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

Photo by Aaron Cornia, courtesy of Mississippi State Athletics

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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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.