Southern Miss bullpen slams the door on Ole Miss

Ole Miss was hoping for some baseball deja vu Tuesday night. Southern Miss, still with nightmares from about this time two years ago, was trying to avoid the same.

Remember? Ole Miss, getting white-hot at just the right time, came to Pete Taylor Park here in May of 2022, beat the highly ranked Golden Eagles, then returned to Hattiesburg a couple weeks later for an NCAA Super Regional and thrashed USM twice more en route to that amazing national championship run.

Early on Tuesday night at the jam-packed “Pete,” Mike Bianco’s Rebels seemed to be re-writing that 2022 script. Andrew Fisher’s two-run, 416- foot blast gave the Rebels a 2-0 lead two batters into the game. The Rebels scored two more in the second inning for a 4-0 lead.

“It looked like it was going to be our night at the plate,” Bianco would later say.

The Southern Miss bullpen had other ideas. Four Golden Eagle relievers combined for seven innings of one-hit, shutout baseball, and, cheered by a sellout crowd of 5,706, the home team reeled off seven unanswered runs for an important 7-4 victory.

The victory moved USM to 35-17 on the season and vaulted the Eagles to a No. 29 national RPI headed into the last weekend of the regular season. For Ole Miss, hopes of an at large NCAA Tournament bid took a hit, although just how much remains to be seen. Ole Miss still has an NCAAworthy No. 24 RPI, but the Rebels record stands at 27-25, just two games above .500 heading into the last weekend of the season.

“Winning here might have raised our RPI a few points,” Bianco said, “but I still think this weekend’s series (at LSU) is what really matters. We need to go win that series.”

Southern Miss first-year head coach Christian Ostrander, when asked about the early 4-0 deficit, said this: “This team doesn’t panic when it gets down. Ole Miss is a really good team playing well lately, and they popped us in the mouth early. But we stayed in the middle of the ring and kept punching. Our bullpen was fantastic, our offense did what we needed and our defense made some really clutch plays. This team has grown up a lot over the course of the season.”

Southern Miss has done just that. Replacing more than 70 percent of the players who started games last season, the Eagles started slowly and have had to overcome several injuries along the way. Only three players – Slade Wilks, Carson Paetow and Nick Monistere – who were everyday starters last season started Tuesday night.

“I know a lot of people will make a big deal about this because it was Ole Miss, but this was important or a whole lot of reasons,” Ostrander said, turning and pointing to left field and USM’s huge “Tradition of Excellence” sign, which lists the program’s many accomplishments. “What’s most important is adding to that tradition you see right there. This win tonight helps keep us headed in that direction.”

It likely guaranteed Southern Miss an eighth straight NCAA Regional berth. Southern Miss already had achieved its 22nd consecutive 30-victory season, the nation’s longest such streak. Tuesday night’s victory moves the Eagles a step closer to an eighth straight 40-victory season. They are the only Division I program that owns seven straight 40-win seasons.

Hard-throwing sophomore right-hander JB Middleton from Yazoo City probably had the most to do with turning Tuesday night’s game around. He entered to begin the third inning with the Eagles trailing 4-1. He pitched three innings of no-hit baseball, facing only 10 batters and striking out five of those.

Middleton, who prepped at tiny Benton Academy, has always thrown in the mid-toupper 90s, but he entered the game with a 5.32 earned run average and giving up a hit an inning. In high level college baseball, a 97-mph fast ball that doesn’t move often leaves the ballpark going even faster. His fast ball was moving more against the Rebels and he also used a fast-dropping changeup for a couple of big strikeouts.

“In the last couple weeks, I have been throwing a twoseam fast ball that seems to have a little more run to it than the four-seam fast ball I was throwing,” Middleton said. “It looks like I am going to stick with the two-seamer.”

The Eagles also got excellent bullpen work from lefty Ben Riley Flowers, true freshman right hander Josh Och and sophomore right hander Colby Allen, who appears to have settled into the role of closer. USM pitching benefitted from a couple of remarkable defensive plays, including right fielder Carson Paetow’s diving ninth inning catch that robbed Reagan Burford of at least a double and shortstop Ozzie Pratt’s acrobatic play that nailed Campbell Smithwick at first in the eighth inning.

Pratt, who grew up in Oxford, and Paetow were also the Eagles offensive heroes. Pratt had two hits, including a run-scoring double, and scored twice. Paetow added three hits including a triple high off the center field wall and drove in three runs. Monistere added a two-run double.

So now, Southern Miss will begin its final regular season series Thursday night against Sun Belt rival Texas State before heading to Montgomery next week for the Sun Belt Conference Tournament. Ole Miss was to spend Tuesday night in Hattiesburg and then head for Baton Rouge for the huge series with LSU. The Rebels probably need to win that series or make a huge run at next week’s SEC Tournament in order to make the NCAA Tournament. Southern Miss, on the other hand, is playing for seeding now. In Hattiesburg, the NCAA Tournament has pretty much become a foregone conclusion.

Rick Cleveland, a native of Hattiesburg and resident of Jackson, has been Mississippi Today’s sports columnist since 2016.