Close Doesn’t Cut It
The Alabama Crimson Tide sent the Ole Miss Rebels packing with a 7-5 extra innings victory.
“It’s always disappointing to finish here and not on the weekend. That’s the reason it’s the number one baseball conference in the country. This is the reason it’s the best tournament in the country. It’s very unforgiving. If you don’t play well, you lose” said Ole Miss head coach Mike Bianco.
“This happened the last two days. We haven’t played that poorly, but we haven’t played well enough to beat these teams the last two games. We had opportunities yesterday and today, but congratulations to Alabama. They got a lot of key and big hits. Every time we turned around, someone came up and got a big hit. Jacob pitched and started the game. We asked a lot out of him today. We had a couple of opportunities to score, but we couldn’t get the big hit,” Bianco added.
Ole Miss took an early 3-0 lead in the bottom of the second inning, however after three straight productive innings for Alabama in the fourth, fifth and sixth, the Rebels found themselves trailing 3-5. The Rebels responded in the bottom of the seventh with a two-run inning that would tie the game up and force extra innings.
A Little Bit Extra
Alabama scored two in the top of the tenth that would eventually serve as the game-winning runs as Tucker Hawley closed out the game with a scoreless bottom of the tenth. Hawley pitched 3.0 scoreless innings for the Crimson Tide, walking two and allowing just two hits to earn the win on the mound, improving to 5-2 on the year. However, Alabama isn’t a stranger to extra inning games.
“Throughout the entire year we have fought and battled. Like Coach (Mitch) Gaspard was saying, we’ve set a record now for extra inning games. We’ve got a little bit of confidence going into them. We just take everything pitch by pitch, compete and never give up.” Tucker Hawley
Moving Forward
While Ole Miss is now eliminated from the tournament, Alabama will play the loser of the LSU/Arkansas game. Alabama fell to LSU in the opener of the SEC tournament and lost two games of their series against Arkansas during the regular season. The game will take place on Friday at 3:00 p.m.
