OXFORD | Sunday wasn’t just another gut punch in a Southeastern Conference season full of jabs, hooks and uppercuts. It was potentially the one that found the chin — both from a tangible numbers standpoint and the emotional and mental toll of being one strike away from something, anything, to take forward.
Ole Miss and Mitch Murrell had two outs and no one on in the ninth with a two-run lead, but after a walk and a hit by pitch and a 1-2 count on Hayden Travinski, the LSU pinch hitter hit a breaking ball well out of left field at Swayze. It gave the Tigers the lead, and three Ole Miss outs later, the 7-6 victory to sweep the series.
It's LSU's first SEC sweep as it moves to 32-7 and 12-5 in the SEC.
“It just wasn’t good enough,” starting pitcher JT Quinn said. “So many people out here watching us, and we’re just not playing good baseball right now… It sucks; it rips your heart out. It’s frustrating.”
The Rebels haven’t won an SEC series in six tries and are 21-19 overall and 3-15 in the SEC — two games below Missouri for 13th in the conference and three games behind Mississippi State for 12th, the minimum requirement for the SEC Tournament.
Ole Miss has won 30 games every season since 1997 and hasn’t lost more than 17 conference games in a year since that 1997 team went 6-24 in the league.
“You do the best you can, and days like this it’s really hard,” head coach Mike Bianco said about his team’s emotions. “We talk about it often and to be able to get up the next day and compete… The guys have been terrific. We haven’t played well, but they continue to pull for one another, and that’s all you can ask.”
The Rebels took the two-run lead in the bottom of the eighth when Judd Utermark hit a first-pitch fastball from Javen Collins over the left-field wall. Utermark was 4-for-31 coming into the game and hit his only other home run on the second day of the season.
The home run followed the day’s potential theme of young players taking steps toward toppling LSU and showing a potential blueprint of how the Rebels could get more from its roster, whether it’s an acceleration of any type this season or a dogged-ear introduction that Ole Miss can look back on in 2024.
Utermark pinch hit for fellow freshman Will Furniss, who had a home run off Paul Skenes on Friday and had a hit in all three games in the series. The hit Sunday produced an RBI.
Freshman JT Quinn has given Ole Miss a chance in every start this season and limited the Tigers to four runs in four innings despite allowing 10 hits, two walks and a hit by pitch. He’s growing up and showing toughness to go with talent.
“You have to respect and love he continues to compete every time he goes out on the mound,” Bianco said. “He doesn’t shy away and an other gutsy performance.”
Freshman Sam Tookoian stranded an inherited runner in the fifth and threw two scoreless relief innings before giving way to Murrell, Ole Miss’ best reliever recently. He threw two shutout innings and had the two outs before things went awry in the ninth inning.
Ole Miss had 11 hits, including two apiece from Jacob Gonzalez, Kemp Alderman, Calvin Harris and Anthony Calarco. The Rebels hit four doubles — two each from Calarco and Harris, and Alderman hit the tying home run in the seventh inning. Ole Miss was 2-for-10 with runners in scoring position.
LSU had four two-out RBIs including the home run that shellshocked the Rebels. Ethan Lege, in the ninth, hit a ball to the wall with two men on that would have won it had hit gone 10 more feet, but instead the game ended a couple minutes later.
“It’s just not happening on the mound; it’s just not happening at the plate,” Quinn said. “Somehow we have to figure that out. We have to make it happen ourselves.”
Ole Miss is in Pearl on Tuesday for the Governor’s Cup and hosts Georgia this weekend. The Bulldogs swept Arkansas in their latest SEC series.
Bianco said Jack Dougherty was unavailable this weekend with a sore shoulder. He didn’t offer a timetable, other than rehab will continue this week.
