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Tennessee evened its series with Arkansas in walk-off fashion Saturday afternoon.
After the first two batters reached against Jaxon Wiggins, the freshman gave up a three-run home run to Max Ferguson that gave the Volunteers a dramatic 8-7 win over the Razorbacks in Knoxville, Tenn.
It was the third straight inning Tennessee hit a long ball. The first two - including one by Ferguson - were solo shots that kept the Volunteers within a run before the game-winning swing with no outs in the ninth.
“It was an emotional game, both benches were getting after it a bit,” head coach Dave Van Horn said. “Players were fighting. Just told them that's the way the game works every now and then. Just have to get over it.”
With ace reliever Kevin Kopps unavailable after throwing 66 pitches in Friday’s win, the Razorbacks found themselves in an uncomfortable predicament late in the game.
Right-hander Ryan Costeiu came out of the bullpen and ended the seventh inning with a strikeout, but gave up a two-out home run in the eighth. Although he’d thrown just 20 pitches and struck out four of the fave batters he faced, Costeiu was not considered to pitch the final inning.
Instead, Van Horn knew he’d turn to another reliever for the last three outs with Arkansas leading 7-5.
“Costeiu, he was done,” Van Horn. “That’s what he does, four outs maybe. Every time we’ve sent him out (again), it hasn’t gone real good, so we either had to go with Wiggins or maybe Vermillion.”
A potential Game 3 starter, Wiggins was coming off a midweek start against Arkansas State in which he threw two scoreless innings. More importantly to Van Horn, though, was that he has had success finishing games this year.
In fact, Wiggins’ four saves - including a pair in SEC play - are second only to Kopps on the team.
“We had a chance to win the series right there, so he was the obvious guy,” Van Horn said. “If we’d have brought in somebody else and it hadn’t gone good we’d have second guessed ourselves.”
However, it was the hard-throwing freshman’s first appearance on a weekend in nearly a month, as he hadn’t pitched in the Razorbacks’ last three SEC series.
Connor Pavolony led off the inning with a bloop single and then Liam Spence - who came into the game with an SEC-high .399 batting average - worked the count full before drawing a walk.
That put the tying runs on base. Even though Vermillion was warming up in the pen, Van Horn decided to stick with Wiggins to face Ferguson.
“We knew that (Ferguson) was going to get one swing and then lay down a sac,” Van Horn said. “If he would've walked another guy or if it wouldn't have gone good a couple pitches in, we probably would've gone to Vermillion."
Sure enough, the Tennessee second baseman swung at the first pitch he saw and crushed it well over the right field wall to hand Arkansas its first walk-off loss of the season.
Another Short Start
It wasn’t a secret that Van Horn was looking to get a solid start from Peyton Pallette in Game 1 after Patrick Wicklander was chased in the third inning of the series opener. He told reporters Friday night that he hoped the right-hander would give them five-plus innings.
Unfortunately for the Razorbacks, Pallette didn’t make it out of the fourth.
Much like Wicklander a day earlier, he gave up three straight hits to open the game. Liam Spence led off with a ground-rule double, Ferguson bunted for a hit and then Jake Rucker hit an RBI single to start the scoring.
Pallette seemed to settle down after that, retiring the next three Volunteers in order. However, one of those outs was a sacrifice fly by Evan Russell that made it 2-0.
