STARKVILLE, Miss. — LSU left-hander Lane Mestepey turned in the best performance by a Tiger pitcher in 2001, hurling eight shutout innings to propel LSU to a 7-1 victory over Mississippi State in game two of a three-game Southeastern Conference series Saturday at Dudy Noble Field.
The sixth-ranked Tigers (19-6-1, 6-2) will go for the three-game sweep on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. The game will be televised by the Guaranty Sports Network and can be seen in Baton Rouge on Cable Channel 10.
LSU is at Northwestern State on Tuesday and Louisiana-Monroe on Wednesday before returning home next weekend for a three-game SEC series with Kentucky.
Mestepey, a true freshman from the Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary and Central Private, improved his record to 4-0 as he did not walk a batter and struck out six, while inducing 12 Bulldog hitters into ground-ball outs.
Mestepey was denied his chance at a complete-game shutout, as Tiger coach Skip Bertman replaced him with Justin Hill with one out in the ninth after hitting Phillip Willingham and allowing a single to Jason Burkley.
Hill immediately uncorked a wild pitch to move the runners ahead, then a sacrifice fly by Jon Knott ended the shutout.
Shane Youman and Roy Corcoran combined on a 4-0 blanking of Kansas State in the second game of a February 10 doubleheader for LSU’s only shutout this season. The last shutout in the LSU-MSU series came on May 13, 1994, when Scott Schultz blanked the Bulldogs 3-0 in Baton Rouge.
Before he even took the mound for a warmup toss, Mestepey was staked to a 3-0 lead, thanks to some timely two-out hitting by the Tigers. Mike Fontenot and Todd Linden were on with walks, then Bryan Moore’s single brought home Fontenot to put LSU on the board before Aaron Hill laced a two-run single back through the box.
That score would hold until the Tigers plated three more in the fifth. LSU loaded the bases with nobody out, and after Wally Pontiff popped up to short, Linden’s chopper just in front of the plate scored Johnnie Thibodeaux. Moore then followed that with a two-run single to score Theriot and Fontenot.