Sweet sendoff: Plumlee, MacNamee, Mangum and others get their moment on the way back to Omaha

By Brett Hudson

STARKVILLE — Peyton Plumlee spent a second looking down the filled sections of grandstands, first to his left and then his right, after he finished his 6.2 innings of 2-hit, 1-run pitching. His hat partially covered his face, an effort to keep himself from crying, as a giddy JT Ginn met him with an emphatic embrace.

Before this triumphant stroll, Plumlee got a word of advice from coach Chris Lemonis: “Take it slow.”

This was his Dudy Noble Field sendoff, and one Lemonis wanted Plumlee to enjoy.

The 2.1 innings of baseball to follow was much more of the same. Yes, Sunday’s night’s 8-1 win over Stanford was one that won the Starkville Super Regional, one that sent Mississippi State to Omaha for the 11th time in program history and to the program’s first back-to-back Omaha trips in 21 years. But it was also the heroic exit the soon-to-depart crop of players deserved, one immediately after the other with 11,597 people applauding every step of the victory lap.

Few fit that description — and bolster it with raw emotion — better than Plumlee. Plumlee took the advice to soak it in; his parents did the same.

“I said, ‘Y’all film, I’m watching,’” Mia Plumlee said.

She said she could see the emotion on her son’s face, but, “It was hard to see through mine.”

Mia Plumlee would be thrust back into that emotion later, recounting an added layer to the meaning of the night.

“Omaha’s been talked about in our family since he was a little kid. My dad, we grew up South Carolina fans because we lived there, but all my dad wanted to see was Peyton to get to Omaha one day,” she said, choking back tears. “He’s watching from above, and he did it.

“Peyton did it. For this town, for this school, he did it.”

Peyton’s father Michael also had to choke back tears as he watched Peyton exit the game from left field. His mind went back to 2010, when Peyton was 13 and they went to the College World Series as fans for its final season at Rosenblatt Stadium. For Peyton to play such a big part in sending the team there is still surreal to him, but by now it shouldn’t be a surprise.

“He’s not afraid,” Mia said, and Peyton’s performance in the big moments proves it.

Plumlee got the start in the Governor’s Cup game against Ole Miss and responded with 4 innings of 3-hit, 1-run ball; he started five days later for a chance to sweep top-5 Georgia and threw 6.1 innings with one hit and no runs allowed. He got a rubber match start against Texas A&M and delivered 6 strong innings and a win.

Plumlee’s gotten wins in both of his NCAA Tournament starts, one to send the Bulldogs to a Super Regional and another to send them to Omaha.

In tow on that route to Omaha: Elijah MacNamee’s redemption story.

* * *

The usually eloquent MacNamee didn’t have many words roughly 36 hours after not hearing his name called in the MLB Draft. He was short and to the point: he’ll put his trust in God’s hands and trust all will work out as it’s supposed to.

It did nothing to stop everyone around him from voicing their frustrations.

“There’s 1,200 picks in the draft and he doesn’t get drafted. It’s a joke,” Jake Mangum said. “All week he said God’s got him, he’s going to stay with God and good things happened.”

Chris Lemonis added, “Elijah’s week’s been really hard. He’s such an awesome kid, he’s a great player but an even better person. It was really hard, but the day after he’s working hard and pumping everyone up, and the game rewards that.”

MacNamee had faith in that basic principle, but at least he gets to have the bat in his hand and control the situation in some way. His mother, Jen Horton, is not as lucky. She had moments of being bitter, contemplating how Elijah’s chase of the national championship he so covets could be influenced by such an important outside event right in the middle of it.

“He’s my hero, and I’m going to cry saying that,” Horton said. “It hurt me down to the core as a mom. You want to hear the name called.”

If MacNamee allowed his frustration to show to anyone, it was Horton. She felt the urge to send him a long text message before Sunday night’s game, reiterating her pride in him, how his performance as a Bulldog is far beyond anything they could have imagined. Part of his response: “You’re my best friend. Let’s finish this.”

MacNamee finished it with a behemoth of a home run that twisted the cap off his emotional bottle. He admired his work and flashily flipped the bat back to the dugout as he yelled, screamed and repeatedly pumped his fist, the gyrations of his body not all that different from the “trot” around the bases in Tallahassee for which he will be remembered forever.

In the stands, Horton did the same thing she did when MacNamee’s home run walked off game one of last year’s Nashville Super Regional: she collapsed and cried. She wanted to surround herself with other mothers — Mia Plumlee, Stacy Mangum and Jennifer Self, to name a few — as their boys went through their final motions in this stadium (Riley Self excluded). As MacNamee’s ball left the yard, Horton was surrounded by hugs and brought into them.

Stacy Mangum had her own moment just three at-bats earlier, when her son Jake Mangum couldn’t help but notice his first and last Dudy Noble Field hits resembled each other: through the left side of the infield.

“And of course it’s on the first pitch,” Jake Mangum said.

Mangum stood on first base and blew a kiss to the throngs of fans, Stacy Mangum among them, almost certainly shedding tears. She’s still coming to terms with these four years ending — and frankly would take another one in a heartbeat if the NCAA would let her — but Jake’s sendoff had her smiling ear to ear in the wee hours of Monday morning.

Third baseman Marshall Gilbert got to have two hits in his final day at Dudy Noble. Jared Liebelt recorded four outs between the starter and the finisher in his last time on that mound. He returned to Mississippi State to stare long odds in the face in hopes of proving he belongs and proving he can help a championship team, and he did both in his heroic goodbye.

Cole Gordon’s sendoff moment was muzzled and came with a different view: his came from the bottom of a dogpile. Eleven months prior, Gordon was weighing life after baseball, even as far as having one foot into that life. Instead, he and his fellow seniors have reached the pinnacle of their sport and done it with the storybook moment to share forever.

“If you think I can put that into words,” Jake Mangum said, “you’re crazy.”

Rowdey Jordan's Days of Thunder come in June, when his team needs him most

By Brett Hudson

STARKVILLE — Rowdey Jordan has a calm presence about him. He exudes quiet confidence through a generally chill vibe, one that doesn’t change much whether he’s standing on first base after a single or getting roasted by teammates at batting practice.

