As well as Georgia played in Tuesday’s opening round win of the SEC Tournament against LSU, Wednesday’s 11-2 loss to Arkansas qualified as something less.

Take absolutely nothing away from Razorback starter Lael Lockhart.

The lefty was dominant. He had a perfect game working until Josh McAllister singled with two out in the seventh. Up 10-0 at the time, that would have been the game, due to the seven-inning mercy rule implanted throughout the SEC Tourney.

Freshman Corey Collins ended those hopes with a two-run homer, but the damage was done.

Three Bulldogs errors and 13 walks ruined whatever chance Georgia (31-24) might have had.

Georgia now awaits the loser of Wednesday’s late game between Vanderbilt and Ole Miss in what will be an elimination contest. First pitch will be 30 minutes after the conclusion of the day’s earlier elimination game between Tennessee and Mississippi State.

“That’s not who we were. We’ve been a tough and gritty team all year long, and those first five innings, I didn’t even recognize that team,” head coach Scott Stricklin said. “We’ve had some struggles with our walks, especially with our young guys, and we threw a lot of young guys tonight. But when you play Arkansas, you’ve got to play really clean baseball, and we didn’t do that.”

McAllister did not disagree with that. He also believes he and his teammates will bounce back, like they have for much of the year.

“Everyone has bad games, and we definitely did not play our best baseball tonight,” McAllister said. “We know that; Coach Stricklin knows that. We talked about it after the game. We’ve just got to clean it up and bounce back. We’ve done it all year, so hopefully (Thursday) we can go out there and play our best baseball.”

In a bit of a surprise, Georgia started redshirt freshman Charlie Goldstein instead of Liam Sullivan, in order to keep the true freshman on his regular rest.

Goldstein started well enough, striking out two of the three batters he faced in the first. Things would begin to unravel after that.

Five walks between Goldstein and Michael Polk paved the way for a six-run second by the Razorbacks, who outhit Georgia 7-3.

“We wanted Liam to be 100 percent, and he was one day short of full rest. He's a freshman, he’s been in the rotation for three weeks, and we wanted to make sure he was 100 percent,” Stricklin said. “(Tuesday) before the game, he said, ‘pretty good.’ That told us, OK, when you tell us you’re great—we just wanted to make sure he was 100 percent. We had two games left when we won last night; we wanted him 100 percent, and he’ll be 100 percent ready to go (Thursday).”

Walks were once against a huge problem. Wednesday marked the sixth time this season that Bulldog pitchers have combined to walk 10 batters or more in a game.

Freshman pitcher Max DeJong, who was called on despite appearing in just three games previously, admitted the walks have been a problem.

“It’s been a pretty big issue,” DeJong said. “It’s something we’ve got to work on. We’ve just got to pound the zone.”

Stricklin, who substituted six of his eight position players throughout the course of the game, said his reasoning was two-fold. One, it was due to the game being out of hand. Two, it was due to his not necessarily being pleased with the way some of his players were competing.

“It was a little bit of both. We needed to get Fernando out of there. He’s catching a lot, and he’s been getting beaten up. Kam Guidry, Randon Jernigan, Luke Wagner, Josh Stinson—all those guys play a role on our team, and I kind of wanted to send a message that hey, we need to compete. We’ve got guys over there who want to play,” Stricklin said. “Bottom line, we weren’t playing very well; we needed to make a couple of changes, and maybe light some fires. I think we’ll be ready to go. After the game, guys were ticked off. They should be; we all are. So we’ve got to turn the page and be ready to go.”

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