By: TJ French
Athens, GA – The Georgia Bulldogs baseball team defeated the Tennessee Volunteers 4-2 on Saturday night to draw even at one a piece with Tennessee in the SEC Opening Weekend series. Georgia is now 1-1 in SEC play, and 16-4 overall.
The night belonged to Caden Aoki, who came on in relief at the start of the sixth inning and recorded the final 12 outs for the Bulldogs. He struck out six Tennessee batters in four innings and gave up just three hits. Aoki got himself into a couple of jams, but extinguished all those fires with his hammer curveball that Tennessee couldn’t time up.
As SEC play is now underway, one of the immediate observations is that Georgia seems to have a strong(er) pitching staff, which has notably held question marks in past seasons. In the second game of this series, Georgia did a much better job of putting Tennessee hitters away in two-strike counts, and that was largely thanks to Aoki.
Georgia opened up the scoring on Saturday with a Michael O’Shaughnessy home run in the second inning. The Bulldogs would open up a three-run cushion thanks to a two-run home run by leadoff hitter Ryan Black. Tennessee scored one run in the fourth and one in the fifth, but that was it for the Volunteers.
Dylan Vigue started the game for Georgia, and pitched 4.2 innings, giving up two earned runs and striking out five. Tennessee struck out 11 times in the game, and Georgia went down on strikes just six times. Although a down-scoring night in comparison to their season average, the Bulldogs picked up 11 hits in the win. Ryan Black, Daniel Jackson, O’Shaughnessy, and Henry Allen all had multiple hits on Saturday.
It’s Paul Farley who is credited as the winning pitcher in the game, but Farley only faced one batter in the fifth and recorded an out.
Georgia dropped the first game of the series on Friday, but will be going for the series win over Tennessee on Sunday. Kenny Ishikawa is slated to start on Sunday in what will be his return outing after recovering from a hairline fracture.
Leave a Reply