It's been a long time since Brandon McArthur got to sit down and watch Wednesday Night Baseball.
Without any games to actually play until Friday, McArthur will finally get his chance - Yankees vs. White Sox, 8:11 p.m., ESPN.
This week is the first of the entire season that the Gators don't square off against another team on Tuesday or Wednesday night, and the players appreciate the mental refresher.
"It's a little weird to have this entire week off," McArthur said. "But it can also turn out to be a very good thing."
The senior first baseman took time Tuesday night to train his brain for a final exam, his last class at UF.
"Then, hopefully, I'll graduate," he said with a laugh.
The team needs the physical breather as well. After playing on Friday and Saturday for the first time since he ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament on April 2, McArthur missed Sunday's game against Kentucky when his knee stiffened up.
"Rehab, that's what I'll be doing," McArthur said. "I can't take time off from rehabbing, because if I do that then I can look back and say, 'Well, I should have rehabbed.'"
Sophomore shortstop Cole Figueroa sprained his ankle in the Kentucky series, and he used his three free hours Tuesday night to catch up on sleep.
"I think everybody's getting a little injury bug right now," Figueroa said. "It'll give us a little boost going into this very important weekend. … It's been a long couple weeks."
UF coach Kevin O'Sullivan said he would rather his team take the field during the week.
"I wish we were playing at least (Tuesday and Wednesday), but that's the way the schedule worked out," he said. "We haven't played as sharp the last couple weeks, so maybe this week will be good for us to get some more ground balls and work on fundamentals."
They might need the work in the field. When asked to pinpoint what was going wrong with UF these last few weeks, O'Sullivan had a clear answer.
"We're (near) last in fielding percentage," O'Sullivan said. "It's killed us. Not just the fielding percentage itself, but the errors that we've made have come at the most crucial times and killed us."
Tuesday and Wednesday may hold some time off to get out the kinks, but the Gators (25-15, 10-8 SEC) haven't had as important a series as the one they host this weekend.
SEC-leading No. 10 Georgia (27-12-1, 14-3-1 SEC) comes to Gainesville for a three-game series Friday, starting off four grueling weekend series before the SEC Tournament on May 21.
"It's really big for us," Figueroa said. "We just want to go out here and play well, get a couple of games from them. If we could go for the sweep, that would be amazing."
The Bulldogs' closer, Joshua Fields, has 11 saves and has not surrendered an earned run all season.
Once UF gets past Georgia, things don't let up the rest of the way. The Gators face No. 12 South Carolina the weekend after that in Columbia, then head to Alabama for a three-game set against the Crimson Tide and finally close out the regular season with a homestand against No. 17 Vanderbilt.
"We've still got four very important series left," Figueroa said. "We can't take anything for granted."
If the Gators can make it through all that and remain one of the top eight teams in the SEC, they'll head to Hoover, Ala., for the SEC Tournament.
McArthur knows how special it is to play in that tournament, and he hopes to give the younger players some idea of what it means.
"Some of these guys haven't experienced the freaking honor you get when you get escorted to the field by motorcycle cops and stuff like that," McArthur said. "That's what I really want to help these guys with, is those visual memories that I have of that stuff, and how meaningful that stuff is. And I want to give them the opportunity to get there, too, so that they can experience that themselves."
