— Shortly after Mississippi State’s Game 4 win over Texas on Sunday night, the team bus drove a half-mile from TD Ameritrade Park to the Hilton Omaha.
“Man, that lobby, that was crazy,” said he who was being yelled at, Mississippi State righty Will Bednar.
Over six innings, he faced 21 Longhorns and struck out 15, the most by a CWS pitcher since Clemson’s Kris Benson also had 15 against Miami in 1996.
With every punchout, Bednar, Sims and Mississippi moved another rung up the CWS record book and another rung higher in the national-sports consciousness.
All added up, the MSU roster is tied with Ole Miss for the Division I single-season record with 765 strikeouts, but the Bulldogs have as many as six games still to play.
During this still-new baseball age of hyper-focus around pitching spin rates, a lack of focus on small-ball swings at the plate and an overall lack of fundamental sharpness because of the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, strikeouts have skyrocketed throughout college baseball.
“The last month you’ve seen a lot of strikeouts because our top guys, starters and relievers both, have been fresh-armed,” he said.
While Foxhall preached his self-described “Lord’s Prayer broken record” mantra of “command your fastball and throw your off-speed pitches aggressively for strikes,” Lemonis, hitting coach Jake Gautreau and catcher/slugger/captain Logan Tanner kept an eye out for any bruised egos or hurt feelings.
“We have guys on this pitching staff that I think are going to have great careers, a real chance to be major leaguers, and we’ll look back and see that they didn’t really pitch much for us in 2021,” Foxhall said.
“At our practice just now, you saw that like I see it all the time,” Tanner said agreeingly on Monday afternoon following a Mississippi State workout at nearby Creighton University.
It was all about the arsenal of All-Big 12 arms from Texas and the one-two pitching punch of Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter of a foe that’s very familiar to Mississippi State: SEC rival Vanderbilt.
Now MacLeod will try to add to the story on Tuesday night when the lefty All-American toes the rubber against Virginia.
“We don’t really look too deep into that kind of stuff,” Bednar said in reply to a sportswriter’s attempt to do just that.