The Mississippi State baseball team was defeated by the South Carolina Gamecocks on Thursday night. The Diamond Dawgs lost game one of this weekend’s series by a score of 6-4.
Mississippi State really needed to win tonight to have a shot at taking the series from the No. 9 team in the nation, the South Carolina Gamecocks.
Could this year’s Mississippi State team be the Bad News Bulldogs?
Here are my early post-game thoughts:
The bats will always give Mississippi State baseball fans hope this 2023 season.
The Diamond Dawgs have some guys who can hit the ball in the hole or hit it out of the park. Obviously, fielding is the number one issue right now, but typically, that stuff gets fixed by the latter half of March (it hasn’t).
What is unfortunate for Mississippi State fans, the bats will just keep fans in the game until their hearts are broken, but hey, that is the life of being a Mississippi State fan, right?
The Diamond Dawgs are now 0-7 in SEC play.
This win would have started to turn things around for the Mississippi baseball program. Defeating the No. 9 team in the nation is a program-defining win.
The Diamond Dawgs have not had this bad of an SEC start since the early 1900s. The Bulldogs had their chances tonight but couldn’t finish the game.
Colby Holcombe had a really solid game, and the win might have been stolen from him in the 7th inning.
Mississippi State pitching has been what many would call poor this season. Tonight was not as bad as it was the last two weekends vs. Kentucky and Vanderbilt.
Colby Holcombe replaced Jurrangelo Cijntje in the sixth inning and did an excellent job. Where the Diamond Dawgs lost the game was when Holcombe left a pitch up in the seventh inning for a South Carolina homerun.
Now, I’ve never called baseball games from behind the plate, but the pitch before the two-run homerun was a strike. If strike three would have been called, the game would have stayed tied going into the bottom of the 7th inning.