Gators lose season-opening series for second year in a row

For the second consecutive year, the No. 9 Gators dropped their season-opening series this weekend with back-to-back losses to Liberty. 

The Flames evened the series with a 6-4 victory Saturday and won Sunday’s rubber match 5-3 at Florida Ballpark before a crowd of 5,377. 

Freshman Pierce Coppola’s seven strikeouts marked the most by a Gators pitcher in his debut since 2011 (Karsten Whitson), but Liberty struck out 11 UF batters Sunday and 31 total in the series. 

“Their pitching staff did a really good job of attacking the entire weekend. That was probably the difference,” Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan said after Sunday’s loss. “They didn’t give us anything. We put ourselves in tough positions with leadoff walks or hit batters to start innings. We put ourselves in a little bit of a hole.

“Offensively, we’ve been swinging the bat really well the entire preseason and I thought we swung the bat good on Friday night. For whatever reason, we struggled the last two days. Give Liberty’s pitchers credit, that’s the bottom line.”

UF took a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the fourth Sunday with Josh Rivera’s RBI double down the left-field line and BT Riopelle’s two-run shot — his first homer as a Gator and the 13th of his college career.

Florida’s lead didn’t last long. 

The Flames tied the game in the fifth with a two-run homer by Aaron Anderson — prompting O’Sullivan to pull Coppola for reliever Philip Abner — and Brady Gulakowski’s RBI double. 

Abner exited after back-to-back walks to start the sixth and Liberty took its first lead with Gray Betts’ sacrifice fly. Gulakowski then homered off Garrett Milchin in the seventh to make it 5-3.

Florida reliever Ryan Slater tossed scoreless frames in the eighth and ninth, but the Gators couldn’t over the two-run deficit with no hits in the final two innings and just five for the game. 

Coppola received a no decision in his first-career start, pitching 4.1 innings with two earned runs allowed on five hits and two walks.

“He was good,” O’Sullivan said of Coppola. “Just ran up some deep counts, tough to get him through the fifth inning. I think that’s the thing he’s going to have to improve on. You can see the talent. He’s going to be really good. He is good. But … he buries a breaking ball against Betts, throws the ball behind Anderson 2-0. There’s just two situations, it’s a 3-2 ballgame. Obviously with Phillip you got an 0-2 count and a leadoff walk. That’s another minor situation that ends up being the difference in the ballgame. But I don’t want to put it on the pitching. 

“The pitching is going to have its ups and downs at this point in the season because of the youth. The offense, they gotta take some of the pressure off these younger arms. So, it was not expected. … Just, for whatever reason, took some fastballs and hitter’s counts maybe this weekend that we hadn’t done before. Chased some pitches out of zone, maybe panicked a little bit with two strikes. But I certainly didn’t expect that from some of our older hitters. I mean, they’ve been around. But, you know, what are you gonna do? At this point, get ready for Tuesday and talk about some things you need to improve on.” 

Florida (1-2) travels Tuesday to Deland for a matchup with Stetson at 6:30 p.m. on ESPN+. UF is now 38-7 in season-opening series under O’Sullivan and 22-5 since 2014.

The Gators lost their first season-opening series under O’Sullivan last year against Miami. 

“I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, a loss is good.’ You don’t want to go 1-2 to open up the opening weekend,” O’Sullivan said. “But certainly when you play good teams, it gives you an idea of where you’re at and where you need to improve. You could play lesser competition and walk away with three wins and you have no idea what you’re going to improve on moving forward. 

“So, that’s the positive I’m going to pull out of it. We’ll look at it and we’ll figure out some things in the lineup that we need to do. Obviously, we’re going to need some protection behind Sterlin [Thompson]. These are things that, you know, I’ve been here a long time. There’s certain things in the lineup that have to happen. Our older guys gotta do their job.”