Mississippi State baseball squanders SEC West championship with loss to South Carolina
Tyler HorkaSTARKVILLE – A university-wide power outage left Dudy Noble Field without electricity before No. 5 Mississippi State and South Carolina's series finale on Saturday.
The problem was resolved shortly after MSU senior Peyton Plumlee hurled his first pitch past the plate, but the Bulldogs' bats remained without electricity for nearly the duration of the game. The Gamecocks had plenty of energy in theirs essentially from start to finish.
South Carolina returned the favor from Mississippi State's first two wins of the series by beating the Bulldogs, 10-8. State would have won the SEC West regular season title with a win. Instead, the Dogs suffered one of the most crushing conference losses of the season in their final game before the SEC Tournament in Hoover.
Arkansas' series loss to Texas A&M left an opportunity for Mississippi State (45-11, 20-10 SEC) to win the SEC West for the first time since 2016 when the Bulldogs won the conference's crown outright across both divisions. Mississippi State simply didn't do enough to go out and take it.
"It was kind of a pressurized game because we knew going into it we had a chance to win the West, and that was our goal all season," senior third baseman Marshall Gilbert said.
Perhaps it was a bad omen when South Carolina sophomore Andrew Eyster sent a solo home run flying over all the lounges in left field in the first inning. The ball literally left the park. Red-shirt sophomore Luke Berryhill followed suit in the seventh against MSU senior reliever Jared Liebelt. Berryhill's three-run homer, which gave the Gamecocks a 7-1 lead, might've went even further than Eyster's.
Eyster hit another, though, in the eighth off MSU senior Cole Gordon. It was a similar shot to MSU sophomore's Josh Hatcher from Friday night. The ball banged off the batter's eye in center field to give South Carolina a 10-3 advantage.
"We weren't great today," MSU head coach Chris Lemonis said. "We've played great baseball lately, and we were just OK today."
MSU sophomore third-baseman Justin Foscue hit his team-leading 14th home run of the season down the left field line in the fourth, but it barely had enough juice to clear the fence just inside the foul pole. The metrics of his homer compared to those of the South Carolina batters represents an apt comparison for how Saturday's game went.
The Gamecocks had pop at the plate. The Bulldogs didn't until it was too late.
Senior center fielder Jake Mangum and sophomore first baseman Tanner Allen each had RBI hits in the seventh. Gilbert, sophomore Jordan Westburg and Allen all had run-producing hits in a four-run eighth inning for Mississippi State. But even then, the Bulldogs trailed by three, 10-7, entering the ninth inning.
Juniors Keegan James and Trysten Barlow combined to pitch a scoreless top half of the frame. The Bulldogs worked a run across the plate in the bottom half, but they couldn't manufacture the three necessary to send the game to extra innings.
Still, Lemonis saw enough fight out of his players to have optimism moving forward to the SEC Tournament. Trailing by seven on two separate occasions, State moved the tying run to the batter's box both times. Had Foscue or Gilbert not gotten out in the eighth and ninth, respectively, then this story might've read a lot differently.
"I feel like the mood in the locker room is nothing bad," Allen said. "We're still confident, and we'll have a big week next week."
Contact Tyler Horka at thorka@gannett.com. Follow @tbhorka on Twitter. To read more of Tyler's work, subscribe to the Clarion Ledger today!