Baseball Closes Out Fall Series Of Games With 3-1 Win Over LSU

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- The Samford baseball team completely utilized all four playing date opportunities this fall by taking on Ole Miss, Troy, and LSU (twice), concluding with two long days of baseball with LSU over the weekend. Samford took the final game, 3-1 on Sunday evening on a day filled with tight baseball and big plays.

"It was a great overall fall series for us," Samford head coach Tony David said. "We had two opponents that were in the College World Series in June and another in LSU that is a prohibitive favorite to get back there. We were able to pick up a couple of wins over Ole Miss and then LSU and had a gut wrenching walk off loss at Troy. We played ok on Saturday but had it get away from us a little. It's hard to measure how important it was for our guys to show what they did by bouncing back and playing nearly perfect on Sunday."

Coach David's blueprint for the fall is about development and gaining experience for each of the players,

"Obviously we want to win every time we take the field," David said. "But we also aren't playing the 'as of today' starters all day either. For the most part, we played 10 guys in game one and then a completely different set of 10 for the second game. These reps against opposing teams are critical for all our players, but especially the young guys. We played a lot of freshmen."

The final day of the fall season was an outstanding one. Samford took an early lead on a long sacrifice fly by Adrian Areizaga to score A.J. Cruz who had singled earlier in the inning. Samford extended the lead to 2-0 on a blast by Trent Wright to the wall in deep left center.

The story of the game was dominant pitching. Andrew Marble went three no-hit innings followed by newcomer lefty David McKechnie getting his first inning of the fall with a shutout inning. Frank Randol launched a long home run for a 3-0 lead before LSU answered with a run of their own. Freshman Burton Moore closed the game out in the final two innings, including escaping a first and third, no out jam in the last inning to allow no runs and get the save.

"Unreal pitching by our guys on Sunday, and with just a couple of exceptions we pitched well all weekend," David said. "Our guys really threw a lot of strikes with really big-league strike zones. I wanted to use Moore to finish it. He has a bulldog mentality on the mound. I thought it was an important development moment for him against that team in that situation. Probably worth more than 10 regular innings."

LSU took the first game in a tight 4-1 game that wasn't decided until the final inning. Returning starting pitcher Noah Berry threw well to get things started on the mound and closer John Malone made his first appearance of the fall with a scoreless inning followed by two freshmen in Garret Reid and Will Price.

"It was great to get Malone back out there," David said. "Garrett has been great for us all fall, we used him back-to-back days to let him feel that for an inning each time out."

Freshmen Ty Waters and A.J. Cruz each picked up hits, along with newcomer Michael O'Brien and Gus Gandy.

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Players Mentioned

Noah Berry

Gus Gandy

John Malone

Andrew Marble

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