Oklahoma baseball: Sooners go quietly in NCAA Regional final
By Chip Rouse
On Sunday, the softball season ended for the Sooners, and 24 hours later, the Oklahoma baseball season followed suit.
The Sooners, the No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tallahassee Regional, one day ago were one win away from advancing to next weekend’s Super Regionals. So close, yet so far, as they say
Oklahoma was unable to close the deal, losing in back-to-back blowout to Mississippi State, the same team Oklahoma put away by a 10-run margin in Friday’s opening round of the Tallahassee Regional.
The Sooners followed up their 13-5 beatdown by Mississippi State on Sunday with another yawner against the same team on Monday, in a game with even higher stakes. The No. 2-seeded Bulldogs won two of three from Oklahoma, handing the Sooners an 8-1 drubbing on Monday afternoon, to capture the Tallahassee Regional and advance to the round of 16, otherwise known as the Super Regionals.
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Oklahoma scored its lone run in Monday’s regional final in the second inning on a single by Justin Mitchell that scored Brady Lindsly from second base. Other than that, the Sooners managed just four hits off of two Mississippi State pitchers. Meanwhile, the Bulldogs scattered 11 hits and scored eight runs off of six Oklahoma hurlers.
Freshman Levi Prater started Monday’s game for the Sooners. He made it through 4 2/3 innings, allowing three runs, all earned, on the same number of hits. Mississippi State scored a pair of runs in the fourth inning to take the lead and added single runs in the fifth and the eighth to make in 5-1 going into the final inning.
In the ninth, junior right-handed reliever Austin Hansen came on for Oklahoma. He retired the first Bulldog batter he faced, but yielded hits to the next five hitters, the big blow coming off the bat of leadoff hitter Jake Mangum, who blasted a two-run homer. Hansen faced six batter total and allowed four runs on five hits.
Kyle Tyler came on in relief of Hansen and got the final two outs, but the ninth-inning damage all but sealed the Sooners’ fate.
A pair of strong offensive performances by Mississippi State, coupled with, and perhaps attributed to, shaky pitching by Oklahoma in the back-to-back losses to the Bulldogs, pretty much sums up the story of Mississippi’s two wins over OU to remain alive in the NCAA Championship.
It would have been nice to have Steele Walker, the Sooners’ best hitter and run-producer, and speedy Kyler Murray available for regional action. Both were out with injuries, but I’m not sure even if had they played, that would have been enough to close the run gap that plagued Oklahoma in the last two games.
The six OU pitchers in the game combined for six strikeouts. That raised the Sooners’ strikeout total for the season to a record-breaking 606, breaking the previous mark for a single season of 576, set in 2010.
Oklahoma’s season ends with a final record of 38-25