A night to remember: Looking back at Georgia’s wild 20-inning win over Clemson

Will Cain had the perfect excuse not to go.

A couple miles away at Foley Field, No. 5 Georgia faced No. 24 Clemson on the diamond. But on the night of Tuesday, April 16, 2019, Cain stayed in his room at Russell Hall, following along online as he studied for a chemistry test the next day.

His friends, however, were persistent. Led by fellow Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity member Connor Koscevic (who also had a test the next day), Cain eventually put chemistry on the back burner and the group made the drive to Foley Field around the eighth or ninth inning.

They arrived expecting to stay just for an inning or two. In reality, the crew showed up just as an ordinary Tuesday night game turned legendary.

Being a top-25 matchup, this contest already meant a little more than a typical midweek game. Georgia head coach Scott Stricklin emphasized to his team that a win against the Tigers could do wonders for the Bulldogs’ postseason seeding down the road.

“If you can get those wins, it really helps you RPI-wise,” Stricklin said. “You want to make sure head-to-head that you’ve taken care of business with those teams because it helps you when it comes time to decide if you’re going to host a regional or not.”

Midweek games are important, but SEC series are where teams really make their case for the NCAA tournament. Stricklin said he tries to schedule most weekday games for Tuesdays to give the Bulldogs an extra day of rest before the weekend.

However, the TV schedule that week had Georgia starting a conference tilt with Missouri on Thursday, just two days after the Clemson game. The mindset of not burning the bullpen’s best relievers, a thought prevalent during the week anyway, came even more into focus as the game got underway just after 7 o’clock.

Things progressed like a typical top-25 matchup. Both teams got solid starting pitching, Georgia from Tim Elliott and Clemson from Jacob Hennessy, before the Tigers broke through with two runs in the sixth.

In the bottom of the seventh, the Bulldogs tied it on a two-run “Little League home run” from shortstop Cam Shepherd, who doubled to left and came all the way around to score when the Clemson outfield failed to get the ball in.

As all this action unfolded, junior Logan Moody sat in the bullpen. He had appeared in just six games out of 38 so far on the season, but he knew he needed to stay ready as the game crept toward extra innings.

“When you’re not playing the game but you’re watching it, you’re still focusing in on stuff, seeing how the other hitters on the other team are reacting to certain pitches and that type of thing so if you’re called, when you go in the game you’ll know how to pitch to them,” Moody said.

Fatigue and frustration show up

After Georgia’s John Cable struck out to end the bottom of the ninth, the game officially moved into extra innings. Shortly after, Cain, Koscevic and company arrived at a stadium that had seen the crowd thin out considerably since first pitch.

They first sat in general admission seating, then moved to the upper section behind home plate a couple innings later. Soon after, they moved to the empty lower section directly above the plate. They joined the several hundred diehard Bulldog fans that still remained in the stands.

“You could kind of feel that everybody was just like leaning in, tuned in to the game, kind of living and dying on every pitch,” Koscevic said.

As Moody took over with one on and none out in the top of the 12th, Sean Brock watched from Buddha Bar in downtown Athens. He had photographed the first few innings of the game but had to leave. As he stood around with friends at the bar, he realized that contest he’d left hours earlier had yet to end.

As he recalled it, people at the bar were laughing at the TVs, amazed that the game wouldn’t end. Around the 15th inning, Brock decided he had to make it back to Foley Field. He Ubered home, grabbed his camera and headed to the park.

The game had yet to end in large part thanks to Moody’s dominance. He pitched a then season high four innings and allowed just one hit and no runs. Eight of his 12 outs recorded came via strikeout.

He said he focused on just coming in and throwing strikes, allowing Georgia’s stellar defense to work behind him. Being the sixth pitcher into the game allowed him to present yet another unique look to the Tiger batters. Moody also said that as the game crept closer to midnight, adrenaline began to take hold.

“I guess we’d been there for eight or nine hours, you already threw once, you sit down in the dugout,” Moody said. “You get back out there and then you’re just having to go for it with not much energy, and the adrenaline’s just taking over completely.”

Moody also had one of the best chances to end the game at the plate. He came up with runners on first and second and two outs in the bottom of the 13th, knowing a hit would likely end the game. He sat fastball the entire at-bat and scalded a 1-2 pitch back up the middle.

The ball connected with the leg of Clemson pitcher Holt Jones, however, instead of making its way to the outfield. He picked it up and flipped it to first, ending another Bulldog threat.

“When that ball didn’t get through and a few other balls didn’t get through to walk it off, I was like, ‘This game could go 25 innings,’” Moody said.

Moody’s at-bat was just the start of the Bulldog frustration. Georgia stranded the winning run in scoring position four innings in a row from the 13th through the 16th innings.

“You see the emotion come out when they don’t get it done,” Stricklin said. “Fatigue sets in, frustration sets in, and that’s when you see a helmet thrown, a bat thrown, someone throws out an expletive. Guys get really frustrated, and you’ve just got to try to calm them down somehow, someway.”

Student support provides a jolt

Stricklin recognized this phenomenon of trying too hard from a game he managed nearly seven years earlier. In 2012, his Kent State team topped Kentucky 7-6 in 21 innings in the first game of an NCAA regional.

