Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By KEVIN ECKLEBERRY

Daily News

The batting average isn’t where he’d like it be, but Georgia’s Ben Anderson has found a way to get on base.

Anderson, a LaGrange High graduate and a red-shirt junior, has a .206 batting average, but he leads the team with 34 walks, and he has a .332 on-base percentage from the leadoff position.

Anderson will try to keep finding his way on base as Georgia opens play in the SEC tournament on Tuesday in Hoover, Ala.

Georgia (30-23), the number eight seed, will play ninth-seeded LSU (34-21) at 5:30 p.m.

While loser of the game will be eliminated, the winner advances to the double-elimination portion of the tournament to play top-seeded Arkansas on Wednesday.

Anderson heads into the SEC tournament on the heels of two of his best games of the spring in a regular season-ending series against Ole Miss.

Anderson had two hits and two RBIs in Friday’s loss, and he had two hits with a double and three runs scored in Saturday’s win.

The performance bumped Anderson’s batting average up 10 points and above the .200 line.

Anderson, who has played in 52 of Georgia’s 53 games with 49 starts, has four home runs, three triples, and 17 RBIs.

One of Anderson’s most memorable moments this season came when he hit a go-ahead home run during a 7-3 road win over Arkansas.

Anderson played his freshman season at Furman before transferring to Georgia, and he had to sit out the 2019 season.

Anderson excelled during a COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, leading the team with a .414 batting average and a .544 on-base percentage, and he reached base in the first 17 games of the season.

Another former LaGrange Granger, Logan Moody, is a red-shirt senior pitcher for Georgia, although he hasn’t appeared in a game this season.  Moody was an outfielder in 2016 and 2017, and after being red-shirted in 2018, he made the transition to pitcher for the 2019 and 2020 seasons.

During the 2019 and 2020 seasons combined, Moody was 2-0 with a 3.06 earned run average, and he didn’t allow any runs in eight innings last year.