 Arkansas will play for a baseball national championship for the first time since 1979. The Razorbacks defeated No. 1 seed and defending national champion Florida 5-2 on Friday night at TD Ameritrade Park to advance to the final round of the College World Series. Arkansas (47-19) will play the winner of Saturday's game between Mississippi State and Oregon State in the best-of-three championship series beginning Monday. Arkansas has never won a national championship in baseball and has not played in the championship round since 1979 when it lost to Cal State Fullerton. The Razorbacks have never played in the best-of-three championship format that was implemented in 2003. Freshman Casey Martin was 4-for-5 and scored three runs to help Arkansas defeat Florida for the third time in five meetings this season. Martin singled and scored in the first and third innings, and doubled and scored in the fifth to give the Razorbacks a 3-0 lead. He also had a two-out RBI infield single to score Jared Gates in the sixth and extend Arkansas' lead to 5-2. Redshirt sophomore right-hander Isaiah Campbell retired the first 14 batters he faced and earned his fifth win of the season. Campbell struck out a career-high eight batters - also an Arkansas record at the College World Series - in 5 1/3 innings. "It really started with Isaiah Campbell tonight," Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn said. "His stuff was electric for the first 4-5 innings. I think he had a perfect game going into the fifth and only a couple of balls were hit hard in the first four innings for sure. "He gave us a chance to get out and get a couple-run lead. He kept pounding the zone." Jake Reindl came out of the bullpen to strand a runner in the sixth inning and worked around a pair of one-out walks in the seventh. Closer Matt Cronin recorded the final six outs to earn his 13th save, tying the school record previously set by Colby Suggs in 2013. Suggs is Arkansas' bullpen coach. Arkansas' success against Florida ace Brady Singer continued Friday night. The Razorbacks handed the right-hander his third loss of the season after tagging him with four earned runs on seven hits in five innings. Singer is 0-3 with an 11.77 ERA against Arkansas in three career starts. Gators coach Kevin O'Sullivan didn't think Singer had a bad outing. "I don't think he pitched terribly. I think he made a couple of mistakes and they capitalized on it," O'Sullivan said. "In the first inning I think they ran his pitch count up around 30 pitches and I don't think it has as much to do with Brady as it does their offense. "We had three hits the whole night. I think Brady was OK. I think sometimes you just have to tip your cap to the other team." The Razorbacks held Florida (48-21) to three hits. Both runs came against Campbell with two outs in the fifth inning. Brady Smith's RBI single put the Gators on the board and Smith later scored from third base on a Campbell wild pitch to cut the deficit to 4-2. Dominic Fletcher hit a solo home run in the fifth inning to give Arkansas a 4-0 lead. It was Fletcher's 10th home run of the season and second at the College World Series. The Razorbacks have hit a school-record 98 homers this season, including 14 in the NCAA Tournament. Arkansas enters the championship series with an 8-1 postseason record. The Razorbacks have outscored their postseason opponents by a combined score of 85-33, including 23-11 in three games at the College World Series.<doc-sep>OMAHA, Neb. — Some days, they are the Big Gray Machine. Others, the Big Cream Machine. Depends on the jersey color the Arkansas Razorbacks are wearing, while they’re pounding yet another pitching staff. What they don’t have are their reds or whites, because someone on the road tossed those in the laundry together and everything came out pink. And you can’t wear pink, even with an NCAA tournament team batting average of .332. But that’s about the only thing that has gone wrong lately. The Razorbacks clubbed another opponent Wednesday — Texas Tech, 7-4 — to stay in the winner’s bracket of the College World Series. They are now one win from the championship series, and if anyone is going to stop them, they’re better come up with a way to unplug their offense. Their victims understand how hard that is to do at the moment. “It’s an impressive lineup,” Texas Tech coach Tim Tadlock said Wednesday after looking down the business end of the Arkansas bats. “Seems to me when you miss, they’re doing a good job hitting it. One through 9, they can create pressure on you. There’s not an easy out in there.” RELATED: How to watch the CWS | Scoreboard | Interactive bracket Consider Arkansas’ recent carnage. The 14-4 thrashing of South Carolina to win the super regional, when the Razorbacks had five runs after only six batters. The 11-5 mashing of Texas here Sunday, which included sending 14 hitters to the plate in an eight-run sixth inning. Arkansas advances past down Texas, 11-5 And then Wednesday, when they waited 3 ½ hours to play because of weather, and then in the first four innings had two homers, two doubles and five runs. In their last three postseason games, they