Despite encountering more opposition than they might have felt comfortable with, the Mississippi State baseball team managed to go 2-0 in midweek games before hitting the road today for Texas.Tuesday
Mississippi State scored 11 runs on 14 hits Wednesday to slip past Jacksonville State 11-9 and move to 8-1 for the season.
Catcher Ed Easley went 4-for-5 in the game, driving home one run, while designated hitter Brian LaNinfa had only one hit with 3 RBIs. Mitch Moreland went 3-for-4 and Andy Rice went 2-for-3 with 2 RBIs to round out the list of Bulldogs with multiple hits.
Jacksonville State jumped out early on the Bulldogs, scoring four runs in the opening frame, then two more in the top of the third inning.
Sophomore Jared Koon lasted only 2.1 innings against the Gamecocks, giving up 6 runs and 10 hits in his first career start.
The Bulldogs plated two runs in both the second and the third, but by the bottom of the fourth inning, MSU was still behind 7-4.
In the Bulldog half of the fourth, however, MSU scored the four runs on two hits and took its first lead of the game.
JSU rallied for two runs in the top of the fifth, but the Bulldogs capitalized on two Gamecock errors in the bottom half of the frame and scored Mark Goforth to tie the game at 9. MSU then scored another run on a JSU error in the sixth inning to take the lead and eventually the win.
John Lalot worked 3.2 scorless innings from the bullpen to earn his first win of the season, and freshman Rick Bowen worked a scoreless ninth inning for the save.
Wednesday
With one out and two on base in the bottom of the eighth inning, senior left fielder Joseph McCaskill doubled to deep center field, scoring both Michael Rutledge and Mitch Moreland and giving Mississippi State an 11-10 lead and eventually a victory over the visiting University of Alabama-Birmingham.
McCaskill went 2-for-2 in the game coming in for Jeff Flagg in the top of the sixth inning.
“I thought he was going to throw a fastball away,” McCaskill said. “I wasn’t even planning on swinging. But he hung that slider just a little bit and I thought I’d try to do something with it.”
MSU’s Tyler Whitney had his pitches working early, holding off the Blazer offense long enough for the Bulldog offense to amass a 6-0 lead.
“It was amazing,” McCaskill said. “The first five innings we thought we had it pretty easily. Then they started stroking the ball.”
Whitney gave up a run in the top of the fifth, and then allowed a 2-run ground-rule double in the top of the sixth before leaving the game in favor of freshman reliever Greg Houston.
Houston could not stop the bleeding, however, and allowed 4 more runs in the sixth to give the Blazers a 1-run advantage.
“It’s just a case of contagious hitting,” MSU head coach Ron Polk said. “Usually when that happens, though, you catch a ball and end the inning. We just didn’t do it.”
MSU tied the game in the bottom of the frame on an Andy Rice single that scored McCaskill.
The Bulldogs then regained the lead with two more runs in the bottom of the seventh, but that lead would also falter, this time to a 3-run Blazer frame in the top of the eighth that would hold until McCaskill’s hit in the bottom of the frame.
“He’d looked bad on a breaking ball right before that, but he got the guy to throw him another one,” Polk said. “That was huge for us. We needed something like that.”
Freshman Brandon Turner paced the Bulldog offense, going 4-for-5 with three RBIs, the first four-hit game of his young career. Turner now has 13 RBIs, a team high.
Moreland went 3-for-5 and knocked in two RBIs in only hit second career three-hit game.