Tucson CitizenTucson Citizen

Arizona’s pitchers struggle in home loss

Citizen Staff Writer
UA BASEBALL

KEN BRAZZLE

kbrazzle@tucsoncitizen.com

Normally, five runs on a Friday night, plus playing at home, would be good enough for the University of Arizona baseball team.

But it wasn’t nearly enough against No. 12 Georgia.

The Bulldogs scored three runs in the fifth inning and four in the eighth to defeat Arizona 11-5 in the first game of a three-game series on Friday night.

The teams play at 6 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday at Sancet Stadium.

“If you get five runs on a Friday night, you should feel good,” said Arizona coach Andy Lopez. “Obviously, we didn’t play very well. We didn’t get a real good starting performance and didn’t get a good bullpen performance. We didn’t give our offense a chance to really get going.”

Arizona’s five pitchers combined to allow eight walks.

Preston Guilmet (0-1) started for Arizona (4-2) and lasted 4 1/2 innings. He yielded seven hits and five runs while walking three.

“There is really no excuse,” Guilmet said. “I really don’t know what it was. I couldn’t locate my fastball.”

Three of the walked hitters scored for Georgia (6-0).

“Pitching is what we didn’t do a very good job of,” Lopez said. “We didn’t get good starting pitching out of Preston. Eight walks. That’s not good pitching. That’s below-average pitching. We got to get our pitching squared away.”

Arizona pulled to within a run at 5-4 thanks to two runs in the bottom of the fifth. But the Wildcats were hurt by their No. 6 through No. 9 hitters going a combined 0 for 15.

“We’re running a lot of young guys out there,” Lopez said. “You have to have a plan and get them ready to play the right guys.

“We feel like we have a plan . . . Now it’s finding the right guys. The only way you find the right guys is in a game like this.

“We had some spots in the lineup that emptied out. That’s the situation. They got to get better. We anticipate them getting better.”

Rafael Valenzuela and Bobby Coyle each had three hits for UA. Coyle homered and had two RBIs.

• Box score, 5C

UA BASEBALL

No. 12 Georgia at Arizona, 6 p.m. Saturday; noon Sunday at Sancet Stadium

Our Digital Archive

This blog page archives the entire digital archive of the Tucson Citizen from 1993 to 2009. It was gleaned from a database that was not intended to be displayed as a public web archive. Therefore, some of the text in some stories displays a little oddly. Also, this database did not contain any links to photos, so though the archive contains numerous captions for photos, there are no links to any of those photos.

There are more than 230,000 articles in this archive.

In TucsonCitizen.com Morgue, Part 1, we have preserved the Tucson Citizen newspaper's web archive from 2006 to 2009. To view those stories (all of which are duplicated here) go to Morgue Part 1

Search site | Terms of service