Georgia baseball burns the midnight oil (again) with Clemson in another marathon win

Here’s some advice if you are planning to come to a future Georgia baseball home game against Clemson.

Bring plenty of snacks. Take an afternoon nap. Don’t have an early wakeup call.

Five years after the two old rivals played a 6 hour and 33 minute marathon 20-inning game, they came kind of close again.

Well, it felt like that at least when No. 4 Clemson’s Rocco Reid uncorked a bases loaded, one-out wild pitch and No. 17 Georgia’s Paul Toetz raced home from third for the 4-3 Buldogs win.

The game took 5 hours and 30 minutes. First pitch was 7:03 p.m. Tuesday and the game ended at 12:33 a.m. Wednesday.

Toetz’s Georgia teammates mobbed him and they took the celebration into left field.

“I didn’t even hesitate,” Toetz,said. “I said screw it. Let’s run and let’s go home.”

Most in the season-high crowd of 4,183—actually the largest announced since 2009—were long gone by the time the game ended but around 300 fans perhaps remained.

At 11:59 p.m. with the game going to the bottom of the 14^th, a Georgia fan led a chant of “Nothing finer in the land than a drunk obnoxious Georgia fan.”

Someone in the press box muttered: “14^th inning stretch. Time to get up right?”

Toetz, the Purdue transfer, said it was his longest game he probably has ever played.

“It’s really hard to stay locked in,” said Toetz who went 1 for 6, driving in a run on a second inning single for the first run of the game. “We did our best job to stay locked in and stay focused and we got rewarded today.”

Georgia won the 20-inning game against Clemson, too, 3-2, on April 16, 2019.

A box score from that game is framed on a wall in the Foley baseball press box.

Georgia reliever Chandler Marsh brought up that game multiple times in the bullpen.

He used to see a clip of it in a scoreboard highlight video before games.

“We were like how far is this one going to go?” Marsh said.

Marsh (1-0) came in with runners on first and second and one out in the 14^th, got out of the jam and struck out all five batters he faced.

“It was a long time in the bullpen,” Marsh said. “It was guy after guy.”

Marsh was the last of 10 Georgia pitchers used.

Clemson also went through 10.

The teams combined to leave 28 runners on base.

“What did we go 15?” Marsh said. “It felt like 20.”

First-year Georgia coach Wes Johnson saw his team improve to 30-10 while Clemson fell to 32-8.

Johnson, the former veteran SEC assistant, said he never experienced a game that long in college.

He was part of an 18-inning game when he was pitching coach for the Minnesota Twins when they lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 5-2 on June 27, 2019.

Clemson led 3-1 in the seventh inning before Georgia tied it after RBI singles from Corey Collins in the seventh and ninth.

Then the teams played five shutout extra innings before it came to an end in the bottom of the 15^th.

Georgia’s pitching staff shut down Clemson for the final 11 innings.

“Mental toughness for me is what you saw tonight,” Johnson said.

He said that when it was actually the early morning. He was asked about the effort of starting pitcher Zach Harris who threw two shutout innings before being touched for two runs in the third before being lifted after two outs.

“Zach Harris, that feels like two days ago,” Johnson said.

The game tied for the second longest this college baseball season.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Georgia baseball prevails in 15-inning marathon over Clemson