Florida baseball got the Gainesville Regional moving in the first pitch of the game, and Kyle Jones made sure the opener had a jolt immediately. He turned that first offering from Rider into a home run, giving the No. 8 national seed a 1-0 lead on Friday, May 2, at 1 p.m. ET on +.
That was the kind of start Florida wanted at home. The Gators entered the regional at 39-19, had won 10 of their last 12 games and were hosting a postseason regional for the fourth time in the last six years, while Rider arrived after winning the MAAC tournament and riding an 8-2 stretch of its own.
The early innings belonged to Florida. Landon Stripling drove in Caden McDonald with a sacrifice fly in the fourth to make it 2-0, Jones added an RBI single in the fifth, and Stripling followed with a solo shot in the sixth to push the lead to 4-0. Russell Sandefer had helped hold the edge in front of that run, allowing one hit and striking out four over four innings, and he left after two outs in the sixth with Florida still in front.
Then the game turned hard. Rider chipped away before Anthony Paskell blasted a grand slam off Jackson Barberi in the eighth, and the rally kept going until Florida’s 6-0 cushion became a 6-6 tie. The Gators answered with the kind of power that had carried them through much of the season: Caden McDonald hit a solo homer and Cade Kurland followed with a two-run shot to restore a 7-6 lead.
Even that did not settle it. Rider tied the game again in the ninth on a solo home run off Joshua Whritenour, leaving Florida baseball in a fight at the end of a regional opener it had controlled for most of the afternoon. The matchup carried a small bit of history too — the teams had last met on May 21, 1992, when Florida beat Rider 6-1 in Gainesville — but the more immediate story was how quickly an opening-round cushion can disappear in the NCAA Tournament.
What Florida did after the ninth was the question left hanging. The Gators had already shown they could score in a burst and answer a punch, but the regional opener was no longer about a fast start alone. It was about who finished it.
