College baseball is back, and that means all the dramatics of sports are back too. The Georgia Bulldogs have played their first five games of the season and are already feeling that passion that is sometimes called chippiness. On Tuesday night, the Bulldogs traveled to Marietta to play the Kennesaw State Owls and found themselves in a trap game. The eighth-ranked Bulldogs found themselves down four early.
Along the way the team found themselves unhappy with the handling of the game. A few calls went against the Bulldogs and riled up the dugout. Then, in the seventh inning, head coach Wes Johnson was ejected arguing about a strike call.
“We needed something to get going,” said Johnson. “It got pretty chippy… I mean those kind of things come out in games like that.”
The Bulldogs did get going. The team, now down two late, responded emphatically. In the same inning, Slate Alford crushed a home run into deep left. Despite still being down a run late, Alford watched his home run with pride and then pointed at the Owls’ pitcher before rounding the bases. The antics did not stop there.
In the bottom of the seventh, Davis Chastain had words for the opposing team’s dugout, which caused him to have to sit out the rest of the game with his head coach. Ryan Black, making his season debut, then crushed a home run of his own to tie the game in the eighth. The Bulldogs then pulled out a victory late, scoring two runs in the ninth and winning 6-4 in an emotional win.
Brian Curley, a talented pitcher for the Bulldogs, got in on the fun after throwing the game-winning strike, tossing his glove and talking to his dugout as they poured onto the field. Curley seemed pleased with the moment while recounting it the next day.
“I feel like that’s good for college baseball,” he said. “I’d say road games… it gets us stronger and closer than before.”
The opening road streak has now come to a close, and the Bulldogs will finally get to open up the new season at home this weekend. It will be a special opening home weekend, as the Dawgs will be showing off their newly renovated stadium for the first time in a doubleheader. It’s not hard to imagine that there will be more energy from these chippy Bulldogs as they host the University of Illinois Chicago.
“We got a lot of competitors on this team,” said Devin Obee. “But at the end of the day… just being able to like, control it and… have a control competitiveness.”
Controlling competitiveness will be crucial to any program trying to survive the cannibalistic SEC this season. The Bulldogs are off to a very interesting start.