That day, Stricklin told his players, “You’re going to tell your grandkids about this game. Make sure it’s a good story.” Seven years later, he relayed the same message to the Bulldogs.

Meanwhile in the stands, Cain and Koscevic had been busy recruiting friends to join them at Foley. They had moved to the first few rows behind the plate around the 13th or 14th inning, and a couple of frames later Koscevic thought to look over his shoulder.

“I turned around and that whole section was filled,” Koscevic said. “I was like, ‘Wow, that happened quickly.’”

Students were filing in from all over Athens — dorms, bars, frat houses, you name it. Some came in their pajamas. Down in the dugout, the Bulldogs took notice.

“It was like getting hit in the face with a bucket of water,” Stricklin said. “It was a wake-up call.”

These students came to create an atmosphere more like that of a football or basketball game. They taunted Clemson players who had gone six or seven at-bats without a hit. They heckled Grayson Byrd, son of Atlanta Braves broadcaster and former MLB pitcher Paul Byrd. (The younger Byrd, to his credit, laughed it off and waved to fans after the game, according to Koscevic.)

As the game rolled toward 1 a.m., the crowd consisted mainly of students. A dedicated student section is something Koscevic believes Georgia baseball is missing, noting the advantage that student areas present for schools like Ole Miss and Mississippi State.

“I think that was part of the reason why that game was so fun because by the end of it, it was pretty much all students,” Koscevic said. “We were able to kind of, not necessarily let loose, but have a little more fun than being stuck up in the corner of the stadium.”

As energy picked up in the stands, the players began to let loose too. It started with Aaron Schunk retrieving a Guitar Hero guitar from the clubhouse, “acting like he was shooting energy out on the field with it,” according to Stricklin.

That progressed to a shark hat, a motorcycle helmet and even a game of dugout Ping-Pong, among other hijinks. Clemson joined in with rally caps as both teams tried to one-up the other.

Moody said this was needed to stay loose in such a long and close game. After all, the players had been there for eight or nine hours at that point. Stricklin noticed the same thing and trusted his players, especially upperclassmen like Schunk, Adam Goodman and Tony Locey, with keeping the dugout loose but focused.

“What are you going to do, sit there and tell them to be quiet?” Stricklin said. “They’re having energy, they’re trying to have fun, they’re trying to lift their teammates up. That was one of the times where I just kind of put tape over my mouth and said, ‘You know what, you guys have fun.’”

Oh, what a night

On the mound, freshman Darryn Pasqua picked up right where Moody had left off. In his sixth appearance of the year, he fired five shutout innings with two hits and seven strikeouts.

Between them, Moody and Pasqua combined for nine scoreless innings with three hits and 15 punchouts.

“That’s the best probably both of them have ever thrown, and they’ve had some good outings for us,” Stricklin said. “It was a really good moment for both of those guys to kind of come up and give us even more depth, that gave us more confidence going forward.”

Pasqua escaped a jam in the top of the 20th inning, getting a strikeout to strand runners on second and third. That moved the game to the bottom of the frame as the clock ticked toward 1:30 a.m.

The inning started with a walk from Tucker Maxwell, who advanced to second on an errant pickoff throw. An infield single from Riley King put runners at the corners with none out. After a strikeout and intentional walk, Connor Tate stepped to the plate with the bases loaded.

He chopped a ball to the left side of the infield. It hopped past the third baseman and into the history books as Maxwell scored from third. At 1:35 a.m., the longest game in Georgia history ended with the Bulldogs winning 3-2.

“You’ve got 20 innings, six hours of this up and down emotion,” Stricklin said. “You win in the ninth inning, you’re happy. You get a walkoff, you’re excited. You win in the 20th, there’s just so much that has been put into that emotional bucket throughout the game that it’s, again, I think it’s just a lot of relief coming out.”

Stricklin said the postgame speech was short in an attempt to get the players out of there and rest as much as possible. However, he suspects many of them spent the night as he did — Stricklin said he was so wound up and excited that he didn’t fall asleep until nearly 4 a.m.

It wasn’t just the players that were flooded with excitement. Brock said a large group of students went to celebrate at the Snelling dining hall after the game, telling the tale of the contest to the workers serving exuberant students at 2 a.m.

“When I tell my kids, when they go to college, it’s not the nights that are the crazy nights or the big parties or whatever,” Brock said. “It’s just kind of the weird nights where you recognize you’re at college and you’re on your own.”

The next day, the team held a very light workout. Stricklin still wanted them to rest before the series with Missouri started the next day. He did, however, tell them they were now forever a part of Georgia baseball history.

The staff felt concerned about the fatigue level of the players — overly concerned, as it turned out — but the Bulldogs went on to sweep that weekend set with Missouri.

“The team definitely bonded because that’s something you just don’t experience ever,” Moody said. “That definitely helped the team going forward and gave us some momentum going to the end of the season and postseason.”

Meanwhile, Cain went to class on that Wednesday — April 17, 2019 — and took his chemistry test. He thinks it went well, although he’s not exactly sure how he scored or even what the test covered.

His memory of that special night at Foley Field, however, hasn’t faded a bit.