Mississippi State senior reliever Cole Gordon looked to have reached his tipping point in Wednesday’s 6-5, 17-inning win over LSU in the second round of the Southeastern Conference tournament.
MSU coach Chris Lemonis left the dugout and headed toward the mound with two outs in the 13th inning. Action in the Bulldog bullpen signaled a switch.
But as Lemonis chatted up Gordon and the rest of the MSU infield, he didn’t take the ball. Rather, he turned and strolled back toward the bench. The ball and game were in Gordon’s hands with the go-ahead run on second.
“I was actually going out there to ask him if he had anything left in the tank,” Lemonis recounted. “About halfway there he started barking at me that he wanted this last guy.”
Gordon remembered the moment likewise.
“I told him, ‘those are my runs out there and I owed it to the team to get that guy out,'” Gordon said. “I told him, ‘just give me that last batter and if I don’t get him out the ball is all yours. But let me get that guy.'”
Five pitches later, Gordon induced an inning-ending groundout to first base from LSU leadoff man Josh Smith. He had capped his gem –five innings of one-hit ball with eight strikeouts to boot.
“Every pitch in that situation the game is on the line,” Gordon said. “One mistake, it turns into a game. I was just trying to go out there and make every pitch. From there the results are up to themselves.”
In 22 appearances entering Wednesday’s game, Gordon had just two outings that lasted longer than two innings. Of those, he pitched three innings just once — a 20-15 road win over Auburn March 24.
Gordon looked headed for another routine outing against the Tigers as the Bulldogs moved runners to third in the 10th, 11th and 12th innings. Three times MSU failed to plate the winning run as part of a 4-for-26 combined effort with runners in scoring position.
With his offense struggling, Gordon dug in and delivered the most memorable performance of his final season in Starkville to date.
“I was just going one pitch at a time,” he said. “I don’t know when the last time I threw five innings was and I couldn’t tell you the last time my arm felt like this.”
Gordon looked on from the dugout with bated breath as chaos took over in the latter stages of Wednesday’s game that spilled into this morning.
While redshirt junior Keegan James tossed a solid 2 2/3-inning, one-run, two-hit appearance, it was junior Gunner Halter who ensured he and James’ outings were not wasted with a walk-off, RBI single in the 17th.
“I think this put an exclamation point on our team,” Gordon said. “This is what we want to be known for, this is what we want to do. So when we get opportunities like this in games like this we need to take advantage of them and just show what our M.O. is.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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