JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Although being on the wrong end of a 5-3 score in Friday night’s exhibition against Florida wasn’t quite what Scott Stricklin had in mind, Georgia’s head baseball coach wasn’t doing a lot of complaining.
Played at the home of the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Double-A affiliate of the Miami Marlins, the game – played in the shadows of TIAA Bank Stadium – gave freshmen and newcomers from both squads a rare opportunity to get a taste of the type of environments they’ll see once SEC play begins next spring.
A crowd of approximately 10,000 nearly filled the 11,000-seat Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville Stadium, which was followed by a concert by Country Music stars Chase Rice and Brett Young.
“It’s invaluable experience for our guys to be able to play in front of this crowd, to get on the road, to be out of the comfort zone of home and that’s what it’s for, for our freshmen,” Stricklin said. “Everybody played tonight. We had 15 position players play, with three true freshmen and a redshirt freshman pitch. It was really encouraging to see some of the things we saw tonight. Obviously, I was disappointed that we lost but it was a great experience to come down here.”
Bulldog veteran Riley King agreed.
“Sometimes you don’t even see this during the regular season unless you’re at Arkansas or somewhere like that,” King said. “But yeah, this was big-time. You can’t recreate this in practice, so for them to be able to experience this in this atmosphere, when the season rolls around, they will have already gone through it. It’s very valuable.”
There were some performances note for the Bulldogs.
Sophomore Randon Jernigan led off for Georgia and went 2-for-3 with a triple and a pair of runs scored, while freshmen Jonathan Cannon and Michael Polk each tossed scoreless innings for Georgia, which used nine pitchers.
Cannon’s effort was particularly impressive.
The 6-foot-5 right-hander came on in the sixth and responded by striking out all three batters he faced.
“Cannon is a star in the making. He’s a guy we were really happy that he came to school with the draft. He’s 6-foot 5 and throws 95 mph, so we were a little nervous about it. But he’s a good student and kind of wanted to follow in the footsteps of Emerson (Hancock) and Cole (Wilcox),” Stricklin said. “He threw like that in our Red and Black series, just exactly like that. Polk was good in the seventh and Justin Glover pitched well.”
Four of Florida’s five runs were charged to freshman Brandon Smith in the third, with redshirt freshman Garrett Brown allowing the final Gator run in the fifth.
Florida outhit Georgia 6-4.
Stricklin said he hopes the series in Jacksonville will be able to continue.
“I hope so. I know Kevin O’Sullivan (Florida coach) wants to do it, I certainly want to do it,” Stricklin said. “The city of Jacksonville has to be very pleased with what happened here tonight with the crowd, the energy. It was really positive. I know the fan bases like to get after each other but it went really, really well. The seats were full, we had close to ten thousand here, and to be able to do that in the fall was outstanding.”
