For Alabama Baseball, Response is Everything After Heart-Wrenching Loss

Alabama baseball needs to hit the reset button in a very short time after Wednesday, as the Crimson Tide faces elimination on Thursday.

Will Miller | May 24, 2023

HOOVER, Ala. —Postseason baseball is some of the most electrifying competition there is. Unfortunately, for every walk-off hit and clutch payoff pitch, there’s a side that gave it up. On Wednesday night, in a long game that took 11 innings to settle, it eventually ended up being the Alabama Crimson Tide against Florida, the top-seeded team in the SEC Tournament.

It was one of the most crushing defeats in recent memory for the Crimson Tide, as Florida catcher BT Riopelle launched— not just hit, launched— a walk-off home run that erased Alabama's three-run lead lead in one shot for the dramatic 7-6 victory.

There were moments in the build to the final frame that could have been game changers for either team had they gone differently— including a botched throw on a bunt play, an interference call on a sacrifice squeeze, better location on a two-strike Florida pitch to Tommy Seidl in the top of the 11th.

However, the SEC Tournament is won and lost in moments, and despite the defeat, Alabama gave itself the opportunity to make more moments in Hoover by advancing to double-elimination with its Tuesday evening 4-0 win over Kentucky.

Seidl, whose bases-clearing hit in the final inning gave the Crimson Tide the lead in a game that had been knotted since the eighth, said Alabama needs to immediately get Wednesday’s result out of its system.

“You’ve just got to flush it, take what you can from it, learn from it,” he said. “Baseball is a game of winning moments, and we won the moment in the top of the [11th], and they got us back in the bottom. It's just a matter of staying [as] even keel as you can throughout those moments that will just help you win those moments in the future.”

Alabama interim head coach Jason Jackson said that while it’s okay for his squad to be angry for a little while, a reset for Thursday’s elimination game is critical. If there's any silver lining in taking a loss like Wednesday’s, it’s in the fact that the Crimson Tide’s tournament goals are still in front of it. However, there's obviously far, far less room for error. Another loss is the end of the line in the conference tournament.

“You invest that much into a game, and it was an emotional game and it was a very well-played game, but this was supposed to hurt. That's a kick in the gut,” Jackson said. “But when we wake up tomorrow, that score resets to 0-0, and we've got to bring it to the ballpark. We have to be ready to go. We have to be ready to bring it when we get here tomorrow.”

Alabama will face the loser of the late game between Auburn and Vanderbilt. Both teams lost a weekend series to the Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa. Auburn has improved since mid-April, while Vanderbilt remains one of the top teams in the country. Either way, the difficulty of winning a high-stakes SEC baseball game cannot be overstated, especially when one game could be the difference in hosting a regional in the NCAA Tournament. The Crimson Tide knows this, and has to respond in a productive way to the loss on Wednesday night.

Perhaps the fast turnaround will help.

First pitch in Alabama’s elimination game will be at approximately 1 p.m. CT on Thursday. The game will be televised on the SEC Network.

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