have outscored their opponents 8-0 in the first inning. For the NCAA tournament, they are hitting .332 and with a scoring differential of 70-31. In two College World Series games, eight different Razorbacks have already driven in runs. “You can win games in a lot of way,” second baseman Carson Shaddy said. “That’s one way we’ve been doing it.” RELATED: Live updates from Omaha | Highlights & videos from CWS This is not exactly out of character for a team that is seventh in the nation in slugging percentage, 11th in batting average and 15th in runs per game and on-base percentage. The signs were there early. Go back to February when Arkansas opened the season against Bucknell. The first gamed ended 14-2. The second game ended 32-4. The leadoff man to this fireworks show, Eric Cole, sat by his locker after Wednesday’s game and tried to describe what the Razorbacks have been up to. The quick starts, for instance. “It’s huge, especially for the starting pitcher. It takes a lot of pressure off them, and honestly kind of takes the pressure of us. That first run of the game is the hardest run to score. Everyone’s looking at you, waiting for you to score that run.” So how are they doing it? “I really think it’s a group of guys going out there looking for the same thing. Draft day is over, school’s over, everything’s over except for this. We’re all in it for a national championship. No one has the draft in the back of their head, no one has stats in their back of their head, everyone’s going out there trying to compete for the guys behind them and the guys on the bench. It’s finally clicking what we thought we had all year. It’s a really fun lineup to be a part of, and it’s a really hard lineup to pitch to when we’re on like this.” It could be any Hog doing the damage on any night. Clearly, hitting has become more contagious in the batting order than chicken pox. From Jared Gates, who homered Wednesday: “We kind of feed off each other. It’s good to have good hitters all around you.” MORE: The College World Series champions almost no one saw coming Wednesday’s wrecking ball was Dominic Fletcher; four hits, four RBIs, a homer that left a vapor trail. “You see guys around you doing well, you want to do well. It’s kind of a competitive thing between all of us.” Which is not good news for the people trying to get them out. “Somebody gets a hit and then the next guy gets a hit and you can kind of feel that the pitcher’s getting nervous, the pitcher doesn’t want to make a mistake,” Fletcher said. “And that’s when they make a mistake and leave pitches over the middle of the plate, and we hammer them.” . @RazorbackBSB's Dominic Fletcher is the first player with 4 hits and 4 RBI in a #CWS game at TD Ameritrade Park. pic.twitter.com/BZJCreWXnT — SEC Network (@SECNetwork) June 20, 2018 Fletcher has six hits and six RBIs in two World Series games. “What I saw from him at the beginning of the spring is he was trying to hit the ball 500 feet,” coach Dave Van Horn said. “I will tell you the very first weekend in a three-game series, I bet he hit seven balls 390 foul, and then he didn’t do anything. He was pulling off, trying to do too much. "Then he slowly climbs out of it.” And now he’s the beast of Omaha. “Just sticking with the approach,” he said. “Mostly just being relaxed and not trying to do too much.” Sounds simple. Not that simple to pitch to him. Not that simple to pitch to any of the Razorbacks. They’d even be scary in pink.<doc-sep>Cody Empkey stopped watching the Texas Tech-Arkansas game in the fifth inning on Wednesday. It wasn't because he's a bad fan. It's because he played baseball his whole life, and he's superstitious, and he hoped Tech would just get something started as he completed his drive home in Dallas from work. He missed the Red Raiders' attempt at a rally that fell short in a 7-4 loss to the Razorbacks. But he and thousands of Tech fans -- many of whom are in Omaha -- will get a chance to see the 1-1 Red Raiders play at least one more game against Florida Thursday evening. RELATED: How to watch the CWS | Shop CWS gear | Highlights & videos from CWS Empkey had the phenomenal fortune to be at a family wedding in Nebraska last week. When he heard about the wedding in February, he said he told his dad and his brother that it might be a good time for them to fulfill their mutual lifelong dream of attending the College World Series in Omaha. "It's always been a bucket list thing," Empkey said, nevermind the possibility of seeing Tech play. As Red Raider alums, he and his brother were ecstatic to see Tech play in the CWS. "That's the Mecca. That's the dream." Being in Omaha is a lot like being in Lubbock, he said. RED RAIDER RALLY TIME?? @TTU_Baseball plates two in the bottom of the 9th!