His father, Kevin, wasn’t blessed with that quality when it comes to Rowdey’s performance. When the cruel nature of baseball strikes Rowdey, the player keeps his cool, identifies minor corrections to be made and goes about them; the father grows concerned for future playing time, eagerly awaiting the luck to reverse so Rowdey’s lineup spot is assured.

Every year to date, Rowdey has been right. He’s always been swinging a hot bat as the postseason comes, and in his first two years at Mississippi State it’s to the tune of a .400 career batting average in the NCAA Tournament (26-for-65) and MVP honors of last week’s Starkville Regional. It’s also come with the adoration of the MSU fan base that has Kevin Jordan, “ in awe,” never more than when a Rowdey chant takes over Dudy Noble Field.

The name that Rowdey admits probably contributes to his popularity is the only one he’s ever known — and one that’s not on his birth certificate.

* * *

Kevin and Angel Jordan had a deal: he would name the boys, she would name the girls. They ultimately had three girls and a boy, but Rowdey came first.

Kevin was still searching for ideas when he watched Days of Thunder, the 1990 Tom Cruise film on life in NASCAR and the rivalry between his Cole Trickle character and Rowdy Burns, played by Michael Rooker. Kevin was drawn to the rivalry, to the character and to the name, so his mind was made up. Angel — then a school teacher, since retired — refused to have her colleagues see her son’s name on the role call sheet as Rowdey Jordan, so Rowdey’s birth certificate (and roll call) name is William Kevin Jordan Jr., “which I was very much opposed to,” Kevin Jordan says.

(So much for that naming agreement.)

Kevin would ultimately get his way: Rowdey Jordan can’t remember a day when he didn’t go by Rowdey, and Kevin Jordan confirms he’s been called Rowdey his entire life.

At mention of the movie, Rowdey asks, “Is that a NASCAR movie?” Clearly he’s never seen the movie that produced his name, but Rowdey Jordan also says he doesn’t watch a ton of movies. He’s open to coming across it one day and watching it, but apparently that day isn’t now.

In an ironic twist, Rowdey Jordan wasn’t all that rowdy as a child. Kevin Jordan said he has a subdued nature like his mother — “Unlike his daddy, with my mouth.” — which has served him well as his baseball seasons tend to follow a bumpy arc.

* * *

As recently as two months ago, Rowdey Jordan’s 2019 was defined by a slump: the slump that had a .321 hitter from a year ago hitting .245 through 30 games, the slump that saw him miss a start (the final game of the series at Florida) for the first time in 53 games dating back to last season. Kevin Jordan

It helps that Rowdey has been here before. Kevin Jordan estimates Rowdey went through a 2-for-20 slump to start his junior season of high school and wasn’t lights out to start his senior season — far from his season-long hot streak as a sophomore that saw the Auburn native lead the state in hitting — but in all instances, Rowdey Jordan had it going when the games mattered most.

At Mississippi State, that trend has continued: Rowdey Jordan has hit .223 in March in his MSU career, and that number is boosted by his uncanny ability to punish his hometown Auburn Tigers coming in March of this season; if not for this year’s Auburn series, Rowdey Jordan’s March batting average would go down to .198.

But as a Bulldog, June has belonged to Rowdey. His .400 NCAA Tournament batting average and .646 NCAA Tournament slugging have made him a postseason hero — for reasons he can’t explain.

“I don’t know what it is the last two years where it wasn’t there at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year it is,” Rowdey Jordan said. “Getting some at-bats under you — I got 200 under me now — so I don’t know, just seeing the ball well and putting good swings on it.”

Kevin Jordan recognizes fortune’s role in all this: fortunate that Rowdey did so well last year that a coaching staff might be willing to let him find it through struggles, and fortunate that a new coaching staff was willing to do it on word of mouth alone.

Chris Lemonis is able to explain it easily: Rowdey Jordan’s postseason form is a result of Rowdey’s truest self shining through undeterred.

“He’s not thinking about it. He’s not a great thinker, just point him to the plate and let him play,” Lemonis said. “Early in the year he got caught up in trying to think about it and do too much; now that he’s relaxed and just playing, he’s one of our more enjoyable kids to coach. He’s always in a great mood when he runs out there.

“If he just relaxes and lets the game come to him he’s really good, and you’re seeing that right now.”

Full Count, Starkville Regional: Three Thoughts from the Weekend, Two from Palo Alto

Photo by Aaron Cornia, courtesy of Mississippi State Athletics

By Brett Hudson

The field of 64 is nearly down to 16, and for the fourth year in a row Mississippi State has a spot in that elite class. We went daily with Dogpile, our MSU baseball podcast, through the regional and that includes the final day, so there’s some extra coverage to be had there, but here are some thoughts on top of it.

Three Thoughts from the Weekend in Starkville

Weekend of revivals

As if this lineup needed more weapons, it had three more wake themselves up with impeccable timing.

• Jake Mangum, back. Thanks to a four-game skid that spanned 18 at-bats, Mangum has as many hits in six 2019 postseason games (five) as he had in single games against Little Rock and ULM. But three of those five hits came in the final game of the Starkville Regional and made him one of just five people in the history of Division I baseball to amass 375 career hits. He even drove a blast of a double into the gap, and that’s the real test of him being back for me: with his foot speed, he’s got a shot at legging one out like he did for that first hit any night. Sending one into the gap with gusto for a double, his 22nd of the year, tells me all is right in the Mangum world.

• Jordan Westburg, back. It’s like you could see the pretend monkey leaving his back after the double in the Miami game, the way he celebrated it. Four hits, four RBI over the weekend: he had two hits over seven games from May 3 to May 12, and now he’s got four in a weekend. In it all he even walked twice and only struck out once.

All of this comes as the 3-hole hitter, Tanner Allen, just so happens to have raised his season average from .316 to .350 in a matter of three weeks. As it exits the Starkville Regional, this lineup is terrifying.

