A ninth-inning rally wasn’t enough for LSU baseball to pull off a victory over Kentucky in the first game of the series on Friday night.
LSU has struggled to put all of the pieces together since conference play started, and the 7-4 game was no different for the Tigers. They couldn’t catch any breaks, and that included hot and cold moments from the mound and the plate.
“[Kentucky] is a great team,” head coach Jay Johnson said postgame. “They do what they do incredibly well. They do a good job of getting on base; that’s what they do. Then they do a good job of moving the ball with runners and scoring position, and we allowed them to do that.”
Nothing was going as planned for LSU early, as Friday night starting pitcher Casan Evans truly struggled. He had a hard time finding the strike zone as soon as he started throwing on the field, and it took him three full innings to settle in. In those innings alone, Evans allowed six free passes.
After everything clicked in the fourth inning, he didn’t allow any. He recorded his first strikeout, tallying three on the night. In his six-inning outing, he allowed four of the seven runs the Wildcats scored.
“I’m sure he was frustrated, but the response was great,” Johnson said. “I told him that after the outing. He wants to be better there, but if he can do that when he’s not at his best, he’ll pitch for a long time.”
But it wasn’t just the pitching that struggled early. The offense only got hot for one inning of the contest.
In the third inning, sophomore center fielder Derek Curiel singled to right field to score the Tigers’ first two runs, but the inconsistencies from the offense made it hard to overcome the early four-run deficit.
The Tigers didn’t strike out much. Only eight outs were handled between the battery, but the difference maker was at-em balls, while the Wildcats hit sacrifice flies. The constant runners on base for Kentucky proved costly for LSU when it came down to pushing the runs across.
It was textbook baseball that failed for LSU on Friday night.
Early in the season, this team managed rallies that totaled up to 21 runs a game on occasion. In Game 1 versus Kentucky, this same team failed to do that, and it was the difference in the win versus the loss.
Hitting is contagious, and that contagion worked in favor of the Wildcats.
But that doesn’t mean the Tiger fans in attendance didn’t try to turn the momentum in their favor. The electric crowd was doing a lot of heavy lifting all night, and it didn’t matter if the score was 1-0 or 7-2 at that moment; the crowd at Alex Box Stadium was doing what it does best: make noise.
The Tigers will try to even the series in Game 2 on Saturday, with first pitch set for 2 p.m.
