Opposing pitchers on what it's like to face Georgia baseball home run king Charlie Condon

Gunnar Dennis toed the rubber 60 feet, 6 inches away from home plate where the best hitter in college baseball waited for a 2-0 count.

“Pitch to him!” a Georgia fan yelled to the Ole Miss lefthander.

Ball 3.

“Coward!” another fan yelled on this Saturday.

Dennis didn’t serve up a home run to the nation’s leader in that category but Condon smacked the next pitch for a double, stole third and scored on a throwing error by the catcher.

“He’s a special player,” Dennis said. “Seems like he barrels pretty much everything. The double he hit off me had to be like six to eight inches off the plate and he just hammered it into right-center field.”

What makes Georgia baseball star Charlie Condon great

Three days later, fans at Foley Field booed when Clemson intentionally walked Condon.

That didn’t deter Tigers coach Erik Bakich from doing it again with his team clinging to a one-run lead in the ninth inning with an out and a runner on first. He put the tying run on second and walked Condon to put the winning run on first. Georgia ended up sending the game to extra innings and winning in 15, 4-3.

“I just felt like, you know what, it’s the ninth inning, he’s the best player in the nation,” Bakich told reporters. “If we’re going to get beat, it’s not because he hits a home run.”

How to pitch to Condon—or whether to pitch to him at all—is an intriguing storyline at Georgia games.

After all, the 6-foot-6, 216-pound redshirt sophomore from Marietta leads the NCAA with 30 home runs, a .456 batting average and a 1.088 slugging percentage.

“He’s got crazy numbers and stuff,” Clemson reliever Nick Clayton said. “He competes in the box and you know he’s not going to be an easy out. He’s not going to give pitches away. You’re going to have to go earn it.”

The third baseman/outfielder is rated the No. 1 prospect for July’s MLB Draft by Baseball America and MLB Pipeline.

“He’s the whole package,” Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said. “He looks like a big leaguer out there, the way he carries himself.”

Condon carries a 15-game hitting streak into a weekend home series for Georgia (32-12, 10-11 SEC) against Vanderbilt starting Friday.

“He’s easily the best hitter in the country right now,” Ole Miss pitcher Liam Doyle said. “He’s definitely the cream of the crop right now.”

Doyle got Condon swinging for a strikeout on a pitch high and outside on a 1-2 count in game one of a doubleheader on April 20.

He gave up a double to him the next at bat and then on a 2-1 pitch on his third time at the plate, Condon blasted it over the fence in left field for his 25^th home run.

“Threw a change up high to him,” Doyle said.

“You better execute really good pitches in the strike zone to get him,” Georgia coach Wes Johnson, a former Minnesota Twins pitching coach, said. “He will chase occasionally out of the strike zone, but very seldom. …I think everybody’s human, right? I came from the big leagues. Mike Trout’s got a hole. Shohei Ohtani’s got a hole and if you can get it to their hole, down in those low corners, you can get them out.”

How teams will pitch Charlie Condon

Condon has been intentionally walked 17 times compared to three times for the rest of the Bulldogs.

“I would be putting ole No. 24 on a lot if I was pitching against him,” Johnson said. “That guy is just that dangerous.”

Condon last weekend set the career school home run record and now has 55 in 100 games. Former MLB first-round draft pick Gordon Beckham had 53 home runs in 197 games.

Condon is averaging .68 home runs a game. That trails only the NCAA record of .78 by Keith Hammond of Augusta in 1987.

“You have to have your best stuff, no matter what count it is,” Doyle said. “We went in as a staff trying to strike him out, pretend like you always have 0-2 counts on him. If you miss low, you walk him, you hit him, it’s not the end of the world. …You’ve got to be able to pitch him tough—sliders, everything off the plate. Make sure he swings at your pitches, not you give him his pitches.”

Said Dennis, who Condon hit hard twice in the second game of a doubleheader but only went 1 for 3 against including striking him out on a slider: “I was just trying to fill up the zone. He is human. He is going to get outs.”

Bianco said Condon “hits all the pitches, which is a little unusual. Usually, those guys have some type of a hole, but it’s not very big but if you can get it there, you can get him. I don’t know if he does. He seems to be on the fastball. You try to get in on him, he gets to it. You try to throw breaking balls away, you better get him away. If you leave it out over the plate at all, he does damage.”

Condon entered this week with an 87% contact rate against pitches 94 miles per hour plus but under 69% against breaking pitches, according to a post by MLB draft writer Willie Hood on X, formerly Twitter.

Clemson’s Clayton said he wanted to pitch Condon inside and throw off-speed in different counts and thought pitching it down would bring weak contact and keep him from elevating the ball.

“I kind of got ahead and stayed ahead,” he said.

He was able to lock up Condon an inside fastball to make it 1-2 in his one at-bat against him. He struck him out with a change-up away at 81 MPH.

“Before we went out there, we talked about we’re going to be aggressive all night,” Clemson righty Billy Barlow said. “We’re not going to be scared to do anything, we’re just going to do what we’re best at. Really just kind of went right at him. He’s a big guy. He competes really hard. He has a very big presence in the box.”

Barlow struck out Condon swinging on an 84 mile per hour slider outside and induced him into a double play.

“There was a changeup that I left over the middle that he thankfully didn’t swing at,” Barlow said. “Everybody makes mistakes, but he didn’t make me pay for that one, thank God.”

Georgia baseball is deeper than Charlie Condon

Complicating matters for teams going up against Georgia is Corey Collins, who often bats leadoff with Condon in the No. 2 hole. Collins leads the nation in on-base percentage at .599. He’s walked 40 times and been hit by pitch 20.

“You’d like to pitch Charlie really tough and if you walk him, that’s fine,” Bianco said. “There’s times we said pitch it off the edges and if you walk him, you walk him.”

He said Dylan Goldstein (.314, 11 homers) and Slate Alford (.308, 12 homers) behind him in the order make it “tough to navigate.”

Condon is the toughest.

Johnson, who has coached as an assistant at LSU, Arkansas and Mississippi State, thinks back to Mets star Pete Alonso at Florida in 2016 and Dylan Crews (No. 2 overall pick) last season with the Tigers as players he’s seen that can compare to Condon on the college level.

“Charlie’s special,” Johnson said. “Coaches hope to coach a guy like him once every 10 years.”

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Facing Georgia's Charlie Condon through eyes of opposing pitchers