Arkansas had every chance and still lost to Georgia

There’s something about SEC baseball on a Friday night that just hits different.

It’s the smells, excitement for the fans and even to mae it feel like an Arkansas game even some rain delays so everybody could talk about postseason possibilities.

That’s exactly what Baum-Walker Stadium served up Friday when the Razorbacks and Georgia’s Bulldogs squared off in Game 2 of their three-game series. It was good, hard-nosed SEC baseball from the first pitch to the last out.

Arkansas just happened to be on the wrong end of a 5-3 final.

And honestly? The Hogs probably shouldn’t have let this one slip away.

A Game Arkansas could have won

Let’s be clear about something. This wasn’t a game where Georgia simply ran Arkansas off the field. The Razorbacks had their chances and they had plenty of them.

With 10,593 fans packed into Baum-Walker, Arkansas kept hanging around, kept scrapping and kept putting runners on base when it mattered.

That’s the kind of team Dave Van Horn has built in Fayetteville that doesn’t quit. The Hogs have had chances this season.

But in SEC baseball, almost only counts in horseshoes. The Hogs couldn’t find that one big swing when they needed it most.

Van Horn said it himself after the game.

“The crazy thing was we had a chance to win the game,” he said. “We’re right there. We just kept hanging around and we were really just one big swing away and it never happened.”

That’s the painful truth about Friday night. Arkansas was close. Just not close enough.

Gibler gave them a chance

Cole Gibler didn’t have his sharpest stuff Friday.

The Georgia lineup was putting hard contact on the ball early and often and Gibler had to grind through some tough innings to keep his team in the ballgame.

Van Horn wasn’t shy about where the problems started. Gibler got behind in counts too often and didn’t use his off-speed pitches for early strikes the way he needed to.

When the Bulldogs got fastballs, they didn’t miss them. A 477-foot moonshot off the bat of Henry Allen in the second inning set the tone in a hurry and Georgia tacked on two more runs in the third on a two-out rally before adding another in the sixth.

Still, Gibler gutted out five-plus innings and in the grand scheme of a three-game weekend series, that matters. The bullpen needed to be protected ahead of Saturday’s rubber match.

Van Horn acknowledged that Gibler gave the Razorbacks more than it looked like he might early on.

That’s a starting pitcher competing when he doesn’t have his best, which is something you see in every meaningful SEC series.

Offense just wasn’t there

Here’s where it gets frustrating from an Arkansas standpoint. The Hogs drew six walks on Friday night. Six free passes.

And they still managed just five hits in a game where they consistently put themselves in position to do damage.

Van Horn was blunt in his assessment.

“We didn’t do a very good job offensively, bottom line,” he said. “We escaped a couple of innings. They were hitting the snot out of the ball the first few innings.”

That’s not the Arkansas offense we’ve come to expect at Baum-Walker.

The Razorbacks are a better offensive team than what they showed through most of Friday’s game and Van Horn knows it.

When you’re drawing walks but can’t string hits together at the right moments, you end up exactly where Arkansas ended up — watching a 5-3 loss go into the books.

The moments were there. TJ Pompey struck out swinging to strand the tying run in the sixth. The seventh and eighth innings both saw runners reach with the tying run at the plate and neither threat produced the equalizer.

Ryan Wynn’s leaping catch on a 100 mph Nolan Souza line drive in the seventh to strand Camden Kozeal at second was the kind of gut-punch play that just isn’t supposed to happen at that exact moment.

That’s baseball. It’s also maddening.

Ruiz keeps reminding everyone he’s special

If there was a genuine bright spot Friday, it was Damian Ruiz. The man returned from a knee injury last weekend and has simply refused to let it slow him down.

Batting cleanup for the third consecutive game — a spot that tells you everything about how Van Horn views his current production — Ruiz smacked his fourth home run of the season in the sixth inning.

A 368-foot shot to left field that cut Georgia’s lead to 4-2 and briefly made Baum-Walker believe the Hogs were going to pull it off.

Ruiz going 1-for-3 with a walk in a game where the rest of the offense sputtered isn’t just a footnote.

It’s a reminder that when this Arkansas team is clicking on all cylinders, Ruiz is a big reason why. His return from injury couldn’t have come at a better time in the SEC schedule.

The bigger picture

Friday night at Baum-Walker was exactly the kind of game that makes SEC baseball worth watching every single weekend.

Two ranked teams, a rowdy crowd and a back-and-forth game that wasn’t decided until the final out. Nobody got blown out. Nobody quit.

Arkansas just couldn’t get the big hit.

The Razorbacks came into this series having won six straight games. They’re 26-14 on the season and 9-8 in SEC play, sitting in a spot where every conference game feels like a playoff game.

Dropping Friday’s game isn’t a death sentence for this season, but it does mean the Hogs now need to win Saturday’s rubber match to take the series.

Van Horn has been in these situations before. So has this program.

Saturday at 1 p.m. is a fresh start and a chance to remind everyone why Baum-Walker Stadium has one of the best home-field advantages in the country.

But Friday night? That one’s going to sting for a little while.

It was a classic SEC baseball game, the kind both fanbases will talk about when the season’s over.

Arkansas just needed one more hit, one more big swing, one more moment to break through.

It never happened. And that’s what hurts most.