HR helps Auburn avoid sweep

Published 6:00 pm Sunday, May 19, 2019

LSU goes to SEC Tournament as No. 5 seed

lsu tigers baseball graphic

BATON ROUGE — The dicey part of LSU’s makeshift pitching plan worked to near perfection Saturday against Auburn.

That optimistic goal was reached — piecemeal a staff together with enough grit and guile to somehow hand a lead to closer Zack Hess late.

Johnny Wholestaff was fine — four pitchers holding Auburn to two runs over eight innings.

But after getting the final out of the eighth and the first of the ninth, Hess walked a batter then gave up a towering two-run home run to Matt Scheffler on an 0-2 pitch to tie it and the War Eagles got to him for another run in the 11th for a 5-4 win to salvage the final game of the three-game Southeastern Conference series.

“Today was just one of those days that are frustrating about baseball,” LSU head coach Paul Mainieri said. “You got to get all 27 of ours. We got 25 of them.

“That’s a tough loss. It seemed like were a base hit away the whole game.

“The pitching plan looked like it was going to work and then their kid put a good swing on the ball.”

But after Devin Fontenot, Matt Beck, Ma’Khail Hilliard and Todd Peterson played pitching tag-team to get the ball to Hess, it all fell apart.

Hess said he wasn’t sure what he would have done differently.

“I thought I had gotten it where I wanted to,” he said of the fast ball that left the yard. “He put a good swing on it. He beat me. I felt fine. They were just putting it on me. I felt our team played a great game.”

The Tigers fell to 34-22 and finished 17-13 in the SEC, but the loss had no effect on their seed in this week’s SEC Tournament.

Win or lose, the Tigers were going to Hoover, Alabama, where they’ll open play Tuesday night as the No. 5 seed,against No. 12 South Carolina (28-27).

That’s a single-elimination game, with the winner advancing to Wednesday, when it morphs into double elimination.

But completing the sweep surely would have strengthened the Tigers’ case to host an NCAA regional the following week.

“That’s going to be up to the selection committee,” Mainieri said when asked if LSU has work to do in Hoover. “I’m not going to speculate on that. We’ve got 19 wins against top 50 teams and a chance to get more. We won six of our 10 series, didn’t get swept and swept one.

“We’ll just have to wait and see.”

If Saturday was LSU’s last home game, the Tigers will be kicking themselves.

Scheffler’s home run to force extra innings was Auburn’s second of the day along with Ryan Bliss — both players had one bomb going into the game.

“I thought it was a good character win for us,” Auburn coach Butch Thompson said, “Especially after we come to the The Box and get two runs in two days. That’s not how you win.”

Mainieri is likely trying to figure out how his Tigers lost.

“You’ve got to give their kid credit,” he said the tying home run. “I’m sure the pitch was at best — at worst — it was away from him as a strike and for him to yank that out of the park takes a lot of talent and skill. You tip your hat to him.

“I thought Zack was throwing the ball great.”

LSU had plenty of chances to make the home run inconsequential.

“It just felt like we were so close to breaking the game open all along,” Mainieri said.

The Tigers scored single runs in four consecutive innings, starting in the fourth.

But each inning had a chance to be bigger as LSU stranded eight runners over the span, including seven in scoring position.

After Auburn went ahead in the 11th on Will Holland’s RBI double, the Tigers got the tying run to second with two outs before Antoine Duplantis lined a rocket to third for the final out.

“Perfect swing a against a left-handed curveball pitcher, just the way you teach them,” Mainieri said, “and he hits the ball right on the nose right at their third baseman. That’s the way it goes sometimes.”