HOOVER, Ala. — The rain tried. It really did.
Somewhere between the bottom of the third inning and a weather delay that pushed first pitch back into primetime, Mother Nature apparently decided she had strong opinions about the Arkansas-Auburn SEC Tournament semifinal.
She stalled things. She made everyone wait. She did everything short of canceling the whole affair.
Then the Razorbacks just went right ahead and won anyway.
Arkansas beat Auburn 2-1 Saturday night to reach the SEC Championship game for the first time since 2021 and the rain delay — dramatic as it tried to be — turned out to be about as relevant to the outcome as a pregame weather app.
Ryder Helfrick hit a go-ahead home run to left in the eighth inning, the bullpen slammed the door and the Hogs punched their ticket to the title game.
Simple as that. No weather system was going to stop it.
The rain delay’s big moment
To be fair to the delay, it had excellent timing.
Auburn led 1-0 on a Bub Terrell homer to right in the second inning and the skies opened up just before the bottom of the fourth.
Play was set to resume at 8:15 p.m., which meant everybody got to sit around and think about things for a while.
Arkansas thought about how to score some runs. Auburn thought about how to protect a one-run lead.
The rain just kept coming down, blissfully unaware that neither team was going to let a little precipitation write the ending to this story.
When play finally resumed, it became apparent almost immediately that the rain delay was going to go down as the least interesting thing to happen in this game.
Cooper Dossett’s big adventure
It’s worth noting that Arkansas sent Cooper Dossett to the mound as a starter for the first time all season.
His ERA as a starter coming in was 7.90, which is the kind of number that makes a pitching coach reach for antacids.
Dossett hadn’t faced Auburn at all during the regular season, so the Tigers didn’t know much about him. That was either a strategic masterstroke by Dave Van Horn or a creative way of saying the options were limited.
Either way, Dossett didn’t make it out of the third and James DeCremer took over to keep things from unraveling.
Then Colin Fisher came on in the fourth. Then Ethan McElvain in the fifth.
The Razorbacks were essentially running a relay race out there on the mound, passing the baton and daring Auburn to do something about it.
Auburn’s Alex Petrovic had come in at 9-2 with a 3.38 ERA, the kind of résumé that makes a lineup uncomfortable.
He’d actually beaten this Arkansas squad back in the regular-season series finale, going five innings in an 8-3 Auburn win. The Tigers felt good about him on the hill.
He was gone by the fifth inning too. Ryan Hetzler came on and that’s when the Hogs found the crack in the wall.
Camden Kozeal ties it up
Reese Robinett doubled to center to lead off the fifth.
Two outs later, with Robinett perched at second and Arkansas needing something to happen, Camden Kozeal singled to right and Robinett scored.
Just like that it was 1-1, the rain delay felt like a distant memory and the game had a pulse again.
Helfrick struck out swinging to end the threat that inning, so the drama wasn’t going anywhere yet.
The sixth and seventh innings came and went without a run scored by either side. Auburn actually turned a nifty double play in the seventh to escape a potential jam and for a few innings this thing looked like it might need extra frames to settle.
Helfrick doesn’t miss
Then came the eighth and Ryder Helfrick made the whole night irrelevant. The rain, the delay, the bullpen carousel, all of it.
After a Lucas Steele error on a foul ball opened the inning, Damian Ruiz flied out and Kozeal struck out looking. Two outs, nobody on. Helfrick stepped in.
He hit it to left. It didn’t come back. Arkansas 2, Auburn 1.
Zack Stewart struck out to end the inning, but no matter.
The Hogs had what they needed. The bullpen finished it off in the ninth as Terrell popped out, Brandon McCraine struck out swinging and Mason McCraine flied out to left. Done.
Finally back where they belong
That’s the part worth savoring here.
Arkansas is 38-19 overall and 17-13 in SEC play, a record that doesn’t exactly scream “dominant.”
This has been a season with enough turbulence to keep meteorologists busy which, given the rain delay, feels appropriate.
But the Razorbacks are headed to the SEC Championship game for the first time since 2021 and they got there by beating a team that had knocked them around twice during the regular season in Auburn’s own backyard.
That’s the kind of win that means something regardless of the weather, the starting ERA or anything else that tried to get in the way Saturday night.
The rain had its moment. Helfrick had his. The Hogs are moving on.
