Special to Gatorsports.com
STARKVILLE, Miss. — On a night when No. 1 Florida still clinched an outright SEC regular-season baseball title, the Gators had their string of 15 straight SEC series wins come to an end Friday night at Mississippi State.
The Bulldogs jumped on Florida freshman righty starter Jack Leftwich early and didn’t let up in a 12-4 win over the Gators at Dudy Noble Field.
Florida (41-14, 20-9 SEC) suffered its third straight loss and its first series loss against an SEC opponent since losing two of three at home to Tennessee from April 7-9, 2017.
Leftwich was a last-minute replacement for Florida junior righty ace Brady Singer, who was scratched from his start for precautionary reasons after feeling a twinge in his hamstring while warming up. Senior catcher and team captain JJ Schwarz also left the game in the seventh inning after taking a foul ball off his right hand. Schwarz wasn’t wearing a brace on his hand when he left the field on Friday, but there was no immediate word on the severity of the injury.
“Unfortunately he got hit on a foul tip behind the plate,” UF coach Kevin O’Sullivan said of Schwarz. “He was going to come out the next inning anyways. It looks like a bruise, so we probably dodged a bullet there.”
Despite the loss, Florida clinched the outright SEC title when Georgia beat Arkansas 8-7 in 10 innings earlier Friday evening. Entering the final series of the season, the Gators needed just one win or one Arkansas loss to take the title outright.
“At the end of the game, basically what I told the team is this: we’ve won 19-straight series,” O’Sullivan said. “We won the SEC outright today. We can’t let one series affect how we play. We’ve just gotten beat.
“We’ve got to stick together, no finger pointing or any of those types of things. We just got beat. We’ve been extremely successful here for a long time. We’ve got to keep our heads together and go out and play a clean game tomorrow.”
Mississippi State (30-24, 14-15 SEC) rallied against Leftwich early, jumping ahead 2-0 on a two-RBI single by Hunter Stovall that went off Leftwich’s glove and into right field. The Gators rallied to tie the score 2-2 on a sac fly by sophomore left fielder Austin Langworthy and and an RBI double from junior second baseman Blake Reese.
But Mississippi State answered in the second inning, scoring two more runs with two outs to go up 4-2. Jake Magnum put Mississippi State up 3-2 on an RBI double that wasn’t cleanly fielded by right fielder Wil Dalton, which allowed the run to score from first base on the play. Magnum then scored from second base on an error when UF first baseman Brady Smith dropped a throw from Reese and let the ball trickle away from him into foul territory.
It didn’t get any better for Leftwich in the third inning. Shortstop Luke Alexander added a two-RBI single to put the Bulldogs up 6-2. Leftwich (4-4) took the loss, allowing six runs (five earned) on eight hits in three innings, with no walks and seven strikeouts.
“The thing with Jack, if he can figure it out, to finish hitters and locate his pitches down in the zone a little bit better,” O’Sullivan said. “He’s been making mistakes with two strikes. He just needs to finish innings, and that’s been a recurring thing for him going back to the fall. But if he can learn to finish hitters and finish innings I think he’s going to take a huge jump forward. It’s not his stuff; his stuff was really good tonight.”
Langworthy cut Mississippi’s State lead to 6-3 in the top of the fourth inning with his second homer in as many days and his second homer of the season.
But Mississippi State tagged UF sophomore lefty reliever Andrew Baker for six runs over the next two innings to put the game out of reach. A three-run homer by Tanner Allen off Baker in the fifth inning put the Bulldogs up 12-3.
“My job is to know our personnel going into the postseason,” O’Sullivan said. “I think after this weekend and after the SEC Tournament, a couple of these guys will get some more opportunities, I’ll have a really good feel for who can do what at this time of year when everything gets dialed up a little bit more.
“There are some positives to take away, obviously disappointed with the outcome today, but we’ll come out tomorrow and hopefully get another great start out of Jackson Kowar. His last two starts have probably been the best two of his career here. We’ll get him going and keep him on track, then head up to Hoover on Sunday.”
Saturday
Who: Florida at Mississippi State
When: 4:30 p.m.
TV: ESPNU
Radio: AM-850, 98.1-FM
Pitching matchup: UF RHP Jackson Kowar (9-2, 2.56 ERA) vs. TBA
That wasn’t a stumble That was outright humiliation. They couldn’t hit, field, or run the bases. I hope they can come down off Cloud 9 long enough to get ready for the tournaments.
Humiliation. Geez, dude. 41, and counting, wins. No crap talk. There was so much stupid crying on this site last season as O’Sullivan guided UF to the national title. They started a freshman pitcher on the road for an emergency start. Chill, and remind yourself that no other program comes close to what Sully has put together in G’ville.
They got humiliated 2 nights in a row. I think they saw the end of the season and a lesser opponent and took their eye off the ball! hopefully these 2 losses which wont hurt them will shake them up and realize you cant overlook anyone!
Congrats Gators on the outright SEC Championship! Very proud of you. Glad we didn’t need a win last night because we certainly did not play our best. Tough series so far. Hope everyone comes out injury free. Refocus with Jackson on the mound today and get the win. Bats(JJ, Indy, Wil) need to get going. We’ll see you in Hoover! Go Gators!
It’s been a great season so far. Congrats on playing with a big target on you all season, and still winning the SEC championship. That’s a lot harder to accomplish than some of our fans seem to understand. Go Gators! In Sully we trust.
Gators are SEC champs. That’s great, but it’s no excuse to play the way they’ve played the last 2 nights and lose to a bad MSU team. I’m tired of hearing ‘but we’ve won 19 series in a row.’ Big deal. That means nothing if you don’t keep winning. They look like they just don’t care. It’s a bad time to be a team that’s just going through the motions.
And this series was completely meaningless except to give some different pitchers a chance to throw against SEC competition. If they don’t get some young pitchers a little more experience, the same whining fans will complain that we should have played them more early. Please see last year’s SEC tourney as proof that what they do right now has zero effect on postseason play.
And actually winning 19 series in a row did matter, because thats the reason other teams are playing for 2nd place and the Gators are SEC Camps before the season is over! Enjoy the ride, 13 other conference teams would love to be in the position the Gators are in right now.
MSU is not a bad team. It is a very young team that lost its head coach early in the season and played the first 1/3 of the season on the road. After last night’s game, they are 8-1 against teams projected to be national seeds in the NCAA tourney.
It’s a good spot to be in and get a slap in the face wake-up call!
The time to lose is now, not when Regionals start. It means nothing to lose now, and every team has a slump. That’s baseball! Florida is assured of being at home until Omaha, so why worry about meaningless games before the Regionals.
The last 3 games are a disappointment, but better now than later. For that matter, the SEC tournament is also just a glorified exhibition series, so we should not put too much weight on winning that either. Nothing more counts now until the Regionals, and hopefully the Super Regional and CWS. That said, the concern right now is how they are (or aren’t) hitting, and the lack of pitching depth behind Singer and Kowar. Once the NCAA tourney starts, it will require more than 2 ( or 3 if you count Byrnes, though he too has scuffled of late) good pitchers to make to the last game and come home with the trophy. Let’s go Gators.