-2 loss to the Razorbacks in Fayetteville on Thursday.
After walking the first two Arkansas hitters in the bottom of the sixth inning, Maddox gave up a three-run home run to shortstop Wehiwa Aloy to give the home team the 4-2 lead. One swing of the bat erased what was Maddox’s best outing of the season, silencing one of the top lineups in the country and allowing only one run up to that point.
It can be argued that Ole Miss head coach Mike Bianco should have had someone at least long tossing in the bullpen and getting a sweat going, but Maddox was on cruise control through the first five innings. Two of his three walks were those in the sixth and he was keeping Arkansas batters frustrated all night with a pair of strikeouts.
But Bianco did go to Josh Mallitz after the Aloy home run but the reliever gave up a solo shot to the first batter he faced — third baseman Jared Sprague-Lott — for the winning margin.
From there the Rebels bullpen was solid, going three innings of shutout baseball after the Sprague-Lott long ball.
“Another way of beating (the other team’s ace) is you got to put up some zeroes on your side and I thought Riley did that through five (innings),” Bianco said postgame. “The pitch count was in the fifties when he ran out there for the sixth. I don’t know if it was the adrenaline, I haven’t really spoken to him since then, but a guy that absolutely fills up the strike zone walks the leadoff guy, two-hole guy. They show you why they’re so good, they get a couple homers after that. Both teams had two good innings offensively, and that’s about it. Obviously, theirs was better than ours.”
A pitcher’s duel it was to start out and Ole Miss was inning the battle against ace Hagen Smith.
The Arkansas left-hander is considered the top pitching prospect for this year’s MLB Draft but the Rebels showed tremendous patience at the plate.
Smith’s pitch count got worked early with over 80 pitches after four innings and Ole Miss (18-13, 3-7 Southeastern Conference) tagged him for a pair of runs in the top of the third. Working the bases full, first baseman Jackson Ross brought the first run of the night in via the walk and then Ethan Groff was a couple feet away from a grand slam but got a SAC-Fly RBI instead.
Those two runs were enough but the Rebels did leave more on the basepaths, stranding nine runners on base. They were 2-for-14 with runners on base and 1-for-6 when they were in scoring position.
Smith exited the game after six innings once Arkansas (25-3, 9-1) claimed the lead and striking out 11 Ole Miss batters. If there is any solace to take in Thursday’s fifth straight loss it is the fact reliever Will McEntire throw 50 pitches and more than likely done for the weekend.
“I thought, offensively, our guys did a good job,” Bianco. “You try to bunch some hits together. You try to bunch some at-bats, some walks an HBP and we did that. It wasn’t pretty but we got an inning where we were able to put a couple runs across. Got (Smith) out after six. Like to have maybe gotten him out an inning sooner but I thought we did about as good a job as you could do, offensively.”
The Ole Miss defense also got a bit of a shakeup as Bianco moved Luke Hill over to second base and Brayden Randle manning shortstop. After sloppy play by the infield in recent weeks the move worked one game in with the middle infield recording a double play and the Rebels kept a clean sheet in the error column.
