Friday: LHP Konnor Pilkington (2-5, 2.57 ERA)
Saturday: LHP Ethan Small (3-3, 2.94 ERA)
Sunday: RHP Jacob Billingsley (2-2, 4.08 ERA)
Arkansas is expected to counter with Knight, Murphy and Campbell.
Pilkington has a pretty good ERA for a 2-5 record.
What’s been the issue in his starts?
Mississippi State is last in the SEC by a good bit in runs scored - 29 runs behind 13th-place Tennessee. Mississippi State has scored one run or been shut out in four of five SEC starts for Pilkington. The exception was against Ole Miss, when MSU scored 13 after the game was rained out the day before.
In four of their five Friday night SEC games, Moo U has scored 1 or 0 runs. Actually, all of their Friday night games; they got rained out Friday against the Rebnecks and played a Saturday DH, scoring 13 in the first game off Brady Feigl (which Pilkington won). I’d say run support is the issue. Sets up nicely for Knight.
You can pitch well, but sometimes the other guys have to score some runs. I recall Trey Killian pitching pretty well one year and it was clear he had grounds for a law suit for no support!
All this makes me optimistic for this series. I’m confident we can score some runs & equally confident our pitchers can keep MSU in low numbers. If they’re not getting runs off anyone else, I don’t see them getting many off our pitchers. (And maybe we’ll stay away from errors the way we have the last few games, not the way we were at the first of the SEC season.) MSU is a quality program if they’re a bit down this year. I’d love to sweep them down there. Talk about a boost. We’d be 13-5 & only needing 7 wins out the remaining 12 to get to 20. I could see us getting to 21 or more wins if that happened. Regardless, it’d be sweet just to win 2 of the 3. I’ll be disappointed if we only get 1 even if that’s not usually considered too bad on the road in conference play. (I’ll be out on the ledge if we get swept.)
Pilkington is very good.we beat him last yr but he K 12-13 this is there Superbulldog weekend where they have the spring football game so they will probably have big crowds.seeing the OM LH I think would help us but Pilkington is tough.
[quote=“youdaman”]
Pilkington is very good. we beat him last yr but he K 12-13 this is there Superbulldog weekend where they have the spring football game so they will probably have big crowds.seeing the OM LH I think would help us but Pilkington is tough.
[/quote]Pilkington has allowed 5 earned runs in his 5 starts at MSU this season, over 32 innings. That’s stout. His ERA was a bit clouded by his first start at Southern Miss when he only went 4 innings.
We only had 4 hits last year against Pilkington and 13 K’s. We did get a 3-1 win, but we couldn’t hit him well.
Didn’t remember that. Well, hope we do a bit better tonight.