Takeaways: Auburn baseball loses game two versus Mississippi State despite a huge ninth inning
Auburn’s starting pitching gave the Tigers a good chance to take the first two from Mississippi State, but the Auburn bullpen snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Auburn gave a near miraculous night inning to remember, but couldn't overcome the pitching mistakes. Auburn and State will go into Sunday looking at a tied series. Here is what we can take away from today’s game.
Auburn struck first and took an early lead when Cooper McMurray cooked Mississippi State’s Colby Holcombe’s fastball over the wall to give Auburn the lead of 2-0 to end the second inning.
Auburn’s Christian Herberholz had a strong start for the Tigers with 5 complete Innings, allowing only 3 hits, 0 runs, and 4 strikeouts. He pitched very well against a strong Bulldog offense, and he benefited from some great defense behind him.
Stop me if you have heard this before, but all of this was ruined when the bullpen took the mound in the 6th. Auburn relievers Bauman, Armstrong, and Isbell combined to allow 6 runs in one inning to assist the Bulldogs to blow the game wide open. That is a 54.00 ERA for those without calculators. The lead was 6-2 Bulldogs. Something Auburn fans are painfully used to this season.
Auburn fought hard to get one run back in the 7th as Cole Foster drove in Kason Howell with a rocket single into right field. Which closed the gap to 7-3 Bulldogs.
Then the Auburn bullpen did more Auburn bullpen things when reliever Drew Nelson allowed a homer and two runs, followed by Chase Allsup allowing 5 straight hits and another run to let the Bulldogs build a comfortable 9-3 lead.
In the ninth, Allsup continued his interesting style of pitching where he strikes out a few batters, walks a batter, and then floats a heater down the middle of the plate to watch a ball fly out of the park. Mississippi State ends its day with 4 home runs, all off of Auburn’s bullpen. The lead bloated to 11-3 in State’s favor.
In the bottom of the ninth, The Bulldog bullpen did their best Auburn bullpen impression. Kayson Howell had no quit in him as he dumped a 95 mph middle-in fastball deep into homer-space to get one run back. That seemed to jumpstart the Tiger's bats. Auburn started popping the ball as Foster singled to right scoring Wright which was quickly followed by Peirce slamming a double into the wall to score Stanfield. Irish keeps the rally going with an infield single scoring Foster. Auburn batted around and Kason Howell got up again and cleared the bases with a triple. Ryan Dyal struck out looking on a very questionable call to end the game with the tying run 90 feet away. It was truly amazing to watch as the Tigers gave it one heck of a run in the ninth scoring 7 runs on 7 hits with one left on. However, it was not to be as Mississippi State hangs on for an 11-10 win.
The boxscore was 11 runs on 10 hits with no errors for Mississippi State, Auburn tossed up 10 runs on 11 hits with one error.
The late-inning near heroics does give Auburn some momentum going into Sunday, which is a good thing as they really need some series victories as they fall to 22-16-1 on the season and to 6-11 in the SEC.
The rubber game of this series comes tomorrow, April 23, at 2:00 PM ET. The radio broadcast can be found on the Auburn Sports Network and the video broadcast can be watched on SEC +.