Remembering the 2020 Ole Miss Baseball Historic Run

By Adam Brown
Sports Editor
adam.brown@hottytoddy.com

The Ole Miss 2020 baseball team was on a historic start to the season in the middle of a 16-game winning streak prior to the start of conference play. That all came to a close when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country.

After the team played its last game against ULM on March 11, in a 18-7 victory one fan wrote a letter to the club and the fan was retired University of Mississippi Dean of Students Sparky Reardon.

“It was such a disappointment when the season was canceled,” Reardon said. “I just felt like it would be cathartic that I would write a letter with my feelings in it. Once I wrote the letter I said, ‘Well dang I am going to go ahead and send it to the team.’”

After he sent it to the team the letter got posted to Facebook and he received a call from Merrick McCool with Ole Miss Sports Production.

“Asked me if I would do the voice over in it and I did it. I was glad to do it,” Reardon said. “If it makes anybody feel better in these trying times I am glad to do it.”

During the winning streak, as an Ole Miss baseball fan, Reardon did not want to get his hopes up too early.

“It was hard not to get your hopes up watching this team,” he said. “They were so much fun and what was particularly encouraging was even as a baseball fan, I felt we were striking out too much and had too many errors. Those were the two things that concerned me, but here we were at 16-1 I thought to myself how good can we be when we eliminate those things.

“The pitching was so strong with (Gunnar) Houglund, (Doug) Nikhazy, (Max) Cioffi, (Nick) Forsyth, (Austin) Miller and Derek Diamond,” Reardon said. “I felt like this had to be one of our stronger staff we have ever had.”

One of the strong suits of the team was the combination of the young club and the upper-class leadership the Rebels had on the field together.

“It was such a great list between raw young and energetic talent and really talented seasoned veterans,” Reardon said. “I mean with guys like (Anthony) Servideo, (Tyler) Keenan, (Tim) Elko, Miller and those guys then you had the budding young stars of (Peyton) Chatagnier, (Hayden) Dunhurst and (Justin) Bench and those guys that were coming on. A real nice combination.

“What a great season this was with the great combination of junior college players that came in and contributed,” Reardon said. “So all-in-all it was a great season and we hated to see it come to an end. But that is baseball.”