There was no single factor that brought about the end of Mississippi State’s season at the Charlottesville Regional. The Bulldogs simply played the way they had most of the year — like a good team, but not a great one.
Coming off two seasons without postseason play, MSU returned to the NCAA Tournament but could not get past No. 12 seed Virginia, a team with a veteran head coach and plenty of big-game experience after reaching the Men’s College World Series last year.
“I’m happy where we’re at. Unfortunately, you lose the championship game of a regional,” head coach Chris Lemonis said. “But we’re back on the national stage.”
Run producers stepped up in their first NCAA regional
No player on the Bulldogs’ active roster had played in an NCAA Tournament game with MSU prior to this past weekend. Pitcher Stone Simmons was part of the 2021 national championship team, but has battled numerous injuries since and missed the entire 2024 season.
Dakota Jordan and Hunter Hines carried the lineup for most of the year but entered regionals a combined 1 for their last 46. Both players are likely to be drafted this summer and begin playing professionally, and both left strong final impressions in the maroon and white.
Jordan sent the Bulldogs (40-23) into the winners’ bracket with a walk-off three-run home run to beat St. John’s in the opening round, and starting with that blast, hit safely in 10 of his last 15 at-bats. That included a 5-for-5 day against the Red Storm in an elimination game Sunday, capped by a 463-foot homer, and a go-ahead two-run shot Sunday evening in the first inning against the Cavaliers.
A draft-eligible sophomore, Jordan finished the season with a .354/.459/.671 triple slash, 20 homers and 72 runs batted in. He struck out 84 times, tied for second most in college baseball, but is still projected as a late first-round pick in next month’s MLB Draft.
Hines closed the season with three straight multi-hit games and gave MSU the lead in Saturday night’s winners’ bracket game with a long three-run homer. The first baseman may not have quite repeated his 2023 power numbers, but he showed major improvements against left-handed pitching, with nine of his 16 homers this year coming against southpaws.
Starting rotation delivered, capping pitching staff’s turnaround
Lemonis pried pitching coach Justin Parker away from South Carolina after the Bulldogs had the Southeastern Conference’s worst pitching staff last spring, and the pitching turned into MSU’s biggest strength with old faces and new.
Purdue transfer Khal Stephen gave the Bulldogs eight innings in the opening game and Jurrangelo Cijntje went seven innings the next night. Brooks Auger and Pico Kohn each missed the full 2023 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery, and both started 2024 in the bullpen before joining the rotation down the stretch and pitching well in their starts on Sunday.
With MSU playing so many close games late in the season, the Bulldogs’ high-leverage relievers — Cam Schuelke, Tyson Hardin and Tyler Davis — had a heavy workload, and Davis’ ninth-inning meltdown Sunday night was certainly not characteristic of his season as a whole.
MSU may need to retool much of its pitching staff in the transfer portal with Stephen, Cijntje and Nate Dohm, who missed most of the season with an arm injury and did not pitch in the regional, all likely to be drafted. But it’s a staff that far exceeded expectations in its first year under Parker.
The Bulldogs never played to their full potential
It’s a lot to ask for the starting pitching, bullpen and offense to all be performing at their best at the same time, and that never really happened this year for MSU. If it had, this is a team that could have hosted a regional — the Bulldogs came awfully close as it was — and possibly even reached Omaha.
MSU played a weak non-conference schedule, and although the Bulldogs arrived in Charlottesville coming off 11 straight weeks facing teams from the strongest conference in the country, they did not play a team from any of the other high-major conferences in the regular season. They also had their share of struggles in true road games, which continued in their two meetings with Virginia.
In the end, MSU may not have hit its ceiling, but a conference championship and a deeper NCAA Tournament run were never really in the cards for a group coming off back-to-back 9-21 finishes in SEC play. A 40-win season and a top-five finish in the SEC, though, should make Starkville a much more appealing destination for top high school recruits and transfer portal targets this offseason.
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