LSU baseball lost a four-run lead late in the ballgame, dropping its seventh straight SEC game as it took on Mississippi State in an 11-inning, 10-8 Friday night battle.
The Tigers have played a lot of hot and cold baseball throughout the season, and this game against the Bulldogs was one of the hot moments.
The team donning purple and gold simply couldn’t get out when the bats got hot. It was the first time in weeks that this team has consistently put together hits and mistakes to put a thorn in its opponents’ side.
LSU was battling its way through the 11th inning. It was one out away from getting into the 12th inning unscathed when the Bulldogs’ nine-hole hitter came up clutch with a two-run bomb to end the game.
This team has struggled to score runners when they’re in scoring position, but Friday night proved to be mostly different. LSU got base hits, forced errors and utilized passed balls to push runs across in what was looking to be a tight game.
However, the bats continued to get colder as the game went on, which left nobody on base to be brought in. The fact that the game went to the 11th inning proves just that.
Tigers’ head coach Jay Johnson said earlier in the season that there were some adjustments that his team needed to make to start scoring runs with runners in scoring position. He said his staff would focus on that throughout the next week of practice.
“We can’t hit the ball in the air or punch out with runners and scoring position with two outs,” Johnson said. “We’ve done it too much, and we need to be better [at hitting with runners in scoring position].”
Tonight, the team did what Johnson and his staff wanted. The strikeouts were limited, and the Tigers used the ground as much as possible.
Throughout the first three innings, the Tigers only struck out three times. In and after the fourth, the Tigers would strike out 11 times. The team would bring across 13 hits and walk four times as well.
LSU also had some new things happen on the other side of the ball. Johnson mentioned in the postgame press conference during the Texas A&M series that he’d made some mistakes in building his team, and that came from not creating talent from the ground up.
He took this into consideration when putting together the lineup versus the Bulldogs, and there were some positive and negative moments.
Freshmen William Patrick and Jack Ruckert got starts on Friday, and both players had the ball find them in big moments, but they showed their age.
Patrick lost a routine fly ball in the air and had to slide in to catch it. If he had dropped it, it would have resulted in runs. Ruckert had his fair share of defensive attempts, but he made another mistake, pulling his foot off of second base on an attempt to turn a double play.
This also happened to him in the Friday night game versus Ole Miss in the Tigers’ previous away series.
It’s not the regular defensive issues these freshmen have had, but it’s fundamental mistakes that could ruin games later in the season.
Pitching was the only real issue that struggled throughout the entire contest. The usual Game 1 starter, Casan Evans, did not throw. He was removed from the lineup prior to the game starting, and the usual closer, Gavin Guidry, would start the game.
Guidry went 2.2 innings, allowing three earned runs on three hits. He struck out three batters and walked one. He would be the first of seven pitchers LSU would use.
The Tiger bats would go up 7-3, but then fall back to a tied ballgame in the sixth inning after Mississippi State tallied five runs in four consecutive innings. The bats had to battle due to the pitching struggle.
Nonetheless, the Tigers couldn’t overcome the late-inning snowball as it fell in the 11th inning. Game 2 will be played at 6:30 on Dudy Noble Field as LSU looks to even the series.
