STARKVILLE — Tennessee’s pitching staff is too good to blow up twice in a row.
A day after Mississippi State battered Volunteers ace Karlyn Pickens and the Tennessee bullpen in a run-rule victory, Payton Gottshall tied the Bulldogs’ batters in knots, holding them to three hits and striking out seven without issuing a walk in a 6-1 MSU defeat.
“She pitched great, and we did not do a good enough job with adjusting or swinging within the plan to start with,” Bulldogs head coach Samantha Ricketts said. “With our offense, we at least want to be tough outs, and I don’t feel like we really had a whole lot of that.”
Josey Marron started in the circle for No. 16 MSU (29-11, 9-8 Southeastern Conference) and did not have a good feel for her drop ball in the first inning, and the No. 4 Volunteers (31-7, 11-3) made her pay for it. Rylie West brought in the game’s first run with a two-out double, and Sophia Nugent followed with a two-run home run that put the Bulldogs in an early 3-0 hole.
Marron settled in nicely after that, but Gottshall, after giving up a leadoff single in the first to Sierra Sacco, retired the next 11 batters she faced. The former Bowling Green Falcon needed just 88 pitches in the complete-game effort, 67 of which were strikes.
Jessie Blaine, doing the catching as usual for Marron, gave MSU its only run in the fourth when she reached for a pitch up above her shoulders and put it out over the wall in left for her sixth home run of the season. But Gottshall’s rise ball did what she wanted it to do on almost every other occasion, getting the Bulldogs to chase pitches above the zone several times.
“She’s a great pitcher, has been for years, and she had the advantage today with that up ball,” Blaine said. “We’ll make an adjustment and come back tomorrow.”
Tennessee got that run right back in the fifth, then put the game even further out of reach in the seventh when Kiki Milloy led off with her third single of the day and scored on a two-run homer by McKenna Gibson. MSU did not show great patience against Gottshall, although the Bulldogs did make seven of their outs on fly balls to the outfield.
The crowd of 1,572 fans was the fifth-largest attendance in program history and third-largest gathering for a regular-season game. Both teams, along with the rest of the SEC, wore teal or teal-accented uniforms in honor of former MSU outfielder Alex Wilcox, who passed away from ovarian cancer after her freshman season in 2018.
The series will be decided in Sunday’s rubber game starting at noon.
“For the Bulldog community to show up for us like they did, it’s special,” Ricketts said. “We want to perform for them, and that’s where it’s also frustrating. With that many people, you’d love to get them in the game, but we didn’t give them a whole lot to cheer for there.”
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