Georgia avoided a sweep of historic proportions by beating Georgia Tech 6-0 in the schools’ annual baseball game at Turner Field on Tuesday night.
A Tech win would have given the Yellow Jackets a school-year sweep of the Bulldogs in football, men’s basketball and baseball for the first time since 1970-71. But Georgia’s victory salvaged for the Bulldogs a split of the season series in baseball after the Yellow Jackets won in Athens in March and a scheduled game at Tech last month was rained out.
Tuesday’s game, before a spirited crowd of 18,792, the largest crowd in the nation for an NCAA baseball game this season, marked the 13th consecutive year the Bulldogs and Yellow Jackets have met at Turner Field in a game benefitting Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. This season’s previous largest college-baseball crowd was 16,276 for a game between Texas A&M and Houston at the Houston Astros’ Minute Maid Park.
Five Georgia pitchers combined on a one-hitter Tuesday night, and the Bulldogs took a 4-0 lead on a three-run home run to right-center field by first baseman Daniel Nichols in the sixth inning.
“It was awesome, man,” Nichols said afterward. “(Tech starting pitcher Cole Pitts) threw me a pitch up in the zone that I could handle, and I drove it.”
“Not too many balls get out of this park where he hit it,” Georgia coach Scott Stricklin said. “That’s really deep out there in that gap.”
Nichols, a junior, also drove in Georgia’s first run with a sacrifice fly in the first inning and its final run with a single in the ninth. He had three hits for the night, and his five RBIs were a career high.
“He’s been probably our most consistent hitter over the past month,” Stricklin said, “and he carried us tonight.”
Meanwhile, Georgia pitchers — starter Jared Walsh and four relievers — limited Tech to the one hit: a fourth-inning single by second baseman Wade Bailey. Walsh worked five innings, striking out six and walking one, before his bullpen shut down the Yellow Jackets over the final four innings despite issuing four walks.
Walsh (5-2) got the win and Pitts (0-6) the loss.
“I honestly felt it’s the best (Pitts) has thrown,” Tech coach Danny Hall told reporters afterward. “He made a bad pitch to Daniel Nichols, and to Nichols’ credit, he deposited it and kind of blew the game open. But we just couldn’t get enough going offensively to make the game competitive. So give their guys credit.”
According to UGA records, the combined one-hitter represented the Bulldogs’ third best pitching performance in the history of the series against Tech, behind a perfect game by Don Woeltjen in 1963 and a no-hitter by Tom Philpot in 1919.
This season, Tech has a record of 32-19 (13-14 ACC) and Georgia is 25-26 (9-17 SEC).
“A lot of us were recruited by [Tech] and a lot of them were recruited by Georgia, so we’re good friends with a lot of guys,” Walsh said. “Obviously there’s a huge rivalry there, so anytime we can beat Georgia Tech it’s huge within the state for bragging rights.”
Both teams finish their regular-season schedules with three-game series Thursday, Friday and Saturday — Tech at Miami and Georgia at home against Arkansas.
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