As Yogi Berra once said, “It was Deja vu all over again.”
For the second time in two days of the Arkansas baseball team’s Fall World Series intrasquad clash, the teams were tied at the end of the intended seven innings of play.
Monday’s game was declared a 9-9 tie, with a winner-take-all finale set for Tuesday.
But with the scored tied at 8-8 after seven on Tuesday, a winner had yet to be determined. So, the teams played an extra inning, utilizing Major League Baseball’s so-called “ghost runner” rule. Each team began the inning with no outs and a runner on second.
The Cardinal team mustered a run in the top of the eighth, on freshman Kade Smith’s sacrifice bunt, that brought home Missouri transfer Ty Wilmsmeyer.
From there, freshman right-hander Jaewoo Cho shut down the White squad, with a pair of strikeouts, to secure the 9-8 victory for the Cardinal.
“It was real competitive today – I just saw a lot of clutch things happen,” Razorback Head Coach Dave Van Horn said. “All fall has been competitive, The scrimmages have been really tight. It’s been good, and there’s a lot of competition. If we started tomorrow, I could put you a lineup on the field, but I’m sure there would be guys right there to play that aren’t on the field, and then there’s a fall off.
“As far as offensively, you’ve got about 12 guys that look like they’re ready to go, and then there are some other guys who are not quite there yet, at least day in and day out. It was real competitive today.”
That puts a wrap on the fall season for the Hogs, who were allowed 28 official practices within a 45-day window, starting in September.
“Believe me, they’re ready to get off the field,” Van Horn said. “You think about a guy like Kendall Diggs, who won the Cape Cod League championship and played all the way to almost mid-August, Jayson Jones won the league up there in Wisconsin and they were the last team to finish. He went home for one day and he came here. He had an okay fall, but he’s better than what he showed. Get him strong, get him ready to go and find out what he can do.”
Diggs, a junior outfielder, who will be heavily counted on in the spring, gave the White team a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first Tuesday, with a 412-foot rocket to right field that ricocheted off the William Hunter Family Development Center.
The Cardinal evened things up in the second, as Tarleton State transfer Jack Wagner ripped his second homer in as many days, a…
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