… in baseball is so thin. Either team could have won that game. In fact, ORU could have won this Regional too. They were that good.
Biggest moments last night: Runner on third with 1 out and a .240 hitter at the plate, MSU gets a fly ball that scores the run. Runners on 2nd and 3rd with 0 outs and our 3 and 4 hole hitters up, and we get 2 strike outs. That’s the whole game right there.
Was it great pitching or bad hitting? Doesn’t have to be bad hitting to get beat by great pitching. Baseball is a series of 1-on-1 match ups contested 1 pitch at a time. Sometimes hitters win, but most of the time they don’t, even if they hit it hard.
Here’s what was great about that game, despite the disappointing outcome: Both teams battled hard to the end. Both pitching staffs went beyond themselves as individuals to give their teams a chance. Murphy was magnificent after throwing 72 pitches on Sunday and staying up until 4 a.m. with his teammates. He threw 5 complete innings Monday, 1 run on 3 hits and, I think, 2 walks. Incredible.
Those two teams are cut from the same cloth. They’re tough minded, resilient and focused. I wish we’d have won, but there’s no shame in losing the game to a team like that. TCU will have its hands full.
Very well said.
And to your point. In baseball, a 70% failure rate is considered good. a 60% failure rate is otherworldly.
There were all kinds of either/ors. Here’s the one I was thinking of:
Gates hit his homer with the bases empty. SMS’ guy hit his with a man on. There’s your difference.
Gotta tip your hat to the Bad News Bears though. They got it done, we didn’t. It’s not that we played badly, like the errors we made that cost us the LSU game at Hoover. And neither team hit very well yesterday. They just made enough plays to win, offensively and defensively.
the OP was exactly right ll we had to do was put a bat on the ball with our 3 and 4 hitters and we get 2 runs but instead we struck out, I knew that was going to come back and haunt us and it did 0-19 out of our #2-6 hitters is totally unacceptable we werent facing Kershaw!! ridiculous!
I echo the above and add these . . .
Koch finally barrels up a ball and it is about to hit the wall a foot from going out. However, their CF and the ball arrive virtually simultaneously and he hits the wall, as does his glove, the same milisecond that the ball arrives. 4 out of 5 times, that situation ends in something other than the CF coming down with a catch. (As a matter of fact, that same situation has happened with surprising frequency to the Hogs over the last 2 weeks. I remember at least 2 HR’s “stolen” in similar fashion, with the OF hitting the wall exactly at the same moment the ball contacted his glove. In ALL cases, they caught the ball). A great play, and a tip of the cap to them. But in the long run, a lot of those will be drops instead of catches. For whatever reason, we ran into a lot of those down the stretch of the season.
Similarly, we stroked about 3 or 4 other hard hit balls that seemed to find fielders rather than gaps. Add that to our untimely hitting (i.e., failure to deliver with men in scoring position), and you have a 1 run loss . . . twice! Meanwhile, there were a couple of key situations where our guys were 6 inches short of making spectacular plays in the field.
When two teams this equal play, that’s generally how it’s going to play out. Unfortunately, it was our time to get the short-sheet on the close plays.
This regional had 5 one run games. We beat ORU 3-0 and ORU blew out OSU in the other two.
6 of the 7 games were all decided on a handful of plays. Lots of ifs and buts in this regional.
The biggest “if” may have come in Game 1. MSU gets a 9th inning 2 out 2 strike home run to walk off OSU by one. A “simple” curve ball in the dirt and we may very well win the regional in 3 games.
This regional was great baseball. I sat through every inning and, while disappointed in the outcome, thoroughly enjoyed myself.