BATON ROUGE – While a lot of Tiger fans were over at the PMAC for the first round of the NIT against UL-Lafayette, we had some standout performances here at The Box.
Freshman AJ Labas pitched six shutout innings with five strikeouts as LSU cruised to a 9-4 win over South Alabama.
“He was obviously a great match up for us and all those left-handed hitters,” Head Coach Paul Mainieri said. “I think they had trouble with his change-up as well. He just pitched great and gave us a really good chance to win it today.”
“I thew a lot of change-ups tonight,” Labas said. “Right now my slider is not really my out-pitch, it’s not really good right now. We’ve been having to run my change-up a lot more, so we threw a lot of fastballs and change-ups tonight and that’s where my success was.”
At the plate, LSU dominated with nine runs on 11 hits, including one from right fielder Antoine Duplantis, his 200th hit of his college career.
“This is pretty cool,” Duplantis said. “Actually, I didn’t know that until yesterday, one of the media people mentioned it. It kind of was in the back of my mind. It’s a cool little milestone, but I’m just going to continue to try to get a few more, maybe get to 300.”
The Tigers have their first SEC series this weekend against Missouri, with first pitch on Friday at 6:30 p.m.