OXFORD | There are a lot of things that have to go wrong for a team to win only two of its first 12 conference games.
Ole Miss did just that on Saturday, as Arkansas clinched the series with a 6-4 victory after the two teams split a Friday doubleheader. The Rebels fell to 2-10 in the Southeastern Conference and faces 2-10 Mississippi State next weekend in Starkville.
The schedule hasn’t helped, sure, with Florida, Vanderbilt and Arkansas a combined 28-8 in the league to this point. Texas A&M, which took two of three from Ole Miss, has struggled but has talent and finished in the top five nationally a season ago.
Pitching and hitting are both problems for Ole Miss, depending on the game and circumstance. The Rebels entered the weekend, offensively, 13th or 14th in the SEC in average, slugging, on-base percentage, runs, hits, home runs and total bases.
On the mound, the Rebels, inside the league, are 10th or worse in ERA, batting average, hits and runs. Ole Miss is 10th in fielding percentage, as well.
Mistakes and missed chances put the specifics on those statistics, but it goes beyond the raw numbers. Saturday was a gettable and urgent game, and the Rebels simply didn’t make enough winning baseball plays. Physical and mental errors piled up and metastasized into a fifth straight SEC series loss dating back to last season.
Ole Miss is 1-6 in the last seven conference home series. The Rebels swept Missouri last year and have been swept by Tennessee, Alabama and Florida in that span. =
“If you really go back and watch the game, they made more plays than we did,” Mike Bianco said. “They made more pitches and more plays, and that’s what happens. We had opportunities and didn’t do it.”
The Rebels committed two official errors on Saturday, directly leading to three of Arkansas’ five runs. Starter JT Quinn allowed only one earned run in five innings for his best start of the season, but two unearned runs complicated things.
Quinn walked the leadoff batter in the fifth who stole second moments later. Jacob Gonzalez committed an error to put runners on corners, and Arkansas scored on a ball past Calvin Harris. After a fly out, the Razorbacks got a single with the extra out to score another run.
“He probably deserved to win the game,” Bianco said. “He was tough and made pitches, and we didn’t help him.”
TJ McCants mishandled a base hit to right in the seventh inning that allowed Arkansas to score from first with two outs without a throw. The inning ended a batter later.
Ole Miss had some nice at-bats and sequences offensively, and Jacob Gonzalez had three RBIs courtesy of a two-out two-run home run and a two-out RBI single. Harris and Ethan Lege also had two hits apiece, but Harris ran into an out at second base that potentially killed a big inning.
The Rebels were 0-for-1 scoring a runner from third with fewer than two outs and advanced a runner just for times in 12 opportunities.
The Rebels don’t pitch or consistently hit well enough to have a lot of margin currently, but Saturday set up to be a win.
Arkansas started Will McEntire, who had been out with the flu, and Quinn did plenty to keep Ole Miss in the game. He’s been solid the last two weeks in a starter role, but his offense has only scored eight combined runs against teams that didn’t announce a starter ahead of time.
Bianco met with the team for longer than usual, and at this point, the answers aren’t easy to find. Ole Miss isn’t playing good enough baseball to win.
“It’s tough, I don’t know, win I guess,” Peyton Chatagnier said about keeping morale with the team. “I have no idea (why all the losses). I know we’re better than this, and I don’t know what it is but we’ll figure it out.”