Hello, Hatcher

Can you believe we live in a world in which Brad Cumbest, Gunner Halter and Luke Hancock did not get a single at-bat in a weekend, much less a postseason weekend?

Josh Hatcher was the man this weekend, as he was apparently the only option from a bench that is usually really crowded and he rewarded that call with a 5-for-12 (.416) weekend, with two doubles (.583 slugging) and four RBI.

This is wild because there are so many ways to utilize those bench bats, and MSU has proven that over more or less the entire season. They are so good at scouting individual opposing pitchers and crafting bad matchups for them that they’ll pinch hit the same position in the lineup two times in a game if need be to have the right guy in the box at a given time, but they did none of it in the first three games of the NCAA Tournament. They let it ride with Hatcher and he delivered; you can’t help but wonder what, if anything, that means for the Starkville Super Regional and beyond.

Total package

Mississippi State enters Super Regional weekend fifth in the nation in batting average (.317) and fourth in the nation in strikeout-to-walk ratio (3.12), something that has not been done for an entire season since at least 2011. This team is already on the precipice of doing something rare in school history — the fifth 50-win team in school history with one more win, on the edge of back-to-back Omaha trips for the first time in 20 years — but those two numbers show a level of in-season national dominance that college baseball hasn’t seen in a decade or more.

Two Things to Know from Palo Alto

If you want to see a team punch its ticket to the Starkville Super Regional to face Mississippi State, you’ll have to stay up late: Fresno State and Stanford play each other at 9 p.m. Central on ESPNU, winner advances and loser is done.

#KyleStowersLeadoffSingles

Stanford’s leadoff man, left fielder Kyle Stowers, has been red hot in the Palo Alto Regional: 7-for-19 (.368), 5 RBI, two doubles, a home run and a stolen base. Much like Mississippi State, the Cardinal have some power bats behind him in the order — 3-hole hitter Brandon Wulff is slugging .597 thanks to 19 home runs and designated hitter Will Matthiessen has 12 doubles and 12 homers — so Stowers hitting well is dangerous. Keep an eye on his at-bats to see what could threaten the Bulldogs if it’s Stanford in Palo Alto.

Can Fresno State start?

I was reading some work from Robert Kuwada of The Fresno Bee, who is covering Fresno State in the Palo Alto Regional, and he had a couple of lines about this being a “dreaded” extra game for Fresno State. When I look at it, I think it’s because there’s no real solid plan in terms of who can start this game.

The Bulldogs are lucky to have gotten good stuffs from the guys they’ve started so far — 7.2 from Ryan Jensen on Friday, 6.2 from Davis Moore on Saturday and their usual Sunday combo of Nikoh Mitchell and Jamison Hill combining for 5 on Sunday — so the bullpen is relatively in tact. Fresno State has yet to turn to its best reliever, Jaime Arias and his 2.74 ERA over 27 appearances, tied for the team-high. It’s getting to that bullpen that will intrigue me.

Jake Mangum, Leadoff Hitter: The full statistics on Mississippi State's 4-year table setter

By Brett Hudson

STARKVILLE — John Cohen had seen all he needed to see by April of Jake Mangum’s freshman season. His freshman phenom carried a .396 batting average out of the third SEC weekend of the season, and starting that week, Cohen put Mangum in the leadoff spot.

Mangum promptly gave Cohen a leadoff walk in a midweek game and consecutive leadoff singles in a weekend series at Florida. Those three days launched what has since become the best leadoff hitting career in Mississippi State baseball history.

Mangum has anywhere between two and eight games at Dudy Noble Field remaining, depending on how the Starkville Regional and potential Starkville Super Regional go, capping an era of leadoff hitting unlikely to be paralleled in the future.

Mangum enters this weekend 67-for-196 (.341) when leading off a game with nine doubles, two triples and three home runs for a slugging of .454. Some notes on his career as a leadoff hitter:

• Of his 67 leadoff hits, 21 of them (31.3 percent) have come on the first pitch. He has also led off three games with bunt singles.

• His leadoff production has been consistent throughout his career. He had 22 leadoff hits as a junior and has 19 as a senior, so those numbers will likely be somewhat equal by the end of his season. He had 13 in both of his freshman and sophomore seasons, both of those totals limited by not hitting leadoff for the first six weeks as a freshman or the final four weeks as a sophomore.

• He’s been particularly lethal at home: 39-for-97 (.402), including both leadoff triples coming at Dudy Noble Field.

• Mangum has three leadoff home runs; two of them came against Florida.

• One would think Mangum would brutalize Ole Miss in this category as he has in every other, but he has actually struggled in leadoff at-bats against Ole Miss, going 2-for-13 (.153). Here are Mangum’s numbers in leadoff games against every SEC team, with postseason games included.

•  Mangum’s record as a leadoff hitter on the biggest stages: SEC Tournament (4-7, .571), Regionals (3-7, .428, one home run), Super Regionals (1-5, .200) and Omaha (1-3, .333), for a .409 total batting average in MSU’s first at-bat of postseason games.

But here’s the thing about Jake Mangum, Leadoff Hitter: he is the truest table setter. He doesn’t just produce at a high rate when you allow him to leadoff a game; he does it when he leads off any inning.

We mentioned above that he has 196 at-bats in game leadoff role. He has also has 137 at-bats leading off innings that were not the first inning, thus a grand total of 333 times he has taken the first at-bat in an inning. In those 333 at-bats, Mangum has 119 hits for a .357 batting average and 23 doubles, three triples and three home runs for a slugging of .471.

Some other notes from those 333 at-bats:

• He’s awesome both at home and on the road: at home, 61-for-158, .386 and a slugging of .500; on the road, 41-for-120, .341 and a slugging of .483.

• Of his 23 doubles in all leadoff situations, 13 of them have come against SEC teams, two each against Alabama, LSU and Florida.

• Mangum is a preposterous 8-for-16 in all leadoff situations in regionals.

• He has been hit by pitch 12 times to start an inning.

