Ole Miss baseball returns home to take on New Orleans for the annual School Day Game

Holy smokes.

An 11 a.m. first pitch for mid-week?

If you haven’t already gotten your beers on ice, you’re gonna be shotgunning hot beers and being a real trash ball in front of a lot of elementary students today.

No. 5 Ole Miss (19-2, 2-1) faces the University of New Orleans Privateers, which I think is like someone who is always a private? Like either has no drive or ambition or maybe is just terrible at everything? We’ll find out if they’re any good at mid-day baseball in just about an hour. It’s unlikely this will be a huge challenge for the Rebels as UNO rocks a 9-11 record this year, 2-4 in the Southland Conference.

Rafe. Schindler. Yikes, I would be thanking the heavens you don’t play right field for UNO, sir. And that we aren’t playing on a nice spring weekend when Natty Light is the only thing keeping us sane in the blazing heat.

Houston Roth will look to bounce back from a couple disappointing outings, and the key behind that rebound will be keeping Orynn Veillon (srsly you guys) and his .438 batting average under control. UNO has five players batting over .300 for the year, so it could potentially be a morning/afternoon of work for Roth.

This same UNO team lost 9-7 against Southern Miss, so they are most likely going to put some runs across. Then we take a gander at how they perform on the bump, and the picture gains some clarity as to why they are under the .500 mark this year.

Posting a near 5.00 earned run average, the Privateers will be turning to Schindler to turn around a rough start from its pitching platoon. After he is most likely chased in the fourth or fifth, look for UNO to turn to William Griffin (3.55 ERA) and/or John Barr (3.80 ERA) to keep things within reason. These two have logged nine appearances in 20 games and seem to be steady hands.

With a win, Ole Miss would be the first team in the country to reach 20 wins, so that’s really exciting for a relatively young team that has blossomed from a challenging 2017 campaign to top five status in the first two months of the 2018 season.

Also... today’s game is kid’s day. There will be approximately 10,000 small children screaming for three hours at today’s game as the Rebels hopefully throttle a hapless UNO squad. This is our Spartan ritual of sacrifice that younger generations see us be triumphant and indoctrinate them into the spoils of victory.

Don’t let these kids down, Mike Bianco. They need this. We need this.

First pitch: 11 a.m. CT
TV: NONE
Online streaming: SECN+
Game-time weather: 55°, showers, 55% chance of rain
Projected pitchers
Ole Miss: RHP Houston Roth (2-0, 4.98 ERA)
UNO: RHP Rafe Schindler (1-0, 0.00 ERA)