Ole Miss Baseball improved to 6-0 on the season and clinched a series win over UNCW in a dramatic showing Saturday afternoon. The game began as a pitching showcase on both sides, yet late offensive pushes from both teams resulted in an 8-4 final score.
Starting pitcher James McArthur was fantastic in six innings, striking out 11 hitters on 91 pitches. McArthur had a no-hitter through the first six innings and finished the game with only two hits allowed and one earned run.
“I felt pretty good the whole day,” McArthur said after the game. “The last couple weeks, the slider really hasn’t been there, but today it was, and I was really able to locate that.”
McArthur did give up a run near the end of his pitch count, yet the scoring really began after he had been relieved. Head coach Mike Bianco went through four pitchers after McArthur ran out of gas, and Will Ethridge closed the game in the ninth.
While pitching was strong up until the seventh inning, hitting was almost an exact opposite. Thomas Dillard and Colby Bortles scored in the fourth and sixth innings respectively, but the team as a whole just couldn’t seem to capitalize on opportunities. Eight of 11 batters had hits, many in the early innings, but Bianco and his team couldn’t seem to turn hits into runs. Then came the seventh inning and eighth innings.
In the seventh, UNCW scored on an RBI single to make it onto the scoreboard, and Ole Miss made the lead 3-1 with Colby Bortles’ RBI double and Will Golsan’s advancement.
The Rebels trailed for the first time in the series when Will Stokes allowed a two-run home run to Nick Feight, who tied a school record for home runs last year with 21, and the three-run eighth inning gave the Seahawks a 4-3 lead.
Ole Miss answered that five runs in the bottom of the eighth to not only regain the lead but put it out of the reach of a UNCW comeback. Perhaps most notable was pinch-hitter and true freshman Bryan Seamster smashing one right into the student section for a go-ahead two-run bomb.
The offense was boosted, yet again, by freshmen hitters, but it also saw the notable return to form of Tate Blackman and Colby Bortles. The junior and senior captains, respectively, had underwhelming performances prior to Saturday’s matchup and neither had over a .100 batting average. That changed as Blackman went 3-5 with an RBI and Bortles added 3-5 with 2 RBIs. The return of the two offensive workhorses for Ole Miss was a big part of the five-run eighth inning. Both players had a set of RBI hits and runs in the momentous inning.
Another notable contributor was freshman first baseman Cole Zabowski with a four-hit game. “Z-bow,” as he’s called by teammates, is now hitting .545 on the season. Freshmen Thomas Dillard and Grae Kessinger also added runs, proving this freshman class’ exceptional ability to impact games and change momentum.
The Rebels 8-4 win has yet again showed this team’s resiliency. He knows that not every inning will be perfect, but when it gets to crunch time, he knows his team can step up and handle the pressure, as it’s done so many times so early this season.
“It hasn’t been an easy 6-0,” Bianco said. “We’ve had a lot of close games and games we’ve had to work for, a lot of games where we’ve been behind or lost the lead, but these guys answer and play hard and play the game through.”
That ability to fight through adversity and count on a teammate to step up when needed is what has impressed him most about this young team. The talent, the power, the athleticism is all there, but it is because of those intangibles that Ole Miss sits at 6-0. The Rebels will attempt to go for a sweep on Sunday. First pitch is at noon.