For his career, Mangum is hitting .409 when leading off postseason games and .400 when leading off any inning of a postseason game. With his final Bulldog postseason beginning this weekend, #JakeMangumLeadoffSingles are getting their victory lap.

Starkville Regional preview: Who's coming to Starkville?

Miami

The Hurricanes are a classic 2 seed — they’ve done some good things for their resume, but they haven’t been quite up to the standard when going up against top competition to secure that top 16 status. There is a series win over Georgia Tech on the resume, but the Hurricanes lost series with North Carolina and Louisville, plus a sweep at the hands of N.C. State. Going on a run at the end of the season against the bottom half of the ACC — sweep Virginia Tech, series wins over Wake Forest and Duke — stacked the win total to 39-18, 18-12 ACC.

Hitting

The Hurricanes have two well-rounded bats, one mostly power bat and one mostly contact bat. It makes for a strong heart of the order, but really what happens around them isn’t all that shabby, either.

The two best bats are right fielder Adrien Del Castillo and third baseman Raymond Gil. Both are hitting over .310 and both are slugging over .540; Del Castillo has done it mostly with doubles, 20 compared to nine home runs, but Gil has shown more top-end power, with 11 home runs to 14 doubles.

The power-or-nothing bat is first baseman Alex Toral, this dude has 22 long balls this year. Eleven of them did come in non-conference play, but that’s still a dinger per weekend in the ACC. Designated hitter JP Gates has been hitting for average, coming to Starkville with a .346. His numbers are smaller sample, having just 34 starts, but 21 of those starts came on ACC play and he hit .320, so it’s a legit hit tool.

Much like Mississippi State, Miami has the bats around its stars to pile runs up against a pitching staff. Shortstop Freddy Zamora is hitting .302 and has 45 RBI; Jordan Lala and Anthony Vilar have played every day and bring .284 and .282 batting averages to center field and second base, respectively, and Lala is fourth in the ACC with 58 walks.

All told this is a Hurricanes lineup that leads the ACC in slugging and has done a good bit of running, too, with 75 stolen bases. It’s had to be that good with its pitching staff.

Pitching

The Hurricanes have four main starters — Brian Van Belle, Slade Cecconi, Evan McKendry and Chris McMahon — and none of them have ERAs better than 3.25. The best of them by ERA — Van Belle — has a WHIP of 1.213. The bullpen has its clear go-to guys but none of them have a batting average allowed under .200.

Miami ended the season 13th in the ACC in ERA and ninth in batting average allowed.

Central Michigan

The Chippewas dominated the MAC this year, winning the tournament after going 22-5 in the regular season. They ended the season on an 18-game winning streak that included a midweek game over Michigan State.

Hitting

Much like Miami, hitting is what has CMU in the tournament. CMU scored 10.6 runs per game in its MAC Tournament run and hit double-digit runs in three of its final six MAC games, plus that midweek game against Michigan State.

The Chippewas have three batters bringing an OPS of better than 1.000 to Starkville: Zavier Warren (.356 average with 22 doubles, two triples and eight home runs), Griffin Lockwood-Powell (.353 with a MAC-best 11 home runs, 17 doubles as well) and Jacob Crum (.332 with eight triples, how about that?)

Pitching

Pat Leatherman and Cameron Brown are the two best starters, both of them having taken 15 starts and managed to get through it with a 2.56 and 2.72 ERA, respectively.

But the real calling card is the bullpen, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a college bullpen constructed like this one.

Most of the time you see a college bullpen find its four to six primary guys, the ones that go at last once a weekend and at times take two, depending on the midweek game needs or a special situation in a weekend series. Those guys tend to see their appearances number creep into the 20s and there’s a divide between them and that second class, which can see appearances around a dozen at the end of the regular season.

This team has one guy at 25 appearances and eight more between 17 and 14, with just three below that.

Most teams have certain patterns they follow that can give hitters a little head-start on the adjustments they’ll have to make, for example Jared Liebelt almost always relieving Ethan Small. CMU’s opponents don’t seem to have that luxury, and it could be useful for them — four of those relievers have sub-3.00 ERAs.

Southern

The Jaguars had to be pretty pleased with how the SWAC Tournament broke down for them: a matchup with a poor Arkansas-Pine Bluff team before three games against Texas Southern, a team Southern beat in both regular-season series and did it again in the SWAC Tournament. A 15-0 win over Alabama State sent the SWAC’s best lineup to the NCAA Tournament.

Hitting

Southern leads the SWAC in batting average, doubles, triples, slugging and on-base percentage. A good bit of it is on the back of Tyler LaPorte (.389 batting average) and Javeyan Williams (.388), and they do the team in favor in bringing themselves in after all that hitting: LaPorte has 21 stolen bases and Williams has been successful in all 26 stolen base attempts. It’s not a heavy power lineup, with just one player at 10 home runs (Coby Taylor), but the SWAC isn’t a big home run league, either: only six players have double-digit bombs.

Pitching

Let me put it this way, folks: In SWAC games, the Jaguars had a 6.53 ERA, a .297 batting average allowed and allowed 5.39 walks per game.

If Southern does what most teams in this situation do — play two games and get out — it’ll be because they lose their games 13-2.

A swing change, a black eye and a position change: Marshall Gilbert's route to playing time as a senior

By Brett Hudson

STARKVILLE — The Gilbert family had been through this before, but this was different. This is Marshall’s senior season — there is no next year to serve as a foundation of hope.

Marshall’s junior season as a Bulldog, his first in from John A. Logan College in Carterville, Illinois, was an up-and-down ride. Six weeks of infrequent playing time at the beginning became consistent as March turned to April, starting 12 of the 16 games that month. That season ended with just one postseason start for Gilbert, four postseason at-bats as fellow catcher Dustin Skelton enjoyed the best month of his baseball life on a run to Omaha.

That trend continued in 2019: Skelton hit safely in nine of his first 10 SEC games while Gilbert had just six starts in the team’s first 31 games. Marshall’s parents, Phil and Denise, went through an all too familiar routine: check the lineup for Marshall’s name and be disappointed to not find it. By then, Marshall had solidified his approach and was teaching it to his parents — the same approach that has him starting every day as Mississippi State enters the SEC Tournament in Hoover this week.

