OMAHA, Neb. — In late April, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt met in Nashville, Tennessee, for a series that had all the trappings of a national championship.
Both teams were ranked inside the top five, with the Bulldogs at No. 4 and the Commodores at No. 2. Each club had lost just one Southeastern Conference series more than a month into league play.
And all three contests delivered, as none was decided by more than four runs. Mississippi State dropped Game 1 as Vandy’s Kumar Rocker pitched a complete game, beat Jack Leiter in Game 2 and lost a close Sunday matchup to drop the series.
Now, a little more than two months later, the two elite programs will face off again with those national-title stakes as real as can be. Just crank up the crowd and pour on the pressure when No. 7 Mississippi State (48-17) and No. 4 Vanderbilt (48-16) meet in the College World Series final beginning at 6 p.m. Monday.
“They have been here,” Bulldogs coach Chris Lemonis said. “They know how to win. They have come back twice. When they have their big guys out there, the Leiters or the Rockers, man, they are a very formidable opponent, and they just know how to play the game and they are very well coached. It will be a tough matchup. It will be who gets the big hit or who makes the big play, because they are really good.”
No more than 1,500 fans attended any of the three regular-season games at Hawkins Field in Nashville because of COVID-19 restrictions. But TD Ameritrade Park has an official capacity of 24,500 and can hold up to 35,000 fans, meaning there will be a significantly larger maroon and white presence in the stands.
The Bulldogs hope those who make the trip will be rewarded with the first team national championship in school history.
“We know our whole university and our whole state is behind us, and we just want to play well and represent our fan base,” Lemonis said.
Mississippi State has done that all season, staring elimination in the face twice and staving it off on both occasions. The Bulldogs edged Notre Dame 11-7 in Game 3 of the Starkville Super Regional and walked off Texas 4-3 on Saturday in the Bracket 2 final.
Now, they’ll face a Vanderbilt team that also avoided elimination with a 3-1 win Friday over N.C. State. But the circumstances around the Commodores’ berth to the championship series are considerably different. The Wolfpack team that beat them 1-0 in last week’s winners’ bracket game was playing shorthanded due to multiple positive tests for COVID-19. Late Friday night, the NCAA disqualified N.C. State, declared Saturday’s bracket final a no contest and allowed Vanderbilt to advance.
“None of us wish to be in this particular position,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said. “We certainly would want to play them on the field or have played them on the field, but we didn’t.”
The Commodores — who won the 2019 CWS before the pandemic wiped out the 2020 event — emerged from a regional containing Georgia Tech, Presbyterian and Indiana State. They swept East Carolina in two games in Super Regionals.
And because of N.C. State’s disqualification, they will have Leiter ready on six days’ rest for Game 1. Corbin wouldn’t confirm if the right-hander would start Monday, but all signs point to the Commodores having one of their two aces on the mound to start the series.
But Mississippi State beat Leiter before and will vie to do so again. The Bulldogs knocked out the Vandy starter after five innings and four runs April 24 en route to a 7-4 victory.
Of course, that was with Will Bednar on the mound for the visitors, and he won’t be starting Game 1 this time around. The Bulldogs had to deploy Bednar on Saturday to beat the Longhorns, although he could be available for a possible Game 3 relief appearance.
“We’ve done a great job, I feel like, of taking care of him all year,” Lemonis said. “He has not over-pitched all year. Probably his numbers are lower than most starting pitchers that are here in Omaha, and he’s been on a strict pitch count most of the year. I think he’s gone over 100 maybe once or twice. So it’s not a situation where he’s been overused, but it will come down to some conversations between all of us and as we move through this.”
In the meantime, Christian MacLeod will look to bounce back as he draws the Game 1 start. The left-hander went only 1.1 innings on Tuesday against Virginia, although the Bulldogs came back to earn a 6-5 win.
“I’m going into it as, ‘It’s just another start,’” MacLeod said. “You can’t make the moment bigger than what it is. Obviously we’re really excited to be playing for a national championship, playing a quality opponent with Vanderbilt, but we’ve just got to stay calm, cool and collected and do what we’ve done all season — playing together, playing for each other.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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