A couple of southpaws were a large factor in LSU baseball’s series-clinching win Sunday against Arkansas.Sophomore Chris Matulis and freshman Jordan Rittiner combined to pitch 8 1/3 innings of one-run baseball in LSU’s 5-1 victory.LSU coach Paul Mainieri said the pitchers’ outings gave his entire pitching staff confidence.”They’ve shown me they can pitch in this league,” Mainieri said. “You start to say, ‘Wow. Maybe we’ve got some pitching depth.'”Matulis (3-0) went 5 1/3 innings in his first-ever Southeastern Conference start and allowed one run on five hits.He worked himself out of jams several times. The leadoff batter either reached base or homered in five innings.The earliest of these jams was a bases-loaded situation with one out in the first inning.”Coach talked about competing,” Matulis said. “We didn’t want their two best hitters … to beat us. I just tried to pitch the contact toward the end and make some adjustments and get a way to get out of the inning.”Matulis faced 26 batters in total, struck out six and walked four.Rittiner earned his first save of the season after a three-inning relief appearance.He said he didn’t initially know how many hitters he was would see in his first taste of SEC play.”[Mainieri] never really gave me a definite time span of how many batters I was going to face,” Rittiner said. “He told me when I went to warm up that I was going out there to face the two left-handed hitters and see where we’d go from there.”The Jesuit High School graduate started three games this season but has appeared in six.Rittiner allowed two hits while striking out two and walking none to preserve the win for the Tigers.”In Rittiner’s case, he doesn’t have a lot of stuff to get you out of a jam, but he’s not going to hurt himself by walking batters or those kinds of things,” Mainieri said. “He did a tremendous job and was really a big key to the game.”LSU BATS COME ALIVE IN SECOND HALF OF WEEKENDLSU’s bats stayed dormant until the seventh inning of the second game of the weekend series.The Tigers only amassed four runs on eight hits in the first 15 innings of the weekend.They lost 6-3 to the Razorbacks on Friday and were on the verge of losing again Saturday. They trailed Arkansas, 5-1, through 6 1/2 innings.But LSU changed offensively during the seventh inning, and some players said the support of Tiger fans contributed to their success.”Ninety percent of that was probably the fans,” said junior catcher Micah Gibbs. “They were playing ‘Calling Baton Rouge’ out of the scoreboard, and they started getting into it. When they did that, the pitchers kind of lost it a little bit and that’s what this stadium does for home field advantage.”LSU totaled 12 runs on 18 hits for the rest of the weekend and never trailed again.  “For 16 innings they were whipping us,” Mainieri said. “That’s why the games are nine innings in duration and not seven innings in duration. If it was a seven inning game [Saturday], we probably would have lost — maybe.”—————Contact Johanathan Brooks at [email protected]