The ball rocketed off Jacob Olson’s bat like a satellite designed for orbit.
UF left fielder Austin Langworthy watched it as it exited its upward trajectory and plummeted toward the Earth. He tracked it back, back, back, and then he couldn’t track it anymore. He hit the wall, the ball hit the ground just beyond it and suddenly, after an afternoon of dominant pitching from Florida starter Tyler Dyson, South Carolina (13-7, 1-2 SEC) was one pitch away from tying the game in the bottom of the sixth inning.
When Dyson plunked the next hitter on a breaking ball that never broke, coach Kevin O’Sullivan had seen enough. He called on freshman lefty Jordan Butler to bail out Dyson and his team. Over the next four innings, Butler and closer Michael Byrne did just that, earning No. 2 Florida (18-4, 2-1 SEC) a 3-2 win on Sunday in Columbia to clinch its first SEC series of the season.
"To win a series on the road, it’s not easy to do,” O’Sullivan said in a release. “We needed to play our best baseball today.”
O’Sullivan is lucky his conventional wisdom was wrong, because if his team really needed to play its best baseball to win Sunday’s game, it would have lost. Sunday was not Florida’s best day.
After all, the Gators managed just four hits all afternoon to South Carolina’s six. They also committed an error that didn’t end up hurting them in the third inning. And while Dyson struck out five en route to his fourth win of the year, he labored through the Gamecocks’ lineup with 115 pitches in his five innings.
If there was perfection — or anything close to it — to be found on Sunday, though, it was in Florida’s bullpen.
Butler struck out two of the five batters he faced and allowed no hits and one walk. He vacated the mound for junior closer Michael Byrne with two outs in the seventh inning.
Byrne was just as effective. He walked one and didn’t allow a hit in 2.1 innings to keep the Gamecocks behind. He finished them with three straight fly outs to pick up his fifth save of the season and keep his ERA perfect through 16.2 innings.
O’Sullivan, however, focused on South Carolina’s ability to get to Butler and Byrne.
“We know how good our pitching is, but they were able to get both our starters yesterday and today out after five complete,” he said. “Credit them. I thought they played really well this weekend.”
Outfielder Wil Dalton led Florida’s offense by smacking a home run on the fourth pitch of the game. It marked Dalton’s third home run in his last four at-bats.
Senior catcher JJ Schwarz also blasted a solo homer in the fourth inning, and shortstop Deacon Liput drove in Florida’s final run with a sacrifice fly following Schwarz’s shot.
Third baseman Jonathan India was the only other Florida player to record a hit. His two knocks — a single and a triple — swelled his team-leading batting average to .400.
But perhaps the most interesting moment of the game came in the top of the eighth inning when Florida third base coach Craig Bell was ejected for reasons that weren’t made clear.
“Nobody else in the ballpark knew that anything was going on,” the ESPNU announcer said. “That felt way excessive.”
After exchanging a few words with the umpire following his ejection, Bell trudged down the dugout steps, grabbed his backpack and walked out of the stadium down the third base line in clear view of a raucous crowd of 7,113, which serenaded him with a mixture of cheers and boos.
He had trouble opening the door to leave Founders Park, but with an assist from South Carolina’s bullpen catcher, he went on his way.
Bell will presumably be back coaching third base on Tuesday when the Gators host Jacksonville for a midweek game. Then the Gators will focus on preparing for a weekend series against Arkansas in Gainesville.
The Razorbacks have won six straight, including a three-game sweep of Kentucky this weekend in which they outscored the Wildcats 39-15.
Follow Ethan Bauer on Twitter @ebaueri and contact him at ebauer@alligator.org.
Florida pitcher Tyler Dyson pitched five innings against South Carolina on Sunday. He allowed two runs on two hits and struck out five Gamecock batters.
