With so little time left in the season and the stakes so high, Kentucky just couldn’t afford to succumb to a late inning loss against Vanderbilt. That’s exactly what happened.

The Wildcats fell to the second ranked Commodores by a final score of 8-2, officially losing their last series of the regular season. Vanderbilt was able to grab two RBI singles from CJ Rodriguez and Isaiah Thomas in consecutive innings to give them the winning runs.

Dillon Marsh got the start for the ‘Cats and was pitch-for-pitch every bit as good as potential top-3 pick Jack Leiter tonight. Marsh gave the ‘Cats five innings of two hit ball before fizzling out in the sixth and seeing two of his runners score while he watched in the dugout.

“Obviously it’s all hands on deck,” Nick Mingione said after the game in reference to why Marsh got the spot start against one of the best in the country. “We didn’t use Harney yesterday and we didn’t use Marsh yesterday so we decided to do that last night.”

Home runs from Jack Bulger and Troy LaNeve in the eighth put this one out of reach.

Barring any unforeseen changes, losing this series all but clinches that the ‘Cats won’t be making the NCAA tournament unless they get something going down in Hoover at the SEC tournament next week.

“It won’t be hard to keep the team focused,” Mingione said. “They want to win and they keep competing, you obviously saw that tonight.”

Nonetheless, Kentucky will still finish their series and look for a victory against Vanderbilt on Saturday. First pitch is set for 3 p.m. EST and is set to be shown on the SEC Network Plus.