At the start of each week throughout the regular season, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will take a closer look at the Georgia baseball team.
Record: 29-10, 9-9 SEC
Streak: Lost 1
Rankings: No. 17 Baseball America
Last Week (2-1)
Friday: Beat Ole Miss 17-6 (8)
Saturday (DH): Split with Ole Miss, 7-2 win and 3-2 loss
This Week
Tuesday: vs. No. 4 Clemson, 7 p.m. (ESPNU)
Friday: at No. 1 Texas A&M (35-5, 13-5), 6 p.m.
Saturday: at Texas A&M, 2 p.m.
Sunday: at Texas A&M, 1 p.m.
Week in review
Two out of three is not bad, but 3-of-3 is much better. That’s the way the Bulldogs left the weekend in Athens feeling. Pleased but not wholly satisfied.
Georgia pulled even in conference play at 9-9 by winning the first two of their set against visiting Ole Miss. But they lost the final game 3-2 after a long, long day on Saturday. The teams agreed to play a doubleheader to get ahead of Sunday’s wet weather and that probably didn’t serve the Bulldogs well as it just seemed they ran out of gas in the third game.
As it went, though, Georgia rode its hot bats to win a second consecutive conference series and set itself up for the challenging stretch run that is the last four SEC series. One thing that was driven home is that the Bulldogs’ offense isn’t going to take weeks off. It’s here to stay.
Star slugger Charlie Condon has a lot to do with that. The 6-foot-6, 215-pound sophomore continues to wow fans and MLB scouts alike with his tremendous power and consistency. With two more home runs Saturday, Condon now has 26 on the season and 51 in his career. That leaves him just two shy of both the single-season and career records set by Gordon Beckham in 2008 with at least 20 games left to play.
Condon has plenty of support, with Corey Collins (.378) hitting ahead of him, Slate Alford (.324) behind him and power up and down the lineup. Collins extended his on-base streak to 27 games on Saturday and five Bulldogs enter the final four weeks of the regular season with double-digit home runs.
Week ahead
One of the most challenging weeks of the season awaits. Georgia will conclude an eight-game home stand against when No. 4 Clemson visits on Tuesday. The Bulldogs will follow that with the longest road trip of the season to meet No. 1-ranked Texas A&M in College Station.
The three remaining weekends of the regular season will have Georgia taking on Vanderbilt, South Carolina and Florida. There is nothing more convoluted and confusing than college baseball rankings, but only the Gators are not included in somebody’s Top 15 at the moment and all are traditional powers and rivals for Georgia in college baseball.
To keep their NCAA tournament hopes alive, the Bulldogs need to at least go 6-6 over these final four weekends. But they’ll be aiming to do even better. As always in baseball, the key will be having enough solid pitching to get the job done.
Georgia got some positive news to that end as injured pitchers Matthew Hoskins and Charlie Goldstein each made returns over the weekend. Goldstein, the Bulldogs’ Friday night starter before arm soreness sidelined him in recent weeks, faced six batters and recorded four strikeouts on Saturday. Hoskins returned after a year off due to injury and recorded a strikeout while facing four batters.
They said it
“It’s always important to be able to get a home-series win like this. You have to take advantage of it because no matter who you’re playing or where you’re playing, SEC games are going to be hard. I think the frustrating thing for us is that we’re not worried about coming out here and sweeping or anything, we’re just worried about showing up at the start of every game ready to play our best baseball. Today it didn’t quite feel like that after we didn’t make that turn today to go into that second game, but this team is doing a lot of things really well right now and we’re just going to continue to build off of those things looking forward.” – Georgia slugger Charlie Condon
