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Quiet bats and poor pitching led to another early deficit and a quick exit from the SEC Tournament by Arkansas.
Florida jumped out to a 5-0 lead and then hung on for a 7-5 win over the Razorbacks in an elimination game at the Hoover Met on Friday, ending their trip to Hoover after just two games.
It marked the eighth straight game Arkansas found itself down by at least three runs within the first five innings and extended its losing streak to four games. The Razorbacks are now 2-6 in their last eight games and 8-11 over the last six weeks.
“It's not like we've fallen apart, it's just that we haven't done enough to win,” head coach Dave Van Horn said. “It's like I always tell the players — winning is hard, losing is easy. You have to do something special sometimes to win, and we didn't do anything special this week.”
Jac Caglianone delivered the two biggest swings for the Gators early on.
With runners on second and third and no outs in the second, he swung at the first pitch he saw from Connor Noland and hit it right back up the middle for a two-run single.
It was still 2-0 when the freshman led off the fifth inning with his second at bat of the game. This time, he took a strike before taking Noland deep for his fifth home run of the season.
A couple of batters later, Colby Halter hit a two-out blast and BT Riopelle added an RBI double to make it 5-0 Florida.
Unfortunately for the Razorbacks, the Gators weren’t done. Immediately after giving up two runs in the top of the sixth, allowing Arkansas to creep back into it, Florida answered with a leadoff home run by Jud Fabian — his 21st of the season — and RBI single by Halter to push its lead back to five.
“They come in, we scored two, they scored two, and that's got to be our shut-down inning to really have a chance to get back in the game,” Van Horn said. “I thought their hitters did a really good job of laying off some borderline pitches early in the count and worked the count and got a good pitch to hit. We just couldn't catch them.”
Arkansas made it interesting with a few runs in the ninth inning, but as Van Horn said, the margin was too much to overcome.
Here are a few other key takeaways from Friday’s loss…
Relying on the Long Ball (Again)
For the first five innings, Arkansas couldn’t get much of anything going at the plate. It got leadoff singles in the second and fourth innings and two-out walks in the third and fifth, but never advanced to second base.
Over that stretch, the Razorbacks went just 2 for 17 with eight strikeouts against Florida starter Nick Pogue. (In two games at the SEC Tournament, Arkansas went just 5 for 34 with 12 strikeouts and only one run in the first five innings.)
“We got off to a really slow start offensively and you've got to give credit to Pogue for that,” Van Horn said. “He just threw a lot of strikes, got ahead of us. We couldn't get a big hit off of him early.”
