METAIRIE – RBI-walk and RBI-hit-batsman are phrases rarely uttered when discussing baseball.
No. 5 LSU (27-7) had seven of those Wednesday in an 8-3 victory against Southern Miss (19-13) at Zephyr Field in the Wally Pontiff, Jr., Classic. Of the eight runs LSU scored, only one came via a base hit – a RBI-single by junior center fielder Arby Fields in the third inning.
“I can’t remember in a long time having a game like that against a quality opponent,” said LSU coach Paul Mainieri. “That was very awkward. Some of it was their pitchers’ wildness. Some of it was our plate discipline.”
The Tigers walked a season-high 10 times, and eight of the nine starting position players reached base via a free pass. Southern Miss pitchers also hit three batters and the Golden Eagles committed three errors to essentially give LSU the victory without much offensive effort.
The craziness started in the first inning when Southern Miss starting pitcher Taylor Nunez walked three and hit one of the first five batters he faced. Nunez exited the game and his replacement, Cody Livingston, walked the only two batters he faced.
The third pitcher in the inning, James McMahon, walked one more and LSU scored four runs without recording a hit.
LSU’s first hit didn’t come until Fields’ single in the third inning that pushed the Tigers’ lead to 5-2. Fields went 2-for-3 from the plate and had half of the Tigers’ hits.
“That’s how it worked out for me tonight,” Fields said. “I was trying to see the ball, hit it hard, put it somewhere, and fortunately I was able to get a couple hits tonight.”
LSU added three more runs in the sixth inning, all via a hit batter or base on balls. Though the Tigers only recorded four hits, Mainieri hesitated to dwell on his team’s low total in the hits column.
“I’m not going to make too big of a deal out of us not getting many hits,” Mainieri said. “When the pitchers are so wild, it’s hard to be very aggressive at the plate. You don’t want to swing at bad pitches. You don’t want to give them an easy way out of the inning. It makes you tentative at the plate, and that had as much to do with our hitting tonight as anything.”
Typical for mid-week games, Mainieri called on eight different pitchers to piece together the victory. Freshman Aaron Nola started the game, making his first appearance since April 1 after suffering from shoulder fatigue, but only threw inning as a tune-up before he returns to the weekend rotation Sunday against Alabama.
 Southern Miss touched up Nola for two runs, but only one was earned as senior third baseman Tyler Hanover misplayed a potential double-play ball.
“In retrospect, I’m almost glad it happened that way, because his best fastballs came at the end of his 28-pitch performance,” Mainieri said. “He threw a couple fastballs at the end that had a lot of giddy-up, had some life to them. As he kept throwing, his arm strength built up a little bit.”
The next seven batters combined to throw eight innings of one-run baseball, with the only run coming in the ninth inning. Junior Joey Bourgeois and sophomore Kurt McCune each struck out the side in one inning of work for each pitcher.
The game marked the ninth installment of the Pontiff Classic, held annually to honor the life of the former LSU baseball player who died at age 21 in July 2002 of a heart abnormality. A video tribute to Pontiff played during the middle of the seventh inning, and LSU hung a Pontiff plaque in the dugout during the game.