OXFORD — Josh Lovelady just needed to be on the field more.

Mississippi State baseball’s senior catcher, shaking off the residual effects of a minor injury, got just two at-bats in MSU’s first series of Southeastern Conference play, two weeks ago at Arkansas. He whiffed in both of them, dripping his batting average for the season down to .160.

He’s barely missed since then.

In appearing in every game since the end of the Arkansas series, Lovelady has tallied 11 hits in his 24 at-bats (.458) and taken a stranglehold of the everyday catcher role. In those eight games he has notched either a hit or an RBI in all but one of those games and claimed at least one of each in five of those games. Lovelady’s hot bat stayed that way in Ole Miss, driving in three runs as MSU (19-10, 6-3 SEC) swept the Rebels (16-12, 3-6 SEC).

He credits first-year MSU coach Andy Cannizaro’s patented aggression.

“Really it’s just my approach, man, being aggressive and getting confident at the plate,” Lovelady said. “He just preaches be aggressive and you get ahead in the count, don’t let him get ahead in the count. It’s easy when you get ahead in the count because you know what pitch is coming.”

Beyond the sheer number of RBIs, they have come from a critical point in the lineup as Lovelady often hits seventh or eighth, as he did in all three games against Ole Miss. His hitting give MSU a higher likelihood of driving in hitters such as Cody Brown, Tanner Poole and Elijah MacNamee, something MSU was not doing before its current streak of winning its last seven games and 12 of its last 16.

“It gives us so much leadership and he’s swinging a really good bat right now,” Cannizaro said. “He’s picked up some really big hits for us, and he gives us that senior leadership that’s awesome to have on a baseball team.”

Rooker continues to impress

Brent Rooker’s trip to Oxford further solidified his status as the best hitter in the SEC to date, going 5 for 13 with five RBIs and all five of this hits going for extra bases: four doubles and a home run. He now stands with a .422 batting average, 18 doubles, nine home runs and 43 RBIs, leading the SEC in all four of those categories.

It was what he did in the field that may have impressed Cannizaro the most.

Rooker’s offensive performances have come in a multitude of positions: right field, designated hitter, more recently first base and, although he has not started a game there in 2017, Cannizaro noted he could play left field. He showed a mastery of his newest position in Saturday’s win.

With the bases loaded in the game’s final at-bat, MSU holding onto a 2-1 lead, Rooker flashed his glove to the right field line, grabbing a hard hit ball and outrunning the batter to the plate to record the final out. Cannizaro said of the play, “That might have been one of the best plays I’ve ever seen made to win a ball game.”

Stovall’s new role

Cannizaro could not help but notice Hunter Stovall.

His injured second baseman, plagued with a hamstring injury for nearly the entire season, has now missed all but one of MSU’s nine SEC games with that injury, but has found another way on the field: as the first base coach.

“He’s dying to get on the field, he moves a million miles an hour in the dugout the whole time, so finally we just said, ‘Hey, go coach first base. Go burn some energy out there,'” Cannizaro said. “He loves it and we’re winning with him out there right now. Hopefully he’ll be back on the field sooner rather than later for us.”

Stovall has now done this twice, taking the place of assistant coach Will Coggin when he misses a game for recruiting purposes. Cannizaro said earlier in the year he wanted this to happen as minimally as possible, but when junior college pitchers are pitching at the same time as MSU’s games, he said he has to accommodate that at times.

Week ahead

Immediately after the game, Cannizaro said he had no ideas as to who would be the starting pitcher for MSU’s upcoming midweek games on Tuesday and Wednesday against Florida International. MSU is given little time to recover after those games as it hosts Kentucky on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as part of Super Bulldog Weekend, which includes the football team’s Maroon & White Game.

Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter @Brett_Hudson