New venue, same result in UK baseball's loss to Liberty

Baseball is a marathon, not a sprint. More so in MLB's six-month grind than a 60-game college schedule, but even SEC baseball is about the long haul.

No early losing streak needs to spoil a season or prompt a reexamination of preseason aspirations.

That will be an important message that new UK coach Nick Mingione preaches in the days ahead, as his Wildcats look to finally get into the win column. The Cats dropped their fourth consecutive game to start the 2017 season on Wednesday.

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While the Wildcats were swept by nationally-ranked North Carolina on the road to start the season they were also competitive in every game against a team that many believe could be a bounceback contender on the national level.

That's a small consolation for a roster full of players who believed Omaha was, against outside odds, a possibility in the preseason.

But Wednesday's 5-4 loss to Liberty was undoubtedly Kentucky's toughest pill to swallow yet in this young season. The Flames aren't ranked, don't have UNC's talented arms or bats, and lacked the preseason expectations of UK's first opponent. But they share a win over UK in common with the Heels.

Mingione's predecessor at Kentucky struggled less with big name opponents - Kentucky won their fair share of games and series against talented and ranked opponents - and more with failing to win the games it needed to win against supposedly inferior foes. One loss to Liberty does not mean that trend will continue in the Mingione era, but it's now vital, for UK's 2017 baseball aspirations, that the Cats snap out of their early skid and find a way onto the right side of the ledger to create some momentum for more tough out of conference series' ahead that will lead into a brutal SEC slate.

Against Liberty on Wednesday, in the first of the Cats' four single-game matchups in the Old Dominion state (the next three are part of the ODU Baseball Tournament), Mingione's squad fell 5-4 in a game that started on a promising note.

Zach Reks continued his torrid start to the year at the plate with a single to start the game. He was sacrificed to second, stole third and scored when Kole Cottam singled for just his latest RBI.

Liberty took a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the second when Eric Grabowski hit a two-run homer off Zack Thompson, who went 4.2 innings allowing four hits and four earned runs in his first start of the year. Thompson fanned eight Flame batters in just half the game's work, but Liberty took advantage of his mistakes and that led Mingione to call on Alec Maley out of the pen.

The Cats surged back ahead with a 3-2 lead courtesy of Marcus Carson's RBI double in the third and Riley Mahan's shot over the right field fence in the fifth.

But the Liberty bats came alive in the bottom half of the fifth, with the Flames also benefitting from continued fielding issues, and the Flames took a 5-3 lead after a three-run inning.

Kentucky was charged with two errors on the day, and one of those led to an unearned run that was the difference in the final score. It's the second game out of four this year when a Kentucky error has accounted for the difference in the game's final score.

Connor Heady homered for the Cats in the sixth to cut their deficit in half, but there were no runs scored in the game's final three frames. Liberty relievers Garret Price and Jack Degroat allowed just one hit over the final third of the game.

Reks is batting .500 through four games with eight hits and three walks to his credit in 19 plate appearances. Unfortunately for Kentucky, he has scored just three times even though he's been a regular on the basepaths.

Two of Kentucky's three home runs on the season came on Wednesday in a promising display of power hitting that the team will need to manufacture runs, especially if the fielding continues to make things more difficult for a staff of starters and relievers that have been hit or miss.

Marcus Carson is batting .357 through four games but no other Wildcat with more than four at-bats is better than .267, with both Cottam and Heady achieving that mark.

Kentucky batters have struck out 34 times through four games, with that stat largely the byproduct of their 15-strikeout game in the season opener in Chapel Hill.

Evan White, who was injured in Kentucky's first game, was still out of action in the Cats' first game in Virginia.

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