For Georgia baseball, it has come down to threes.
The Bulldogs’ postseason fate will rest on its next three games, in three days, against Kentucky. Their magic number (combination of wins over the Wildcats or losses by Auburn to LSU) is three to earn a spot in the SEC tournament next week in Hoover, Ala.
Georgia (25-26-1, 10-16-1 SEC) is in 12th place in the SEC, which happens to take 12 teams to its annual tournament. The Bulldogs are a half-game ahead of 13th-place Auburn and a half-game behind 11th-place Tennessee entering Thursday’s series opener. Kentucky (30-21, 12-15 SEC) is 10th, with only Missouri mathematically eliminated.
Grabbing one of the last spots for the single-elimination rounds of the conference tournament is a modest goal, for sure. But the Bulldogs missed it last year under former coach David Perno, who subsequently was fired. So they are eyeing qualification not only as a validation of progress, but as a springboard to further success.
“Two weeks ago nobody would have given us a chance, and now we’re playing not only with the SEC tournament on the line, but also with a regional bid on the line,” said coach Scott Stricklin, who’s in his first season guiding the Bulldogs. “At the beginning of the year that was our goal, to make sure this last series of the year was going to be meaningful. We’ve put ourselves in that position.”
It has an up-and-down season for the Bulldogs. At one point they appeared a shoo-in not only for the conference tournament but also for an NCAA regional bid. But then they lost eight consecutive games to Georgia Tech, Florida, Kennesaw State and Vanderbilt the last two weeks of April.
“No. 1 was the competition we were playing,” Stricklin said. “But we also didn’t play well during that stretch. It was bad baseball against really good teams.”
The Bulldogs have continued to face stiff competition. They just finished a 19-game stretch in which they played 17 games against ranked opponents and have played a league-high 29 games against ranked teams. But Georgia went 3-3 the past two weekends against No. 7 South Carolina and No. 11 Ole Miss. On Tuesday, it lost its second of three games against Georgia Tech 2-0 in the Spring Classic for Kids at Turner Field.
“We know we’ve been playing really good baseball lately,” said sophomore pitcher Ryan Lawlor (4.5, 3.98 ERA), who will start the first game Thursday. “We know a lot of those games could have gone either way. So we’re coming in feeling pretty positive. We’re at home and being in situations like this is what everyone plays for, the opportunity to get rolling into the postseason. So we’re ready to take on this opportunity.”
In Kentucky, the Bulldogs will face not only the best player in the SEC, but very likely the national player of the year. A.J. Reed (6-foot-4, 240 pounds) not only has hit more home runs (21) than Georgia’s entire team (12), he’s also one of the league’s better pitchers (9-2, 2.30).
“Don’t let him beat you,” Stricklin said of Georgia’s plan for Reed. “The biggest thing is facing him with nobody on. You’ve got to get the guys out around him. You think of how Barry Bonds affected games. That’s what he’s done to college baseball.”
