STARKVILLE – Mississippi State routinely sets attendance records in college baseball.
They may have set an attendance record of another sort Saturday night – the quietest gathering of 13,452 people ever assembled to watch a college baseball game.
MSU fans watched in stunned disbelief as Arizona roared back from a 5-1 eighth-inning deficit to claim a 6-5 victory in 11 innings and end the Bulldogs’ season.
When Arizona’s Cesar Salazar shot a single into right field to score the game-winning run and the Wildcat players emptied out onto the field in joyous celebration, the large crowd rose as one and filed quietly toward the exits.
Funeral processions are more festive than what transpired at the end of Saturday’s game.
That ending had seemed almost unimaginable going into the late innings Saturday.
MSU, which lost to Arizona, 1-0, in Friday’s opener of the best-of-three series, seemed certain to have forced a decisive third game when MSU’s Brent Rooker smashed a solo home run in the top of the eighth inning, his second homer of the game, to give the Bulldogs a 5-1 lead.
But that comfort turned to sudden misery in the bottom of the eighth as Arizona cut the Bulldogs’ lead to a single run on a three-run homer by Ryan Aguilar in the eighth inning, tied the game in the bottom of the ninth on a run-scoring single by Alfonso Rivas and won the game on Salazar’s game-winning hit in the 11th inning.
MSU was seeking its 10th trip to the College World Series and its second in four years. Instead, Arizona will return for its 17th College World Series. The Wildcats won the national title at the 2012 CWS.
Rooker, who hit two homers in a game for the second time this post-season, drove in three runs and left the game for a defensive replacement after his eighth-inning homer, which seemed of little consequence given the Bulldogs’ four-run lead.
But MSU’s relief pitchers, which had been dominant in the Bulldogs’ three regional wins last weekend, had no answers for the Wildcats’ hitters. While State didn’t collect a hit after Rooker’s homer, Arizona piled up 11 hits off four Bulldog relief pitchers from the eighth inning on, finishing with 18 hits to the Bulldogs’ seven.
The last of those relievers, Blake Smith, took the loss, giving up a single, two walks and the game-winning hit.
Arizona, meanwhile, proved the more resilient of the teams. The Wildcats had to beat Louisiana-Lafayette twice on Lafayette’s home field last week to advance to the Super Regional. They did it again in Starkville, sweeping MSU right out of the postseason.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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