SAN MARCOS, Tex. - South Alabama held onto the reins of this game from start to finish in a 5-2 victory over Texas State to even up the series.

The Jags were able to draw four walks in the first innings, with SAC bunts advancing runners also, but it was a wild pitch on a designed squeeze play that scored Will Turner. The Jags never looked back, with starter Leif Moore only letting up two singles and two walks through the first four innings. USA added another in the fourth off a Duncan Mathews SAC bunt that scored Rett Johnson. 

The fifth inning saw the most action from both sides, with a JG Bell single and Ethan Melton walk setting up Tyler Borges' monster home run out of left field to make it 5-0. A two-RBI single gave the Bobcats some life, but Mitchell Heer made sure to snuff it out quickly and quietly. Heer finished the day with 3.0 innings, two strikeouts and only one walk administered, also forcing a double play to help the Jags out of the fifth inning on the way to his highest pitch count and tied for the most innings from him this season.

Gant Starling entered the eighth inning and pitched a strikeout to end the inning with bases loaded. Starling returned to the mound in the ninth to retire the first two batters, with the lone baserunner of the inning reaching on an infield error before a fly out clinched the victory.

Winning Pitcher: Mitchell Heer (2-1)
Save: Gant Starling (2)
Losing Pitcher: Peyton Zabel (2-3)

QUOTES
Head Coach Mark Calvi

On their offense and getting at the starting pitcher early: We had a good approach against him. We were on his fastball only, his breaking ball is nasty. The batting average against his breaking ball was in the low one hundreds and batting average against his fastball was in the upper 200, so we felt our best chance was to kind of take away some of his pitches and sit on one and we knew they weren't gonna go to him long. He was probably 50 pitches, max, but we did a good job of getting a really good arm out of there early. Really good stuff and yeah, not a whole lot of offense by both teams; wind's blowing in, we hit a couple of balls hard, they hit a couple of balls hard. Lined out a couple of times, but we did enough to win. We got some guys on, and we safety squeezed again,and then Borges with the big three-run home run and I thought I thought Leif did a really good job. Our pitching today was really, really good. Mitch and Gant in behind him, behind Leif was really tough to score against.

On making aggressive changes on the mound: Yeah, well my philosophy is: when you have somebody that's as good, or better down in the bullpen than what's on the mound, the only mistake you can make is to go to him too late. So when you have good relievers like we have, the only mistake I can make is to wait too long to go to them, especially when they're fresh. Like, Mitch was fresh today and Gant was fresh and my only mistake would have been if I said "Ah, let's let Leif work out of it." Leaf did a hell of a job. He put us on his back early. We weren't scoring a lot. It was time to put him on our back and do some work for him. And that's what we did.

UP NEXT
South will compete in the rubber match against Texas State Sunday morning at 11:30 a.m.

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