Patience is a virtue. It’s something that can ease the pain of your baseball team not winning a home SEC series in its three tries. It’s also something that might come in handy when your weekend starting rotation is up in the air until the weekend.
After starting the opening game of a weekend series all seven times this year, Jamie Gant has moved to relief, at least for now.
Mississippi State head coach Ron Polk has all this to deal with.
“But I’m a patient man,” he said Sunday after his Bulldogs had just lost the rubber match of a series with the Florida Gators. He realizes the team (22-14, 6-9 SEC) has 15 league games to go.
Game 1
MSU pitcher Alan Johnson assumed the new role of Friday-night starter and made it seem like a perfect fit in the Bulldogs’ 11-2 victory.
Johnson, who began the season as a Sunday starter and later moved to Saturday, carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning and received more than enough run support to get the win. The junior from Pleasant Grove, Ala., finished with five strikeouts and allowed just three hits for a pair of runs.
Throwing under the lights was new for Johnson, but the sun apparently stayed up long enough for him to get comfortable.
“I just took it like I was coming out here on Saturday,” Johnson said. “I got Daylight Savings Time, so it’s just like Saturday whenever I came out here and pitched.”
Florida’s C.J. Smith was the only Gator starter to register a base hit off the right-hander, but it was pinch hitter Ryan Kennedy who broke up the no-no and the shutout with a single and a two-RBI double. Johnson said he’d had trouble averting his eyes from the scoreboard while it had zeros in the hits and runs columns.
“I was staring at it the whole time. It was driving me nuts,” he said.
Johnson still had the Gators scoreless after stranding three base runners to end the sixth. To start the seventh, he got a little help in preserving the shutout when Jeff Butts made a leaping catch at the left field wall. It appeared that Butts robbed Matt LaPorta of a homerun, but the sophomore left fielder wasn’t sure.
“I had my back to (the wall), so it’s hard to tell,” Butts said. “I knew I was on the track and that Joe (center fielder Joseph Hunter) was talking to me, so I just took a little leap.”
With two doubles to go along with a sacrifice fly, Butts became one of seven Bulldogs to turn in multi-hit performances. MSU had a season-high hit total for SEC games with 19.
State got on the boards early when Brad Corley hit a two-out single in the bottom of the first and Craig Tatum took the next pitch deep for a 2-0 lead.
“Steve (Gendron) came back after he popped out. He said (Boss’) curveball wasn’t good-that if he threw it, you could just hammer it.” Tatum said. “So I went up there expecting curveball first pitch and got it.”
Game 2
Florida got all it needed to even the series the first inning of Saturday’s contest, winning 16-6 and roughing up Todd Doolittle in his second start for MSU. Doolittle had pitched 13 consecutive innings of scoreless baseball to earn his first start last Tuesday against Mississippi. On this day, though, he gave up two hits and walked four for six runs, three earned and retired only one batter before being pulled.
“I don’t know if he was nervous or hyper or overthrowing, but he didn’t have command,” Polk said.
The Gators put seven runs on the board in the first inning and another seven in the fourth, making sure there would be no comeback.
Game 3
MSU and Florida each managed to get 10 hits Sunday, but the Gators turned four of theirs into a five-run fifth inning and won the ballgame 8-3.
The Bulldogs took a 1-0 lead in the third inning when Tyler Jones smoked a ball just on the fair side of first base and stretched it to a triple. He scored on Jeffrey Rea’s groundout. State failed to rally for a big inning, though, and it turned out they needed to do so to keep pace.
“I wish we would have gotten a couple clutch hits and made the lead-instead of 1-0-a few more, maybe two or three,” Jones said.
Florida responded in the top of the fifth after LaPorta led off the inning by flying out. MSU starter Jeff Lacher walked Jeff Corsaletti and Justin Tordi and Adam Davis singled to tie the game. After a groundout, Kennedy drove in two runs with a single through the left side, and Smith followed with a triple to score him. Gant relieved Lacher and gave up an RBI-single to Ben Harrison to make it 5-1 before bringing the inning to a close. The Bulldogs could only answer with a couple of runs in their half of the inning, and Florida got insurance in the sixth and eighth to hold on.