GatorCountry brings you a new podcast as we preview the Florida Gators softball team’s opening weekend of SEC play this weekend.

Andrew Spivey and Nick de la Torre also talk about how the baseball team is doing as they have one more weekend before SEC play starts next weekend.

Andrew and Nick also get into talking spring football and what positions they’re looking forward to watching this spring.

TRANSCRIPT:

Andrew:                 What’s up, Gator Country? Your man, Andrew Spivey, here with Nicholas de la Torre. Nicholas, we talked basketball, and that’s kind of dominating the storylines and everything in Gator Nation, and that’s cool. Basketball deserves its spotlight. Playing well right now. Across the campus a little bit, the diamond sports. Softball, #2 in the country. Baseball, #1, maybe next weeks. I don’t know. They got swept by UCF this weekend. Biggest question is is UCF national champions now?

Nick:                         That was the joke of the week. No. They’re not claiming a national championship. It’s certainly a good win for UCF. It’s not like UCF is a bad team. They’re going to be a regional team. They threw their Saturday guy on Wednesday, and that’s baseball.

Andrew:                 It is. Man, Florida won’t see very many guys that throw like that guy. That is an old-school lefty pitcher. Barely hitting the radar gun at what, 85, Nick? I saw at times it was 83, 84. I can’t say I heard him hitting 90 all night, but maybe I was wrong. He was very sporadic. At the beginning of the game he was pretty sharp, and then he loses his control a little bit, and then some bad calls. We’ll get into that in a second. Then JJ Schwarz flies out to the warning track, almost hits a grand slam.         I thought Sully and Wil Dalton were about to get chumped.

Nick:                         Wil Dalton, he runs the count to 3-0, two questionable strike calls, and then now it’s 3-2, and you get two bad calls. You swing at a bad pitch. You strike out. Dalton pointed his bat at the umpire and said, “That’s on you.” You might be able to get away with telling the umpire that’s on you. A lot of times you’re not going to get away with pointing a bat at him. I think Sully came out of the dugout quick kind of to just get in the way of Dalton, in case he got too hot.

Andrew:                 I also think Sully was letting him know, listen, that sucked. That called sucked. First of all, the 3-0 pitch maybe, because it’s just to get me over fastball. A lot of times umpires are lenient with that pitch. I guess I can understand that a little bit, but then the 3-1 pitch was just as bad.

Nick:                         There was a lot of frustration the night before in Orlando. The strike zone was terrible. You’re looking at a team in Florida who has the best, from a pitching standpoint, the best walk to strikeout ratio and walk per night in the country, and then for them to have 10 walks in a game that’s not a bad game, that’s just a bad strike zone. The umpire Wednesday had nothing to do with the game on Tuesday, but Florida’s players did, and there was definitely some frustration carrying over.

Andrew:                 I don’t even know. I don’t even know what to say. It was bad. That was bad, bad umpiring. Let’s move on a little bit. Kind of talk about what we’re going to talk about in this podcast.

Nick:                         Real quick. There’s a lot, you’ll get it too with softball, and we talk about it more than once, there’s a lot of football mentality when it comes to being a fan and watching these. I get that everyone isn’t a diehard baseball guy like us, but losing to UCF is not embarrassing. It’s baseball. Florida lost two games last year to Florida Gulf Coast, and then won a national championship. It’s not embarrassing.

We’ve talked about the scholarships. There’s a ton of teams and guys in the state of Florida that can’t go to Florida,