Kentucky Baseball: Cats lose final regular-season game at the Cliff

The last regular season home game for the Kentucky baseball team at Cliff Hagan Stadium didn’t go quite as planned.

In a perfect world, the Cats would’ve came out and dominated the Mississippi State Bulldogs. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and the last home game at the Cliff went down as a disappointing loss for the Cats.

Right from the start, the Cats seemed a little out of sync. Mississippi State quickly had runners on third and first and soon after scored on a throwing error by the Cats. Then a single and a double later and the Bulldogs have an early 3-0 lead.

In the bottom half of the inning, it looked as if the Cats were going to keep pace with the Bulldogs after a double by Luke Becker gave the Cats runners on second and third with only one out, but the Cats failed to get any runs across, resembling what happened for most of the game Saturday night.

The second inning didn’t go any better for the Cats defense as Mississippi State strung together some hits to blow this one wide open and make it a 7-0 ballgame early.

After the top of the third resulted in two more Bulldog runs making it 9-0, Kentucky finally got the zero off the scoreboard when Trey Dawson stepped in and hit a leadoff solo homer run making it 9-1.

After giving up a run in the fifth the Cats gave up four more runs in the sixth. However, this time the Cats answered in the bottom of the sixth. Luke Heyer doubled to bring in Kole Cottam to score.

An RBI groundout by Troy Squires would make it a 14-3 ballgame. Then with a runner on Brayden Combs stepped in a hit a 2-run homer for his first career hit as a wildcat cutting the lead to 14-5.

The Cats were able to score three more runs in the bottom half of the eighth inning to make it a 14-8 game, but unfortunately, that was as close as the Cats would get as the Bulldogs would score four in the ninth and go on to win game three of the series 18-8.

While the game was disappointing the Cats still have some very important games coming up. The Cats have a mid-week game with Murray State before hitting the road to face Vanderbilt this weekend in the last regular season series of the season.

After this week begins post-season play where the Cats can’t afford any slip-ups like they had in this one.