“I’ll be very honest with you regarding the maturity: Marshall has helped us, Phil and I,” Denise Gilbert said. “When you’re back home, you’re watching and hoping and you look at the lineup everyday and he’s not in it, you wonder if he’s ever going to get a shot. He is the one that says, ‘I’m just going to keep balling. I don’t have a choice.’”

“He’s helped us deal with it and I can’t tell you how grateful we are that he found a way to get on the field.”

As Marshall Gilbert put it: “When you don’t play a lot the confidence can kind of go up and down, and I needed to mature in that aspect and realize you can’t ride that rollercoaster, you can’t play that way. You have to stick it out for the long haul.”

Marshall Gilbert

That long haul has seen him start all of MSU’s last 11 games, raising his batting average from .286 to .330 in that time, and doing it all at a new position. That long haul has been exactly what he wanted out of junior college: come to the school at the top of his list, Mississippi State, for all its history of winning in the nation’s conference, and find a way to contribute to that winning.

“Once I found something, it resonated with me that this is what it takes to do something for the team,” Marshall Gilbert said. “I don’t like disappointing my teammates in any way. I looked at it as, ‘This is what’s going to make my teammates happy with me.’”

What Marshall Gilbert needed to make his teammates happy was a swing change and a black eye.

* * *

Marshall Gilbert has hit well for most of the season, having spent just 11 games with a season batting average below .300, but he still hit a slump: 15 at-bats from March 19 to April 7 with just two hits (.133), two of his three starts in that time being hitless.

Like many recent MSU hitting turnaround stories, this one starts with assistant coach Jake Gautreau.

“Coach Gautreau and I had some miscommunication on talking about some things, then all of a sudden we got on the same page with some stuff and it just started rolling,” Gilbert said.

“I was lifting a lot of balls, honestly. I was getting under a lot of balls and not giving myself the opportunity to drive a baseball. Then I turned into overexaggerating getting on top, letting my legs work and not trying to do too much with my upper half. That’s where Gautreau and I worked on our two-strike approach, which is what we’re most known for, that’s absolutely battling and getting every single pitch. That’s where we built the foundation for my swing and where it is now.”

Gilbert thinks all of that came together around the time MSU hosted Alabama for Super Bulldog Weekend in mid-April — when Gilbert went 3-for-9 on the weekend with two RBI, hitting a home run in both games he played. That’s also when Gilbert officially became a third baseman — and took the lumps that come with learning a new position midseason.

He was taking his first round of in-and-out, the pregame fielding routine, at third base when a grounder got the best of him. It popped up and hit him in the eye.

“I don’t know if something legitimately clicked in my brain, but right around that time is when it started clicking,” Gilbert said. “I wore the black eye for a week and went from there.”

Since that day, Gilbert is 19-for-54 (.352) with a .435 on-base percentage and slugging .630. Four of his five home runs have come since taking that ball to the eye.

Since the adjustment, Gilbert has been consistently hitting the ball hard as much as any Bulldog. The chart below shows Gilbert at the top of the team’s barrel percentage leaderboard, which is the amount of balls a player puts in play with at least an exit velocity of 98 miles per hour between launch angles of 10 and 35 degrees. The idea behind a barrel is a hard-hit ball in a sweet spot to most likely be a hit and have high potential for power, be it a double in the gap or a home run over the wall; Gilbert is doing at a higher percentage than any other Bulldog.

The final barrel numbers for the @HailStateBB regular season: pic.twitter.com/2Ct7Ye9u03

— Justin Aguiar (@j_aguiar_) May 19, 2019

He’s doing it all from a position of need in the field.

* * *

This all started out of boredom.

MSU was in Gainesville for its series at Florida; Gilbert, being a catcher that wasn’t in that day’s lineup, was in the outfield during batting practice, shagging balls, and got the feeling that he wasn’t really doing anything. So he and relief pitcher Riley Self decided to go to shortstop and goof around; Gilbert ended up making a few smooth plays.

Future BP sessions would see him do the same at third base and the coaching staff encouraged him to pick the brain of then-third baseman Justin Foscue about the position. It wasn’t long after that Foscue moved to second base, opening a hole at third.

When the opportunity presented itself, Gilbert was determined to take it. Jake Mangum — Gilbert’s roommate — once heard Marshall tell him he was going to the park early to take grounders at third.

Mangum’s reaction: “Wait, you play third?”

Clearly this was not an anticipated move — by anyone. Official rosters are quite liberal with their positional listings: Rowdey Jordan has never played infield at MSU and Tanner Allen has all of two outfield starts in his Bulldog career, yet both still have the infield/outfield designation. Gilbert is listed as a catcher and catcher only.

Yes, Gilbert got some work at first base in the fall, but catching remains his primary discipline. Both Marshall and Denise admit they can feel and see, respectively, the instinct to get on the ground and block baseballs as opposed to scooping them with a glove.

It’s a different way of life for them all. Denise Gilbert had seen her son catch so much, she was no longer nervous when he was behind the plate. She knew he was in control, she knew he was in his element. Marshall says he’s comfortable at the new position, but that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable for Denise yet.

“Part of it is awesome because it’s challenging him to do something new, it’s out of his comfort zone,” she said. “It’s going to help him in baseball or in life, for sure.”

It’s not the easiest way to go about playing time, but apparently nothing is for Gilberts playing baseball. While Marshall has battled for every start and every at-bat as a Bulldog, his younger brother Garrett is a sophomore catcher at Creighton battling for playing time — against another sophomore catcher.

The Gilbert way is apparently never the easy way, but in Marshall’s case, that’s perfectly OK. There’s an unexpected silver lining in all of this.

“For me to his smile, it’s wonderful as a mother because you don’t see their face when they play catcher,” Denise Gilbert said. “You see their face when they play third base and it’s wonderful. It’s a new perspective and I like it.”

