Southern Miss plated three runs in the seventh inning to pull away from Southeastern Louisiana in midweek action 5-1 on Tuesday night. The Golden Eagles moved to 5-4 in midweek contests this season.
This one might be the most impressive, outside of the Alabama win, due to the depletion of the Golden Eagle bullpen due to some extended outings from backend players.
“Good win for us tonight, I thought it was a pretty clean game,” Southern Miss head coach Christian Ostrander said. “I thought our pitchers did a good job of making them earn everything. They scattered eleven hits as we did but we were able to minimize a lot.”
Ostrander also announced that freshman McCarty English is out for the season with a stressed fracture in his shoulder, a massive loss for Southern Miss.
Losing English is a massive loss for the bullpen because of the extended innings he was providing the team on the backend and his movement with the ball.
“McCarty has a stress fracture in his acromion process in his elbow, it’s an injury that you could opt to rest for four weeks and let the fracture heal itself or you could have a procedure that you go in there and reinforce it,” Ostrander said. “McCarty’s got a great future and talking with him and his family they opted to go ahead and do the procedure, which I think is the right call. But unfortunately, we won’t see McCarty again this year.”
Despite lacking English and Payne tonight, Southern Miss (21-12, 8-4) was aided by the work of their bullpen, which showed some hope in the grim news of English and Payne.
Four Golden Eagle pitchers took the mound, and all of them got out of various jams to contain the Lions to only one run throughout the game. The Golden Eagles also forced the Lions to strand 12 runners on base.
“I thought Drew Druckenmiller was one who has been waiting patiently and he has the stuff to do it, he just needs to go out there and do it,” Ostrander said.
Druckenmiller recorded his first start on the mound this season and tied a career-high in strikeouts with five.
The most significant moment of the night was when Kros Sivley came in to pitch with the bases loaded in a one-run game and forced a foul out and a groundout with an excellent play in the infield by Nolan Tucker.
Tucker, who has missed the past month due to injury, was back in the lineup tonight for the first time since March 1. Tucker made his presence known at the bottom of the second with his first hit of the season.
He doubled off the left field wall, scoring Matthew Russo to put Southern Miss up 2-0 after Davis Gillespie had an RBI in the first inning.
“It felt good,” Tucker said on seeing the ball drop for a hit. “You’re out so long, you see the team winning without you and you want to do something. You want to help the team win. So, getting back and seeing that I can help the team win felt really, really good.”
After Southeastern Louisiana (19-14, 3-6) scored an RBI single in the first inning to make the score 2-1, the Golden Eagle bullpen pitched six scoreless innings throughout the rest of the game, limiting the Lions to seven hits and no runs.
However, the Golden Eagles could not expand their lead until the seventh inning, when Dalton McIntyre led off with a double and advanced to third on a wild pitch. Ozzie Pratt collected an RBI on a sac fly to go up 3-1. After Slade Wilks struck out, Gillespie ripped a double to left center. Then Carson Paetow batted him in with an RBI single to make the score 4-1. A passed ball plated the fifth and final run for Southern Miss later in the inning.
Chandler Best earned the win and moved to 2-0 on the year.
Next, Southern Miss will travel to Georgia State (15-16, 7-5) this weekend for a three-game series.
