A somber Mike Bianco stepped to the podium to try to make sense of what had just taken place. He paused, and looked down a couple of times, struggling to find words for how his season had just ended.
“It’s hard to talk after that,” Bianco said. “I just told the kids that that’s why it is the greatest game on earth. You have the thrill of victory and it will just rip your heart out. As we sit here, I just feel awful for my guys.”
Ole Miss was on the wrong end of a 6-5 back and forth fist fight with Tulane (40-20), who worked in the last punch in the 9th inning when Jake Rogers took a slider to left field for a two-run home run that saw the lead exchange hands for the final time as the Green Wave avoided elimination.
“That’s why baseball is a special game, and sometimes it just doesn’t work,” Bianco said. “We played two errorless games. Maybe we could have gotten a couple base hits. But you have to credit the pitchers the last two days. Again, it unfortunately just didn’t work.”
The emotions were difficult to tame.
“It’s really hard. It sucks. Our goal is to go to Omaha,” Colby Bortles said.
He paused, and fought back tears while coping with the harsh reality that this year had just ended in the fashion that it did.
“It sucks,” He repeated.
Bianco seemed to have difficulty pinpointing how and why the last two nights had happened the way they did.
“As I told the guys, in other regional losses, you can look back and say we didn’t play well, or we came out flat. But you look at these last two games and our guys played their hearts out,” Bianco said
Ole Miss (43-19) did not commit an error in either of the one-run defeats. It scored five runs in each game, enough to give it a chance. It held a three-run lead as late as the sixth on Friday, and took a lead into the ninth on Saturday. A bullpen that had been the backbone of this team for most of the year, crumbled in the last three games.
“That’ll be the thing you look back and say ‘what could I have done?’” Bianco said. “Did we tax the bullpen too much? Did we lean on it too much to where in the end it didn’t work?”
David Parkinson went a servicable 5.2 innings, and put Ole Miss in position to advance, giving up two runs on five hits, exiting in the sixth with a 3-2 lead, but his successors struggled.
“Look at the stuff. Usually, when that goes with the answer, the stuff is not there,” Bianco said. “You look at Stokes after 30 pitches yesterday, he’s still in the low 90’s with a hard slider. The stuff was there, sometimes you just have to tip your hat.”
Connor Green finished off the sixth, before letting Tulane grab a 4-3 lead in the seventh. He walked a pair, and surrendered a double to Grant Brown that tied the game before he was pulled for Andy Pagnozzi, who allowed the other base runner that Green was responsible for to score on a Stephen Alemais base hit. It was 4-3 in favor of Tulane.
Errol Robinson continued the seesaw affair that saw the lead change five times with a bases loaded two-RBI single in the bottom half of the inning, and Ole Miss grabbed ahold of the lead, and its fate again at 5-4. He was 2-5 with the 2 RBIs that initially looked like would be the Rebels’ saving grace to play another day.
Will Stokes entered the game in the eighth inning for the second consecutive day, and put up a zero before heading back out to try to close it out in the ninth and give Ole Miss another breath of life.
He issued a one-out free pass to Alemais in a lengthy at bat. Rogers then stepped to the plate again, and his shot to left altered the score one final time, and put a bitter end to Ole Miss’ season.
“I knew he relied on his breaking stuff. He kind of hung one, and I got enough on it to help the team win,” Rogers said. He was 2-4 and had half of the Green Wave’s RBIs.
It was the final chapter that prematurely ended a year that included 43 wins, 18 conference victories, and a regional in Oxford, something that many did not anticipate this season.
“I’m just so proud of this team,” Bianco said. “I don’t think many expected us to be playing in June in Oxford, but those guys in the third base dugout sure did.”