Full Count, Week 14: Three numbers as regular season ends, Two thoughts on the season

Three Numbers at Regular Season’s End

Shoot to kill

We’ve discussed Jake Mangum’s incredible ability to string hits together on Dogpile throughout the season, and in case you want to know how it ended, he now has 28 multi-hit games compared to seven hitless games. Another way of putting that: any time you go to a Mississippi State game, you are four times as likely to see Mangum get multiple hits as you are to see him go hitless.

What’s especially wild about it is he is far from alone on this year’s team. Justin Foscue has 26 multi-hit games (46.4 percent of his games); Tanner Allen ended the season with 22, including all of his last three, four of his last five and five of his last eight; Jordan Westburg has 21, and 11 of them came against conference foes; Elijah MacNamee has 17 despite dealing with the foot injury for half of the season, which is impressive when you consider Dustin Skelton raked all season long and he only has 10.

Finally, wrap your head around this: Marshall Gilbert has 10 multi-hit games and just 24 starts.

This is a game that values consistency when consistency is borderline impossible, and for the most part I fall into that camp. But there is something to be said about this ability this lineup seems to have: they generate hits in bunches, and in the end that’s often what you need to score. Having nine hits in a game sounds great, but if you spread them through all nine innings you’re probably not going to have more than two or three runs at the end; pile them up on one another and you can finish with six or seven, and clearly that’s been happening a lot for these Bulldogs.

Team slugging update

You may remember from the Full Count after the Georgia series that this team was poised to do some really impressive things in terms of team slugging, putting itself in the elite class of Mississippi State baseball history. How about we check up on all of those chases now that the regular season is over?

 - Doubles. The record is 157 by the 1989 team, doing so on 2.3 doubles per game. This year’s Bulldogs end the regular season at 141, 2.5 per game. Since they’re guaranteed four more games (two in Hoover, two in regional), their season average suggests they’ll get up to 150-151 just off of that. What I’m trying to say is, if this team hits like itself and even threatens to win either the SEC Tournament or the Starkville Regional, much less both, they’ll break the school record for doubles in a season.

 - Runs/runs per game. The records are 633 in 1997 and 9.5 in 1999; 474 and 8.4, and being about a run per game off the school record is consistent with what they were back in April. 8.4 would tie for fifth in school history with the 1988 and 2000 teams, if it were to stay that way.

(At the time it was a similar chase for RBI and nothing has changed. The Bulldogs have held steady at the 7.6 RBI per game that they were at in April, so if they play the 68 games they played last year, they could be one of just four MSU teams to have more than 500 in a season.)

 - Home runs was a stretch at the time, and it still is. Hitting 1.07 per game, it would have to make a deep Omaha run just to reach 75, which is two short of fifth in school history (77, 1981).

 - Win total: The top class in MSU baseball is 54 (1989), 51 (2013), 50 (1985, 1990), 47 (1997) and 46 (1981). With one win in the SEC Tournament and a clean Starkville Regional win, the 2019 Bulldogs would already have 49, good enough for fourth; a Super Regional win would put it tied for second.

How hot was Tanner Allen?

Y’all know the old-school late night talk show bit where someone like David Letterman says, “Man, it’s really hot today,” and the crowd says, “How hot is it?!?” and it launches him to a few jokes? Let’s do that bit with Tanner Allen’s weekend, shall we?

How hot was he?

 - He was so hot (12-for-15, .800) that if he did it over the course of the 224 at-bats he got this season, he would have 179 hits in 56 games; the NCAA record for hits in a season is 142 set in 85 games.

 - He slugged 1.133 over the weekend. Brent Rooker slugged .810 in his Triple Crown season.

 - He had a .316 batting average in 209 at-bats, yet jumped his average an astounding 32 points in just 15 at-bats.

Two Thoughts on the Entire Season

Pitching showed up

In scrolling through old Full Counts for that note above about team slugging, I got all the way down to the first one, before this enterprise was even called Full Count. It was a quick post about what we know and what we don’t know after two weeks of baseball: one thing we knew was that the bullpen had options, but what we didn’t know was if those options would show up in SEC play.

My basic point was there was only one proven commodity from the previous season in the bullpen, and that was Riley Self. It would be a lot of new guys in the fold, and man, did they deliver.

Jared Liebelt nearly has as many saves (five) as he does walks allowed (seven) in 43.2 innings. Brandon Smith, Jack Eagan and Colby White are all impressive in their own ways: Smith with four walks in 31.2 innings, Eagan with a .159 batting average allowed and White with a WHIP of 0.926.

Previous unknowns are a big part of a bullpen that has what it takes to pitch in Omaha. That’s no small development.

The unsung heroes: the assistants

Chris Lemonis is the one with his name on the title of winningest first-year coach in SEC baseball history and Lemonis is often the one credited with having guys ready to play into the lineup and perform at a moment’s notice — and don’t get me wrong, he deserves credit — but he’s not alone here.

All those first-year pitchers I just mentioned? Think back to all the pitchers that have struggled in their first exposure to the SEC, you’ve probably seen dozens in your time following MSU baseball. Scott Foxhall quickly found a plan for those guys and helped them execute it.

Talk to any hitter about their season, and almost all of them will mention a time when Jake Gautreau helped them make an adjustment that changed their season. Marshall Gilbert and Josh Hatcher are the two most recent examples — you know, the guys hitting like crazy at the bottom of the order right now.

Catcher hasn’t been a two-way position of surplus for MSU in either of the past two seasons, and Kyle Cheesebrough has changed that more or less immediately.

You often see head football coaches be made or broken by their assistant coach hires. Lemonis’ first year at MSU has been made by his assistant coach hires.

Tommy Stevens is coming to town; can he break the trend and be MSU's answer?

If all went according to plan, the graduate transfer quarterback would be pretty good living if one could get it. He swoops into a new place in a time of need, fills that need heroically and rides into the sunset, needing just a few fall months to be remembered in a place forever. Everyone has ups and downs in life, but this quarterback wasn’t around long enough to let his new fans see them; the only thing they saw is success, thus he’ll only be remembered for success.

Turns out that narrative is rare at a Power 5 school.