#CWS pic.twitter.com/WvpUR1O5Dq — NCAA Baseball (@NCAACWS) June 20, 2018 "The locals are just super-nice, the nicest people I've met since I left Tech," Empkey said, noting that people stopped them to ask about Tech wherever they went. Although his family drove through the night after Tech's Sunday night win to return to the Dallas area, Empkey said he doesn't regret going to see a CSW game featuring the Red Raiders. "As a fan, it was one of the greatest nights of my life," he said. Empkey is just one of many fans to have caught a game in Omaha this week. RELATED: What we learned from the opening round of the CWS | CWS schedule Tech was allotted 700 seats for its games at the College World Series. But Robert Giovannetti, senior associate athletic director of external operations, estimated there were about 1,000 fans at the first Tech game on Sunday night. "There's a lot more Tech fans" than those 700 seats, he said. People who want to see all of the games sometimes purchase tickets directly from NCAA, he said. Tech is also growing its fanbase. Just a few days ago, Tech had about 48,000 followers on @TTU_Baseball, the Texas Tech baseball twitter account, Giovannetti said. By Wednesday afternoon, that number had jumped to 52,018. "We're seeing growth, just in a couple of days," he said, adding he expects all Tech athletics feeds on both Twitter and Facebook to increase their following in the next few days. This article is written by Karen Michael from Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Texas and was legally licensed via the Tribune Content Agency through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.<doc-sep>
OMAHA, Neb. –– The Florida Gators are still here. They are the weeds in your garden, the gnats on your patio and the clouds in Omaha skies this week. They’re not going away. Not yet, anyway. Never mind the six losses in seven games at the end of the regular season and SEC tournament; a skid that had the masses so worried, first baseman JJ Schwarz felt it necessary to tweet out reassurance: “R-E-L-A-X.” That went up on May 26, the day after the Gators were blown out of the SEC tournament by LSU 11-0. Never mind being taken to the limit by Florida Atlantic in the regional and Auburn in the super regional. Remember how the Gators finally got rid of Auburn? By homering off the poor right fielder’s glove in the 11th inning Never mind the opening loss here in Omaha to Texas Tech, when the Red Raiders beat Brady Singer the day after he was named national player of the year. RELATED: Live updates from Omaha | Hot bats have Arkansas a win away from CWS finals Never mind the occasional wayward defense. The Gators went through Omaha last June without a single unearned run, not committing an error in their final 50 innings. They had three unearned runs in their first six innings this year. Now they face the demanding and exhausting life in the losers’ bracket. And as they held off Texas Tech 9-6 Thursday night in their latest moment of truth, the message seemed clear enough — the defending national champions and No. 1 seed will be carried off this stage with their teeth marks on the bracket. This a team that is now 7-0 in NCAA tournament elimination games in the past two years. “We still have a lot of guys in the lineup from last year and I think that carried over to the mentality this year,” left fielder Austin Langworthy said. “We know what we have to do to survive and advance. That’s the mentality we have right now. That’s all we can do.” The Gators will play Arkansas Friday night, as this College World Series has turned into an SEC-a-palooza. Four teams are left, three from the conference. “When we started looking at the bracket before we got out here,” coach Kevin O’Sullivan said, “figured it would be probably a point in time we were going to play them.” Arkansas and Mississippi State are the 2-0 teams, but Florida is getting pretty hard to dismiss. Singer will be starting, against an Arkansas lineup that has the highest batting average in the CWS. The Razorbacks can afford a loss. The Gators can’t. MORE: Watch the two web-gem catches in left field in Florida vs. Texas Tech game “We’d like to be in the driver’s seat. We’re not,” Schwarz said. “Our backs are against the wall. I think we’ve shown all year that we really respond well when our backs are against the wall.” So where'd they get this knack for survival? “It starts with the guys that Sully recruits,” Schwarz said. “He definitely picks out a certain kind of guy he wants on the team. You come to this school knowing that you’ve got to be a grinder. We’ve got a bunch of grinders on this team." Florida is looking to repeat in Omaha The grinders Thursday included starter Jack Leftwich, a freshman wobbling through the first two innings, needing 54 pitches to get by. And then, just when you wondered when it would all fall apart for him, he turned into a strike machine, needing only 40 pitches to make it through the next four innings, with only 10 of them balls. “I think the reason I was struggling was just because I was nibbling and not attacking the hitters. I was like kind of pitching scared,” he said. But not for long. Another grinder was Jonathan India, who showed the Gators can still play small ball if necessary, as they did last year when they went 5-1 in Omaha while hitting .222. Their first run came Thursday when India walked, went to second on a wild pitch, stole third, and scored on another wild pitch. They had the lead for good in the fourth inning, and still didn’t have a hit yet.