The Ole Miss Diamond Rebs dropped a 20-16 slugfest to the St. John’s Red Storm Sunday afternoon, ending their run in the 2010 NCAA Championship.
“It’s tough when you lose and it’s tough when the loss ends the season,” said Ole Miss manager Mike Bianco. “
“It was a hitter’s day and pitcher’s nightmare,” said St. John’s manager Ed Blankmeyer.
The Johnnies drew first blood of the hot, humid afternoon when second baseman Matt Wessinger, who reached on a stand-up triple off the top of high wall in straight away center field, scored on ground out to second.
St. John’s wasn’t done in the bottom of the first; it added two more on bases loaded single by Paul Karmas and another on a Sean O’Hare single.
Starting Pitcher David Goforth was taken out after the O’Hare RBI single. He went 0.2 Innings, giving up seven earned runs, though it was only 4-0 when Goforth left the ballgame.
“You’ve got to give it to St. John’s—they were really swinging the bats well,” said Goforth. “I made the situation worse by walking guys….When a team is swinging the bats like that you can’t afford to give those guys free base runners and put guys on like that.”
The Red Storm’s Jimmy Brennan then got in on the action, driving in the fifth and sixth runs of the inning on a two-out, two-run bases loaded single. A double by Matt Wessinger and a single by Joe Panik drove in the seventh and eighth runs of the inning for St. John’s.
Rory McKean, who could have potentially been the third Rebel pitcher of the first inning, began warming up, but a Jimmy Parque fly ball to left field ended an eight-run, seven hit first inning for the Red Storm.
Despite the tall order facing the Rebels, they began chipping away at it immediately. An Alex Yarbrough single in the second scored Taylor Hashman and Zach Miller. Yarbrough would score later in the inning on a fielder’s choice by Tim Ferguson to cut the St. John’s lead to 8-3.
The Rebels continued picking away at the Red Storm’s lead in third. Though they had the bases loaded with nobody out, the Rebs only got one run across the plate due in large part to a double play hit into by Hashman.
Ole Miss further ate into the St. John’s lead in the fourth when Kevin Mort, who reached on a leadoff double, scored on a single by Tanner Mathis. It was 8-5 Johnnies heading into the bottom of the fourth.
Though the Red Storm would increase the lead to 9-5 temporarily when Jeremy Baltz scored on a Parque double, Matt Snyder would cut the lead right back to three on a solo shot to right in top of the fifth.
But the lead would not stay at three. The Johnnies would again push the lead back to four when Brennan scored on a Baltz single in the bottom half of the fifth.
The Red Storm further padded their cushion in thesixth when they drove in five runs and five hits, pushing the score to 15-6.
Despite facing their largest deficit of the game (nine runs), the Diamond Rebs still had some fight in them.
They added a run in the top of the seventh before tallying up another four on three hits in their half of the eighth.
But where the Rebels pushed, the Johnnies pushed back harder. They answered in the bottom of the eighth with a five-run frame of their own, pushing their lead back to nine at 20-11.
“We just had no answer for them offensively today,” Bianco said. “They were just so locked in.”
Ole Miss added a run in the ninth before Snyder hit a grand slam to bring the score to 20-16. It was Snyder’s second home run of the game, but it wasn’t enough to keep his team’s season alive.
In the three games the Rebels played over the weekend, they scored 33 total runs.
“I thought this weekend, offensively, we looked a lot more like the team that we thought we’d be throughout the year,” Bianco said, adding that it was inconsistency that troubled the Rebels down the stretch this season.