The Florida Gators (1-0) pounded the Charleston Southern Buccaneers (0-1) 13-3 to christen the 2023 season. Senior catcher BT Riopelle led Florida’s offense with five runs batted in, three coming from a home run in the bottom of the first inning.
The 2023 Florida Gators baseball campaign hits the ground running Friday night with a three-game series against the Charleston Southern Buccaneers at Condron Ballpark.
Brandon Sproat and Southern Mississippi transfer Hurston Waldrep will form a formidable 1-2 weekend punch.
The Florida Gators’ 2022 outfield consisted of three powerful sluggers: Wyatt Langford, Jud Fabian and Sterlin Thompson.
The Florida Gators baseball team heads into the 2023 season with experience across their infield.
Before offering Thomas a spot on the roster, the coaching staff called senior catcher BT Riopelle, who spent 2019 through 2021 at Coastal Carolina and was teammates with Thomas for the latter two years.
Sterlin Thompson and Hunter Barco went off the board earlier Sunday night, heading to Colorado and Pittsburgh, respectively. But it was the Baltimore Orioles who selected Fabian with the 67th overall pick.
Hunter Barco, the left-handed pitcher that served as Florida’s ace before a season-ending surgery, was taken by the Pittsburgh Pirates with the 44th overall pick.
The 2022 MLB Draft kicked off Sunday, and Florida made its presence known early.
Before the dentist could even pass an insurance claim, Langford was back on the field cracking homer No. 26.
Monday, Florida baseball announced the addition of Taylor Black as an assistant coach. Black joins the Gators after a five-year stint with the Detroit Tigers organization’s scouting department.
After a lengthy rain delay, redshirt freshman Ryan Slater allowed four runs in the eighth inning to the Sooners, a back-breaking frame that the Gators failed to recover from, losing 5-4 in a game that came down to the final at-bat.
The only problem was Florida had exhausted its bullpen hours earlier in an effort to topple Central Michigan. Now, the Gators needed an unlikely hero.
Florida got the necessary win, defeating the Chippewas 6-5 Sunday afternoon.
In a classic can’t-get-out-of-its-own-way performance from UF, the regional’s 1-seed fell to Sunday’s loser’s bracket following spotty pitching and lackluster hitting.
One thing for certain, though, is that the crowd brought the most energy of the year Friday night, and it came at the right time.
A 4-2 record in the Southeastern Conference Tournament last week secured a top-16 seed in the NCAA Tournament, granting Florida the ability to host a regional in Gainesville. Now, UF welcomes Oklahoma, Liberty and Central Michigan to Condron Ballpark for the event.
Even after receiving a beat-down at the hands of the No. 1-ranked Tennessee Volunteers in the tournament finale, the team did more than enough in Hoover to bring postseason play back to Condron Ballpark.
Still, a fifth-inning explosion followed by a three-run sixth sufficiently iced a game in which the UF offense was nowhere to be found until it was too late. The seven-seeded Florida Gators fell in the Sunday finale to the top-seeded Vols’, 8-5.
Manning worked five scoreless innings against the two-seeded Aggies, and the offense scrapped for runs in all but two innings. In one of the more miraculous wins of the season, the seven-seeded Gators booked their trip to the tournament final Sunday with a 9-0 win.
Solutions by The State News
