STARKVILLE – The rematch between Mississippi State and Southern Miss was much different than the first meeting down south earlier this month. A bullpen game with a road-weary Bulldog squad fresh off a plane from Arlington, Texas, fell 7-6 against a Golden Eagle squad at the height of its confidence. It was a fight to the finish, with the hosts holding on in Hattiesburg.
On Tuesday, it was a wire-to-wire beatdown.
The No. 6 Bulldogs improved to 21-4 on the year with a 12-0 run-rule win over No. 11 Southern Miss, setting the tone from the first inning with Chris Billingsley Jr. on the mound and Gehrig Frei and Ryder Woodson hammering home three runs to get their team on the board in the bottom half.
A crowd of nearly 13,000 fans, only a handful of whom donned black and gold, gave the game a sense of importance beyond what most midweek games provide, and the Bulldogs rewarded those in maroon and white with 12 runs in five innings and a shutout display from the bullpen.
“My team believes in me, my coaches believe in me, I just have to believe in myself,” Billingsley said after pitching two innings with two strikeouts. “That’s what I did tonight. I just need to be that guy that my team can count on to set the tone, and I feel like that’s what I did tonight.”
“Coach Parker and I discussed it Sunday night and talked about it yesterday about how we wanted to break this up,” head coach Brian O’Connor said. “Nobody was going to go out there and go three or four innings, but Chris Billingsley started in junior college. We’ve exclusively used him out of the bullpen and felt like he was the right guy to pitch us one time through the lineup and get us off to a good start. Then we’d match up from there. I thought he did a terrific job, really went after them in the first inning. Certainly scoring three runs in the bottom helped, and then everybody went out there and did a really nice job.”
It was the 10th game this season in which the Bulldog batters have produced 10 or more hits, and they did so against the No. 11 team in the country.
Aidan Teel set the tone as leadoff hitter, just as Billingsley did on the mound, going 4-4 and reaching home plate all four times, with two RBI and a home run of his own. He looked at his form as well as that of the team on a confident offensive streak, and credited the togetherness in the dugout.
“It’s funny how hitting is contagious. Having Bryce Chance in the nine hole, myself leading off, it’s almost like I go into the on-deck circle knowing I’m going to get up to bat,” Teel said. “Especially with runners in scoring position, especially when Bryce is two strikes on him. He does such a good job getting on base and having those unselfish at-bats. It’s so much fun being on a team like this where we rally around one another and a lot of guys are unselfish.”
The dominant offense carried over from the weekend. The Bulldogs scored in every inning of a 17-7 run-rule win to sweep Vanderbilt on Sunday and came out of the gates firing on all cylinders again, scoring in the first five innings to build the lead over USM. With a trip to face No. 18 Ole Miss in Oxford this weekend, the bats are coming to life at the right time, and the confidence is evident throughout the order.
“Who would have thought six innings against Vanderbilt and then the first five innings here tonight we’d score at least a run in every inning. That’s tough to do, but it shows the balance of the lineup,” O’Connor said. “The lineup was the same, it has been for a handful of games here, and collectively throughout… obviously Teel at the top and the best night he’s had… certainly since he was ill. That was great to see, Jacob Parker’s three-run home run, just throughout the lineup. There are so many players that can make an impact on the game. I think the sign of a great offensive ball club is that throughout the lineup, you can score runs in different ways. Stole some bases tonight, took advantage of situations. These last couple of ballgames, complete offensive performance for sure.”
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