Tommy Stevens would love nothing more than to fit that storyline at Mississippi State, after the former Penn State quarterback announced on Saturday his decision to play his final season of college football in Starkville. A study of Power 5 graduate transfer quarterbacks shows the track record isn’t great.

Starting with the 2012 season — the NCAA bylaw that gave graduates more freedom to transfer was put in place in 2011 — there have been 25 quarterbacks that fit the mold of Stevens: quarterbacks showing up on a Power 5 campus with one season left to play.

Of that group of 25, 14 of them failed to attempt 200 passes at their final school; six of them didn’t get as many as 50 pass attempts. That list includes swings and misses including Brandon Mitchell losing the starting job to Ryan Finley at N.C. State and three similar cautionary tales within the Southeastern Conference: Keller Chryst to Jarrett Guarantano at Tennessee, Steven Rivers to a committee of Commodores and Malik Zaire to Feleipe Franks at Florida.

Even in those seasons that saw 200+ attempts, not all of them were a storybook ending. A.J. Bush Jr., admittedly injured at times, still shared the duties a little with freshman M.J. Rivers II. Everett Golson split the duties with Sean Maguire in his lone season as a Seminole.

In fairness, Stevens has a familiarity working for him that many on this list did not, having been a Moorhead quarterback for both of the coach’s years at Penn State. There is even a certain level of correlation between prior familiarity and the top of this list.

• We’ve all heard the story of Gardner Minshew familiarizing himself with the Air Raid over the summer before heading up to run Mike Leach’s version of it in Pullman.

• Davis Webb went from one Air Raid offense (Texas Tech under Kliff Kingsbury) to another (Cal under Sonny Dykes) and it went smoothly.

Moorhead has said this offseason if you were to condense the contents of his offense to the 26 letters of the alphabet, MSU got A through M last season; when no longer supported by the best defense in the nation (albeit what should still be a very good one in 2019), the ability to execute N through Z will be crucial. Stevens has more time in the Moorhead offense than anyone on campus, and that familiarity could be a headstart for him to win the job and perform well in it.

None of this is a commentary on Stevens. Frankly, the general public doesn’t have enough of a sample on him to know what he can bring, with just 76 pass attempts in his Nittany Lion career.

What we do know is the last seven seasons of college football suggest the goal he has set for himself isn’t an easy one.

Full Count, Week 13: 3 Numbers from the Sweep, 2 Big-Picture Thoughts from the Sweep

3 Under-the-Radar Numbers from the Sweep

2-out hitting

It’s one thing to hang 21 runs in a three-game series on the road at the rival school and leave with a sweep. It’s another to do it all by getting a good bit of that production in the most painful way: 2-out hitting.

Naturally a lot of this is fueled by every bit of the nine-run 4th inning on Sunday coming with two outs, but the entire weekend numbers are still impressive. With two outs, Mississippi State hit 16-for-41 (.390), thus 16 of the 35 hits on the weekend (45.7 percent) coming with two outs.

For most teams you would call that an anomaly and move on, remembering it fondly but certainly never expecting it to happen again. I’m not so sure that’s the case with this group, if nothing else because Chris Lemonis isn’t so sure. He said after the Sunday game this is what this lineup has done: it has so many quality hitters that are able to feed off each other, they have this innate ability to string hits together in bunches like this.

That quality is also evident in hitting .403 with runners on base this weekend (21-for-52) and hitting north of .400 in advancement opportunities in every single game (.417 on Friday, .524 on Saturday and .615 on Sunday).

Another strikeout number

Most of the attention around the Bulldog pitching staff racking up strikeouts is going to Ethan Small and his climb up the individual strikeout rankings — which don’t get me wrong, is impressive. He now has 132 strikeouts this year, good for sixth in school history and not far behind fifth (Jeff Brantley, 136, 1985), fourth (Gary Rath, 141, 1994) or the tie for second (B.J Wallace 1992 and Eric Dubose 1997, 145). He also has 274 career strikeouts, good for fourth in school history and only behind Chris Stratton in third.

But this team as a whole is striking out guys at a clip good enough to be remembered in school history forever and renowned on a national level unlike any other.

First, on the national level: their strikeout-to-walk ratio of 3.39 (563 strikeouts, 166 walks) is best in the nation. The 563 strikeouts are best in the nation and the 166 walks are top 50. What’s impressive about that strikeout-to-walk ratio is it’s actually getting better of late, which you wouldn’t expect given the strength of the SEC. But the Texas A&M series (17 strikeouts to three walks, 5.66 ratio) and the Ole Miss series (29 strikeouts to eight walks, 3.62 ratio) raised the season strikeout-to-walk ratio from the 3.33 it was on May 1 to the 3.39 that it is now.

Best ever?

These 42-win Dawgs are on the brink of doing something that is uncommon in the history of this program.

Only four times in program history has a MSU team won 50 or more games, and most of them capped at 50 or 51. (54 in 1989, 51 in 2013, 50 in 1985 and 1990.) If the Bulldogs can put together a perfect week to end the regular season — not out of the picture, considering South Carolina is at the bottom of the SEC at the moment — that would give the Bulldogs 46 wins going to the SEC Tournament. Then if the projected top 8 seed does what that seeding suggests — win three games to win a Regional and win two to win a Super — the team could have 51 wins going to Omaha, and that’s if it doesn’t win a single game in Hoover.

2 Big Picture Thoughts after the Sweep

They locked up a top 8 seed

Over the last three seasons, 22 of the 24 top 8 national seeds have been Power 5 conference teams with at least 40 wins. Mississippi State is now a Power 5 conference team with 42 wins. As I write this on Monday, MSU is 3rd in RPI, moving up two spots after sweeping Ole Miss, with just Vanderbilt and UCLA ahead of it.

MSU is also currently a member of an elite in the 40-win regard. In the ACC, Louisville is there and NC State is borderline guaranteed to get there, but that’s it at the moment; the Big 12 may not get one there and the Big 10 will likely need Michigan to do it to get one there. The SEC and Pac 12 are the class of the sport on the top tier, with UCLA and Stanford joining the SEC’s unquestioned top 4 (State, Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Georgia).

