STARKVILLE
For much of Saturday’s showdown between the top-seeded Mississippi State baseball team and second-seeded Cal State Fullerton, the Bulldog faithful were there, 10,656 of them.
They just didn’t seem to know what to do.
This wasn’t what they were accustomed to.
This year, Bulldog baseball has been sound and fury, and fans have come to expect MSU to fill up the bases, to rip balls into gaps, and to blast a home run or two on occasion. While previous Bulldog clubs had to rely on playing small ball and pitching, the Bulldogs have real bite this year, as evidenced by their .313 batting average, .454 slugging percentage, and 392 runs in 59 games. Bulldog pitchers were expected to throw strikes and to rely on their defense to make plays behind them.
MSU’s offensive success has given fans plenty to holler about and, this year at last, it has been hard to get too worked up about moving a runner up.
And then Cal State Fullerton showed up and it was a different game.
It should have been no surprise. The Titans pitch better than any team in America, with a staff ERA — 2.17 — that looks like a typo. Nine Cal State Fullerton pitchers have ERAs in the 2s, including Colton Eastman, the freshman right-hander it sent to the hill against MSU. He carried an 8-2 record and an 2.11 ERA into the game.
He was as good as advertised, too, so any thought about putting up a handful of crooked numbers on the Dudy Noble scoreboard was out the window.
Fans kept waiting for the usual fireworks. For five innings, they mainly mumbled. Fishing tournaments have had more crowd noise, to be honest.
The Bulldogs and Titans played what purists will call baseball as it is meant to be played, a game where hits were something to be coveted, where moving the runner up was no small achievement, where runs had to be fought and scratched for, where the game hinges on executing the small plays as well as the large.
It was the sort of game Cal State Fullerton was well accustomed to, mostly out of necessity. These Titans don’t hit much (a team .265 average with only two hitters batting .300 or better). Scratching out hits, runs, and wins is what they do.
So, aside from putting MSU squarely in the catbird’s seat as the only unbeaten team left in the regional, it is how the Bulldogs produced a 4-1 win that is most gratifying.
Pitching and defense are Cal State Fullerton’s game. It took half the game for MSU’s fans to catch on that the Bulldogs were beating the Titans at their game.
With MSU’s Austin Sexton matching Eastman in the “let’s hang up some goose-eggs department,” MSU eked out a run in the third on a single by John Holland, a double by Jack Kruger, and an RBI groundout by Nathaniel Lowe.
Cal State Fullerton left a runner in scoring position with one out in the fifth and failed to convert on an even better chance in the sixth, when a double and sacrifice bunt put the tying run 90 feet way. But converted catcher Gavin Collins, who already had two errors in the game, made a nice play on a grounder that carried him into foul territory and then fired an accurate throw to the plate to cut down the runner and preserve a 1-0 lead.
It was a pivotal moment and the crowd, at last, seemed to sense it, roaring to life and hooting and hollering right on through the top of the seventh, when MSU finally got to Eastman for two runs on Brent Rooker double and two singles.
Cal State Fullerton got a rare home run (just its 26th of the season) to narrow the gap in the bottom half, but MSU tacked on a run in the eighth to push the lead back to three, which is a veritable blowout by the Titans’ standards.
The win means Cal State Fullerton will meet Louisiana Tech this afternoon in a losers’ bracket game. The winner will have to beat MSU tonight and again Monday to advance to next week’s Super Regional.
The Bulldogs need one more win to advance. You have to like their chances, even without the normal Sound and Fury.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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