MOBILE, Ala. - A seventh inning home run from Robbie Petracci gave South Alabama the deciding runs while the bullpen arms only allowed three batters on base across 5.0 innings in the Jaguars' 5-3 win Sunday evening.
Cam Hill started on the mound hot, striking out the first three batters he saw. He slowed up and in the third, USI found three runs. Hill worked his way out of two runners on base in the fourth and exited the mound. Austin Mills took over, making light work of the top of the Southern Indiana lineup as he went three up, three down in both the fifth and sixth innings and retired one more in the seventh. Logan Wash took over and closed out the inning with the minimum batters faced to allow for Gant Starling and Grant Wood to close out the game. The setup and closer turned their pitching into offense, combining for five strikeouts in the final two innings.
On offense, the Jags worked a run off good baserunning in the bottom of the third in response to the USI three-run inning at the top of the frame. South took advantage of an outfield error in the sixth and Brennan Holt found his way at home to cut the lead to a single run. The heart of the Jaguar lineup took the plate in the seventh, dealing back-to-back hits. Lucas Ismaili put himself into scoring position with a double up the right gap, and Petracci boomed a ball over the right field wall for the 4-3 lead. South continued to work that inning by executing a first and third double steal with Bell scoring the insurance run.
Winning Pitcher: Logan Wash (1-0)
Losing Pitcher: Gavin Seebold (0-1)
QUOTES
Head Coach Mark Calvi:
Overall thoughts of the game: Well, I mean, I told our guys nothing's easy. There's no easy team on our schedule and today was even more evidence of that. Southern Indiana were 0-2 coming into today and we saw two arms today, their starter and their middle reliever, who I thought were outstanding. I give both those guys credit. We had you know, we had some traffic, they weren't empty at bats like the first night, we had some traffic we just couldn't get that hit. We had second and third, we had bases loaded, we got two outs, we didn't get the hit. We worked some guys on but we need to do a better job at handling some guys that mix over the plate, that have a little bit of velo, and throw a decent changeup, especially our left handed hitters need to do a better job of that. I thought
Cam Hill probably if we handled the baseball better, he probably goes five (innings) in my opinion. I thought he competed hard. His stuff tapered off a little bit. I would like to see him hold his stuff a little bit longer. But he competed hard. Overall, I'm glad two of the three games have been tight. We had to come back today. We were down 3-0 going into the sixth, I think, or 3-1. Our guys fought back.
Micah Morgan tonight against the side-armer was huge when every run counts. You know, Holt leads off with an error by the right fielder, gets to second, I think Donaldson moved them and then Micah came in and got that ground ball to put us to 3-2 with that that RBI, and then Petracci with the big homerun, and then the first and third leave early so we did use some different guys. You know, we use some guys off the bench and we saw some bases today. We manufactured some runs and we hit a couple of balls hard and then Robbie, you know Robbie with the homerun and I thought
Austin Mills was the player of the game today with the hold. All the guys out of the pen were really good but Mills going three innings today and, Mills, that was huge for us in the middle innings.Â
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