BATON ROUGE — LSU scored seven runs in the first inning and held off a Birmingham-Southern rally in the ninth inning to take an 11-7 victory and complete the sweep of the three game series on a chilly Sunday at Alex Box Stadium.
The Tigers (#5 Collegiate Baseball, #6 ESPN/USA Today Baseball Weekly, #7 Baseball America) continue their seven-game homestand Tuesday when they host Southeastern Louisiana (1-0) at 6:30 p.m., the first of two meetings with the Lions in 2002. LSU will be looking for its 17th consecutive victory over the Lions and won last year’s meeting 7-4.
LSU (3-0) fell behind 1-0 in the top of the first, but quickly erased that deficit with their biggest uprising of the series.
The first seven LSU batters reached safely. David Raymer started it by drawing a leadoff walk, stealing second and scoring on Sean Barker’s RBI single. Wally Pontiff followed Barker by walking, and Barker came home to make it 2-0 on an RBI single by Aaron Hill.
Matt Heath’s bunt single loaded the bases for Eric Wiethorn, whose single to center brought home Pontiff and Hill for a 4-0 lead.
Wiethorn’s hit also knocked BSC starter Scott Johnson (0-1) out of the game without retiring any of the six batters he faced.
Jason Columbus greeted Panther reliever John Crew with an RBI single to score Heath before LSU gave up the first out of the inning on Darren Welch’s sacrifice bunt. That bunt set up Rocky Scelfo for an RBI ground ball to third, a play on which Scelfo reached when Connor Robertson made a bad throw and put runners on second and third.
Columbus scored the inning’s final run when Jon Prince’s pickoff throw to third went into left field.
BSC (0-3) began to cut into the LSU lead by scoring two runs in the sixth and seventh innings to pull within 8-5, but the Tigers put the game away with a three-run seventh, highlighted by a two-run single by Barker.
Barker, the Tigers’ senior right fielder from Bakersfield, Calif., also contributed a sacrifice fly in the third and finished the weekend with a .600 batting average and seven RBI by going 9-for-15.
The Tigers held an 11-5 lead heading into the ninth inning and gave the ball to freshman Clay Harris to end the game. But Harris hit leadoff hitter Tony Cline and gave up three straight base hits to give the Panthers two runs, and a passed ball by Dustin Weaver left runners on second and third with no outs. But Harris struck out Ryan Griffth and retired the next two batters in order to end the game.
Tompkins, making his first LSU start, struck out seven over 6 2/3 innings to earn the win.