A depleted Ole Miss pitching staff continues to take hits on the injury front
Outside of the play on the field this season the Ole Miss baseball team has been hit hard with the injury bug and continued this past week both in the bullpen and position players.
The defending national champions are going to be spending the offseason working to heal up a lot of players that have made Ole Miss look more like the M.A.S.H. unit this season than a title contender.
Ole Miss is trying to piece together innings on the mound each game with a pitching staff that is depleted and continues nearly on a weekly basis to lose more arms. This past weekend saw Mitch Murrell and Brayden Jones unavailable for the Missouri series.
Losing Murrell from the bullpen was compounded by not having him available to come in late in Thursday’s series opener when Ole Miss had a healthy seven-run lead. The Rebels would go on to blow that lead with Riley Maddox on the mound.
Murrell was scratched from the 27-man roster that must be turned in prior to the start of the weekend series and cannot be changed game-to-game. The injury was soreness in Murrell’s arm and head coach Mike Bianco expounded on it during his weekly appearance on Sportstalk Mississippi on Monday.
“A lot of forearm tightness,” Bianco said of Murrell’s injury. “In a good area. Not in that UCL area but more on the top area of his forearm. So he was not able to pitch.”
Jones also experienced soreness in his arm but Bianco kept him on the weekend roster as he felt Jones was the more likely of the two pitchers to possibly be able to throw. That did not take place as Jones never entered a game.
“(Jones) was on the 27-man, but everyday when he was testing it he was never able to throw,” Bianco said.
Ole Miss was also without a key bat in Judd Utermark who banged up his shoulder in the Georgia series.
Utermark scored the winning run off a walk-off RBI single by TJ McCants on April 30, securing the first Southeastern Conference series of the season for Ole Miss.
When scoring the run Utermark slide into home to try and get around or through Georgia catcher Fernando Gonzalez. The two collided, causing Gonzalez to drop the ball and count Utermark’s run but the Ole Miss designated hitter injured his left shoulder in the process.
Bianco provided an update on Monday but the prognosis does not look promising to see Utermark the final two weeks of the regular season or beyond.
“Utermark, he’s likely to need surgery,” Bianco said. “We don’t know what it’ll look like for him the rest of the year. One, it has to do with the rehab but it’s a shoulder that’s more than likely have to be fixed by surgery (and) not just rehab. But not sure what that looks like through the regular season, now.”
On the season Utermark is hitting .135 (5-for-37) in 17 games played, starting in nine of them, with a pair of home runs and six runs batted in.
The absence of Utermark allowed junior Bo Gatlin to be inserted into the lineup for Saturday’s finale against the Tigers. Gatlin went 1-for-2 at the plate but got on base five times with the help of being hit three other times and scored a pair of runs in the Rebels 20-14 victory.
First baseman Anthony Calarco was also sidelined all last week due to an oblique injury suffered during practice on May 1.
