BATON ROUGE — LSU pitcher Lane Mestepey won his third consecutive start and the Fighting Tigers (12-5) captured their second straight game from Louisiana-Monroe, 7-1 on Saturday at Alex Box Stadium.
LSU (No. 6 Baseball America and ESPN/Baseball Weekly, No. 8 Collegiate Baseball) will go for the sweep at 1 p.m. Sunday. The game will be televised on the full LSU Sports Network (WDGL-98.1 FM in Baton Rouge) and www.lsusports.net. The contest will also be televised on a tape-delay basis in Baton Rouge on Cox Cable Channel 4 starting at 7 p.m.
In addition to Sunday’s tilt, the Tigers have one more game before opening Southeastern Conference play next weekend at home against Vanderbilt, and that will be
Mestepey, the 2001 SEC and national Freshman of the Year, went eight innings for the second consecutive Saturday, giving up just one run and walking none. Mestepey has not walked a batter in his last 23 innings, a span of 86 batters faced. In that same time span, he has yielded a total of three runs in lowering his season ERA from 5.06 prior to his February 23 start at Houston to 2.78, nearly a full run less than his 2001 season ERA of 3.75.
Jason Vargas, who started at first base, relieved Mestepey and worked a perfect ninth inning in his second stint this year on the mound.
The Tigers gave Mestepey all the support he would need with three two-out runs in the first. J.C. Holt appeared to reach on a fielder’s choice with one out, but David Raymer was called for interference on the play, giving the Indians the second out.
Nonetheless, Wally Pontiff singled to extend his hitting streak to nine games, then Sean Barker singled to right, and Jaime Estrada overran the ball, which rolled to the wall, allowing Pontiff to score and Barker to reach third.
The error didn’t matter, though, as Blake Gill walked and Matt Heath laced a two-run double to left to make it 3-0.
ULM would score its only run in the second when Jack Skaggs’ two-out double scored Kade Eady. After that, the Indians (5-10) could only get one runner to third base, and that was in the sixth inning on singles by Ted White and Joey Wolfe.
Gill drove home a run in the third with a bases-loaded fielder’s choice, and the Tigers would score again in the inning on a ground ball to second by Jason Vargas that plated Gill for a 5-1 Tiger lead.
The Tigers pounded out 15 hits as Pontiff, Heath and Clay Harris each had three. It was one hit short of a season high of 16 done on February 23 at Houston.
The start of the game was delayed 40 minutes by a heavy thunderstorm that blew through Baton Rouge at approximately 12:15 p.m. The rain stopped after 20 minutes and the game began under clear skies and gusting northwest winds of 15 to 20 MPH.
The game took just 2 hours and 12 minutes to complete, the shortest nine-inning game for LSU since a 1997 game against Ole Miss was finished in 1 hour, 59 minutes.