STARKVILLE – Coming into last weekend, Mississippi State’s baseball team was looking for a momentum-building SEC series victory against a top-10 Auburn squad before the conclusion of the regular season, and early on it looked as if the team was well on its way to accomplishing just that.
The No. 13 Bulldogs (38-14, 15-12) obliterated the No. 5 Tigers at the plate in Thursday’s Game 1 to the tune of 16 hits, three home runs and 10 RBI for a 10-3 victory, in which starting pitcher Tomas Valincius rang up 13 strikeouts to help keep a top-three SEC offense limited to just four hits. But then Auburn squeezed out a narrow 4-3 victory in Game 2 to knot the series on Friday and then returned the favor Saturday with an 13-2 rout of MSU in seven innings to clinch the series. Instead of gaining ground in the SEC, the loss pushed MSU from fifth in the conference standings to seventh as Florida and Alabama each pulled ahead of the Bulldogs with just one week left before the SEC Tournament.
“The reality is we got beat in every facet of the game by a really good team,” head coach Brian O’Conner said. “This team knows what’s at stake – they care. They want to go out there and play great baseball to put themselves in a position that when the year is over they want to be in, and we just didn’t go out and do it.
What happened?
State managed to mostly keep pace with Auburn at the plate in hit production – the teams each had 10 hits in Game 2 and the Tigers held a 14-9 edge in Game 3 – but the Bulldogs struggled to produce with runners in scoring position.
In Game 2, the Tigers pulled ahead to a 4-0 lead in the fifth inning and forced the Bulldogs to try to create a comeback – and they nearly accomplished it. A two-run homer by Reed Stallman and RBI singles from Ace Reese and Bryce Chance tied the game up in the eighth inning before Auburn’s Chase Fralick smacked a solo homer in the ninth inning to put the Tigers back ahead for good. MSU left 10 runners on base, including a bases-loaded opportunity in the third inning that ended with a ground out.
Much of the same could be said for Game 3. Allowing eight runs in the fifth and four in the sixth didn’t help, but neither did a 1-for-7 hitting mark with runners in scoring position.
“We didn’t make plays,” O’Conner said after the team’s loss in Game 3. “The first couple of innings we had runners on and we didn’t get a hit. Momentum is an amazing thing in the game of baseball and they had momentum because they capitalized on some situations in the second and third inning, and then the reality is it looks worse than it is because the fifth and sixth inning got away from us. … We had some walks, some hit-by-pitches and (Auburn) got some hits and put some good swings on the baseball.”
As the Bulldogs try to strengthen their case to host an NCAA Regional, the last opportunity for MSU to grab another SEC series victory comes down to this weekend on the road at No. 10 Texas A&M. The Aggies (37-12, 16-10) are slotted as the No. 2 team in the conference standings and are coming off a series loss to No. 15 Ole Miss. O’Conner said it falls on his and his staff’s shoulders to get the Bulldogs ready to end the regular season on a high note.
“I’ve been in pretty much every different scenario and yes it’s our responsibility,” O’Conner said. “I shared with the team that it’s all of us collectively as a group that need to be pulling in the same direction, and we’ll talk about that in the coming days about getting back to playing really great fundamental baseball, and really about the opportunity in front of us. They’ll be ready to go and it’ll come down to a few moments in the game on whether or not we do it. The same will be the case for Texas A&M.”
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