With one week left in the regular season, the top class is thin and Mississippi State is a part of it. I’ll be shocked if the Bulldogs don’t earn the right to play a Super Regional at home.

Pitchers showed resiliency

Not all sweeps look as easy as the final results say they were, and it was definitely not the case for the pitching staff this weekend. But whenever a big moment came up, they responded — a quality that will do them well in June.

Jared Liebelt had one when the delay gave him an unusual, unexpected entry point to a game, and he responded with a 4-inning save. JT Ginn had one, battling through a 31-pitch first inning to get MSU into the fifth before going to the bullpen. Peyton Plumlee had one, responded to a 29-minute break between pitching the 3rd and pitching the 4th to throw his best from the 4th to the 7th.

It’s more evidence that the moment will rarely, if ever, be too big for this staff. They won’t perform every single time, no one does in baseball, but they’re good enough to have a legitimate chance every single time. That’s more than enough.

Full Count, Week 12: 3 Thoughts from the Week, 2 Trends to Follow

Three Thoughts from the Week

Is Vandy out of reach?

Vanderbilt (18-6) is three games ahead of Mississippi State (15-9) and its final six games of SEC play are against teams with a combined league record of 18-29-1 (Missouri 12-11-1 and Kentucky 6-18).

This is something I brought up in a Full Count post a few weeks ago, how Vanderbilt has a favorable closing stretch and the Commodores could be tough to catch at the end, but this is where Vandy deserves some credit: yes, the road home in the SEC East is easier than in the West, but Vanderbilt has taken advantage of every single opportunity. Against teams at .500 or worse in league play, Vanderbilt has swept Florida, took two of three from Tennessee, swept Alabama and swept Auburn. Just because it’s supposed to be easy doesn’t mean it ever is in baseball, and there’s something to be said for having a nearly 100 percent conversion rate in spots like this.

Arkansas, however, is only two games ahead of MSU and finishes its season with series against LSU and at Texas A&M. With MSU hosting a bad South Carolina team at the end of the season and obviously having a very good track record against Ole Miss with Jake Mangum on campus, there is a slight opening for State to make that up in two weekends and threaten for the SEC West crown.

Rain helping relievers

There were a total of 33 bullpen pitches thrown by Bulldogs in College Station and Jared Liebelt took all of them. How many teams are lucky enough to more or less give the entire bullpen a week off as it hits the closing stretch?

This comes at a time when starting pitching has been really strong, so the bullpen wasn’t taxed in the Georgia series, then there was no midweek game and they’re basically given the weekend off after it. I wonder how many of these arms show a new level of life for the next few weeks, maybe through the regional, after getting a good bit of recovery time here. I also wonder how the coaches manage the upcoming midweeks, since they are an opportunity to get some bullpen arms a little work for arm health purposes. Not that midweek starting pitching has been a traditional long start kind of deal for MSU recently, but I wonder if you’ll see even more inning-by-inning stuff from them in these final two midweeks against Memphis (Wednesday) and Louisiana Tech (May 14).

Foscue his due

A quick scroll through this fine website revealed that I have yet to sing Justin Foscue’s praises on an individual basis in Full Count; I had him on the podcast to talk about his improvement and how he got here (here’s the link if you missed it), but I haven’t done it in this form, so it’s time to change that.

Folks, his slash line went from .241/.332/.353 last year to .342/.390/.623 so far this year. You know how good Dustin Skelton has been this year? He’s only hitting .310 (lol ‘only’ hitting .310) and Foscue would have to go hitless in 20 at-bats to get down to .310 — and Foscue hasn’t done that in his entire Bulldog career.

Foscue already has 17 doubles this year; 22 would be good enough for tied for 8th in single-season school history. If Foscue keeps this pace (one double every 2.82 games), Foscue would have 22 at some point during the regional. His current home run pace (13, one per 3.69 games) could have him threatening MSU’s top 5 if he holds it through an Omaha run. His current slugging percentage is .623; the only Bulldog to finish a season slugging more than .600 since the 2013 team was Brent Rooker in his Triple Crown season.

Two Trends to Monitor

Elijah MacNamee Post-Texas A&M

Let’s divide Elijah MacNamee’s 2017 season into 3 parts.

 - Eight games before going to Texas A&M: 4-for-22 (.181).

 - Three games at Texas A&M: 4-for-13 (.307).

 - The rest of the season after Texas A&M: 16-for-61 (.262).

As you can see, MacNamee changed his sophomore season for good with three games in College Station: he got a hit in 10 of the 11 postseason games he played that season.

MacNamee is currently scuffling in a similar way — although we have a far more explainable reason for it this time around, his foot injury. That came to our attention at the Governor’s Cup game, when he was seen in a boot and was given a day off of right field duties to help that foot.

Let’s take the same splits from the 2017 season to this one:

 - The four games from Governor’s Cup to the Texas A&M series: 1-for-16 (.062). If you want to include the Arkansas series before it, working under the likely assumption that the injury was there then, too, it’s 2-for-26 (.077).

 - The Texas A&M series: 2-for-10 (.200).

It’s far from the hot weekend he had in College Station as a sophomore in 2017, but again, foot injury. State is looking for any reason to believe MacNamee is starting to recover from the foot injury, and maybe getting a couple of hits in a weekend series is that sign. Much like his 2017 season, the games from now until the end are what will define it.

Mangum’s getting…..better?

Be it publicly, as Mangum himself did, or privately, there was some hypothesizing that Mangum would be a better hitter after he broke the SEC career hits record: now that he’s not living with the shadow of Eddy Furniss over him, he can tailor his approach to what best suits him, not to breaking a hits record.

It’s a small sample size, yes, but in the four games he’s played since he broke the record, he’s 6-for-13 (.461), and those games coming against two of the better pitching staffs in the SEC, Georgia and Texas A&M. That performance has been enough to raise a season batting average of .395 over 200 at-bats to .399 in just 13 at-bats. That’s impressive.

If a .395 hitter magically gets better as the calendar turns from April to May….man oh man.