by Chris Macaluso
LSUsports.net
A baseball game, like just about any other sporting event, can be explained using numbers.
LSU and Tulane played before the largest crowd to ever watch a game a Zephyr Field. It was the second-largest crowd to ever watch an NCAA Regional game.
The number of people in the stands: 11,719.
The Tigers and Wave played an extra-inning affair for the ages, taking that more than capacity to the edge of its collective seats more times than anyone could have counted.
The number of innings: 13
Both teams used just two pitchers a piece. Both Tulane starter Michael Aubrey and reliever Barth Melius threw more than 100 pitches. LSU freshman starter Lane Mestepey threw an almost unthinkable number of pitches in his 10 innings of work.
Mestepey’s final pitch count: 153.
And if the fences in the cavernous outfield of the host Triple-A ball park read 365 or 370 in the gaps instead of 405, both teams could have walked away with their big sluggers riding high.
But in the end, the only numbers that mattered was the one run on one hit scored by Tiger catcher Matt Heath in the top of the 13th inning to give LSU a slight 4-3 advantage and the 6-4-3 double play turned by shortstop Ryan Theriot, second baseman Mike Fontenot and first baseman Bryan Moore to finally quiet the explosive Tulane offense.
In the grand scheme of an entire season, one line-drive base hit to center field amounts to very little. It was one of 13 hits for the Tigers in the game. But what Heath’s line-drive single amounted may be immesurable in terms of the rest of LSU’s season.
His single was the only one the bottom of the LSU line-up managed all evening. All four hours and thirty minutes worth of Friday’s game.
The rest of the evening, the bottom of the LSU line-up was 0-for-13.
Now, the Tigers are just one win away from making a return trip to Omaha to defend their National Championship.
And in Skip Bertman‘s 18 years of work in Baton Rouge and his five previous national titles, it’s safe to say, that the opportunity to play for his sixth is all he’s asking for.
Saturday afternoon in Zephyr Field, just one more timely basehit, just one, could make all the other numbers meaningless again.