LSU baseball found their offensive footing late to pull past and defeat Dartmouth 3-2 on Friday night. The victory gets LSU back in the win column after Tuesday’s loss against McNeese. The Tigers are now 9-1 on the season.
“There’s a lot of ways this team can win games,” head coach Jay Johnson said. “We did it with pitching and execution.”
The Tigers found themselves the producers of a host of off-balance swings in the early part of the game. LSU had just one hit entering the sixth inning; a Brayden Simpson single in the second.
The Tigers’ bats failed to barrel the baseball and were befallen by a ball that couldn’t find grass when it was hit hard. LSU’s first run came in the fourth inning, an inning in which the Tigers generated no hits and pushed the run home on a play designed to be a sacrifice bunt.
Things started to go LSU’s way in the sixth. Entering the inning trailing 2-1, Simpson walked with one out, then LSU found luck on a ball in play when Trent Caraway scorched one that Dartmouth shortstop Alejandro Puig couldn’t contain for a single.
Derek Curiel continued the offensive parade, hammering a double into the right field corner, plating both Simpson and Caraway and giving LSU a 3-2 lead. Curiel was playing as the designated hitter while battling food poisoning.
The turn of batted ball fortune in LSU’s favor continued in the seventh. Steven Milam reached base when Dartmouth right fielder Axel Riess dropped a routine fly ball. Riess had been excellent to that point and had taken a few LSU runs off the board with how well he was fielding prior to the gaffe.
The lead would stretch to two after an imaginative play from the Tigers. Milam, now at third, held his break for home on a sacrifice bunt from Mason Braun. When Dartmouth played the ball to first, Milam made his charge home, sliding in ahead of the throw and doubling the LSU lead.
The baserunning clinic carried into the eighth. Derek Curiel legged out a bunt single to open the inning and would score from first on a Jake Brown double to push the score to 5-2 LSU. Brown was opportunistic in his own right, hustling to earn an extra 90 feet and getting to third when the throw went home.
Johnson said that the hitting turnaround was good to see, but that it does not erase the early offensive woes.
“Some of it was good, but we did not do a good job swinging the bat tonight, and that’s okay,” Johnson said. “It’s a hard game.”
Casan Evans’ third start of the season reversed the trends of his prior two. He had a rocky first two trips around the Dartmouth lineup before rallying around the third turn of the order.
The righty had velocity and break in all of his pitches but lacked control early. He allowed two runs in the game’s first three innings, allowing three walks that enabled both of Dartmouth’s two hits in the inning to drive in a run.
Evans course-corrected once he reached the fourth inning. He found some control and went on to retire six straight between then and the start of the sixth inning. The sophomore struck out ten Dartmouth batters in the start.
“Pitch execution, it’s what it came down to,” Evans said. “I know in the first three innings, it was kind of off the rails, but we reeled it back in in the fourth and the fifth, and I thought it was really well.”
Gavin Guidry came in for Evans in the sixth inning. Evans had allowed a runner to reach scoring position after an error from Seth Dardar and a wild pitch. As has been his billing this season, Guidry extinguished the Dartmouth threat in the sixth and set the tone for LSU’s rally later that inning.
Dartmouth’s offense was extinguished after Guidry entered the game. The only arm brought out of the LSU bullpen, Guidry let up one hit and blanked Dartmouth in the run column across three and two thirds innings of work. He also retired five Dartmouth batters by way of the strikeout.
“Sometimes you just need to win the one that’s in front of you,” Johnson said about his pitching deployment. “That’s what I decided to do with [Evans and Guidry] tonight.”
LSU has three games ahead in as many days. In the immediate, the Tigers will face off against Northeastern on Saturday at 2 p.m. before squaring up with Dartmouth again on Sunday at 1 p.m.
