OU Baseball: Kentucky Sweeps No. 17 Oklahoma as Sooners Fall 7-2

A fourth-inning surge wasn’t enough for Oklahoma on Sunday.

After tying the game with two runs in the fourth, the No. 17 Sooners lost 7-2 to Kentucky. The Wildcats swept the series after wins on Friday and Saturday, and it marks Oklahoma’s fourth loss in a row.

Oklahoma starter Malachi Witherspoon struggled to contain Kentucky’s offense.

The junior allowed a run in each of the first two innings. He allowed three more — off back-to-back home runs — in the fourth inning.

Witherspoon, who picked up the loss, allowed eight hits, five earned runs and three walks in four innings. He is 3-7 on the year with a 5.66 ERA.

OU logged nine hits but plated only two runs.

The Sooners got three men on base with no outs in the fourth inning, giving them a chance to take the lead, trailing 2-0. Two of them scored, but Kentucky notched three outs in a row to end the inning and keep the game tied. And in the bottom of that inning, the Wildcats hit their back-to-back home runs to retake control of the game.

They had plenty of chances to claw into the deficit later, too.

OU got runners on first and second in the top of the sixth, but both runners were stranded. The same thing happened in the top of the seventh inning before Kentucky tacked on two insurance runs in the bottom of the frame.

And in the eighth, OU had runners on the corners with no outs and ended up with nothing to show for it. The Sooners went down in order in the ninth inning to give the Wildcats their five-run win.

Kyle Branch led Oklahoma with three hits, while Jackson Willits and Scott Mudler each had two.

The series sweep comes a week after the Sooners took two games of three from No. 23 Ole Miss at L. Dale Mitchell Park. Oklahoma led only once — for half of the third inning in Game 1 — in its series against Kentucky.

Oklahoma (32-17, 13-14 SEC) is tied for 10th in the SEC standings. The Sooners were three games ahead of Kentucky in the standings before the series, but the teams are now tied.

All 16 SEC teams qualify for the conference tournament, hosted in Hoover, AL, from May 20-25.

The Sooners’ final regular-season series is Thursday through Saturday against No. 1 Texas at home. The Longhorns split the first two games of their series against Florida this weekend, with Game 3 scheduled for 1 p.m. on Sunday.