The start of Scott Stricklin’s post-game Zoom Tuesday night was briefly delayed when the mute button on his laptop was mistakenly left on.
Perhaps that was a good thing, after the Bulldogs fell to Georgia Tech 7-5, on an evening when 10 walks and a key passed ball doomed Georgia’s chances against its archrival.
“Y’all can’t read lips? Hopefully, people on TV couldn’t read lips today,” Stricklin quipped. “But yeah, walks will absolutely kill you. It’s really tough to win games when you walk 10 guys. Somehow, we did it at Vanderbilt, but you’ve got to score a ton of runs, and we didn’t score enough runs.”
Indeed.
Of Georgia Tech’s seven runs, three were batters who walked, with another run scoring on a passed ball.
“We made some defensive mistakes. We made mistakes that gave them two different runs in two different innings, then we had a passed ball that gave them a run,” Stricklin said. “That’s three runs right there that we gifted them, where if we just do what we’re supposed to do, make routine plays and make routine decisions, those runs don’t score.”
With the loss, Georgia falls to 26-14 ahead of this week’s big SEC series against Auburn which begins Thursday night at Foley Field.
The Bulldogs know they’ll need to keep the walks to a minimum, something that didn't happen against the Yellow Jackets (20-16).
Another staff day saw seven different pitchers take the mound for Georgia, each of whom issued at least one walk, including the first two batters of the game by Hank Bearden. Justyn-Henry Malloy followed with a three-run homer that gave the Yellow Jackets the lead.
The freshman righty (3-1) never made it out of the first. Redshirt freshman Charlie Goldstein came into the game after just one out had been recorded.
The Yellow Jackets added a run in the third on a two-strike single by Brad Grenkoski, before Nolan Crisp escaped the inning with no further damage.
Walks have been an issue for much of the year, and they were again on Tuesday.
Back-to-back walks to start the fourth by Crisp were the fifth and sixth for the Bulldogs. Not surprisingly, the Jackets added two runs before Parks Harber’s two-run double in the inning’s bottom half once again cut Georgia Tech’s lead to two.
A solo home run by Ben Anderson brought the Bulldogs within one in the seventh, but that was as close as Georgia would get before Georgia Tech added an insurance run in the ninth.
“We were saying when it was 3-0, keep your heads up, we were going to score some runs. It’s disappointing we didn’t score more than we did,” Stricklin said. “We felt like there were going to be some runs scored in this game. I actually thought it was going to be a little higher scoring than that. I thought it was going to be more like Clemson, 8-7, 9-8, something like that. We got the tying run to the plate in the ninth to give ourselves a chance, but just didn’t play well enough to win.”
