By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
Stan Caldwell
On Sports
This time last year, Southern Miss baseball coach Scott Berry was lamenting the circumstances that threatened to – and then did – scratch what was shaping up as a banner season for the Golden Eagles.
Southern Miss was 12-4 overall after a thrilling midweek victory on the road at Troy and looking forward to the Conference USA season, which was about to start the following weekend.
Of course, then Covid-19 happened and the rest we already know.
But college baseball is back for 2021, and USM appears to have picked up right where it left off last season.
The Golden Eagles are 13-6 after defeating Alabama 5-4 Tuesday night, and they head into the conference season with a full head of steam, having won nine of their last 10 games.
Southern Miss hosts Louisiana Tech to begin its Conference USA schedule this weekend, beginning a four-game series with a single game Friday, a doubleheader on Saturday and a single Sunday final game.
In his 12th season, Berry has maintained the program’s stability – he’s just the fourth coach for USM in the past 63 years – and has built on that to get his team in position for greatness in 2021.
The secret to USM’s success is no secret at all. It’s all about the arms. Southern Miss pitchers have posted a 2.91 earned-run average, with 217 strikeouts and only 40 walks. The Golden Eagles’ strikeout/walk ratio of 5.425 in the best in the nation.
“When you have your offense not scoring a lot of runs, and you have your pitching backing them up, throwing up a lot of zeroes, it’s how we’ve been able to win,” said Berry. “Certainly, we’ve pitched very, very well.”
That’s an understatement.
Southern Miss has developed a trio of weekend starters who have been nothing short of sensational so far this season.
Senior right-handers Hunter Stanley and Walker Powell, and second-year freshman Ben Ethridge have combined for a 7-2 record in 14 appearances over 84 1/3 innings, an earned-run average of 2.13, 108 strikeouts and just 10 walks.
That’s championship level pitching right there.
Powell, an intimidating presence at 6-foot-8, has seemingly been at Southern Miss forever, having first arrived in Hattiesburg in the fall of 2015 as a freshman from Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He was good enough as a true freshman in 2016 to work his way into the Sunday starter role, then took a medical redshirt in 2017 after an arm injury.
He combined for a 13-5 record with a 3.21 ERA, 135 strikeouts and just 27 walks as a mainstay of the staff in 2018 and 2019, and he had raised his game a level last spring, with a 3-0 record, a 1.24 ERA, 22 strikeouts and just two walks before the season ended prematurely.
Powell really didn’t have anything left to prove at USM, and he’d have been fully justified if he’d decided to move on to the pros.
But given an extra year of eligibility by the NCAA because of Covid-19, he’s returned as the Saturday starter, and he’s picked up right where he left off last season. He’s 3-1 with a 1.29 ERA, 29 strikeouts and four walks, and was C-USA Co-Pitcher of the Week this week.
Stanley, a fifth-year senior now in his third season in the USM program after a two-year stint at Meridian Community College, has been matched Powell as the Friday starter.
So far this season, Stanley is 3-1, with a 2.64 ERA, a team-high 46 strikeouts, against just five walks. He too has been named C-USA Pitcher of the Week, earning the honor for the week of February 23.
Powell and Stanley were preseason All-Conference USA selections, so their performances were expected, but the emergence of Ethridge has given the Golden Eagles a solid Sunday starter to go with their two veterans.
Ethridge wasn’t a complete unknown coming into the season. Indeed, he was off to a sensational start in 2020 as a true freshman out of West Lauderdale, with a 3-0 record in four appearances, with 26 strikeouts in 19 2/3 innings.
After starting slowly this season, Ethridge has been great in his last two starts, allowing a run on four hits with 9 Ks in a six-inning no-decision on March 14 against Louisiana-Lafayette, and his first victory of the season this past Sunday over Missouri State.
In fact, he was nearly perfect Sunday in the 3-1 victory over the Bears, completing the Golden Eagles’ second consecutive weekend sweep. He retired the first 16 batters he faced before allowing just two hits in seven innings.
“It’s the best feeling in the world, to get in a groove and feel like nobody can hit me.” said Ethridge after Sunday’s win over Missouri State.
As if the trio of quality starters aren’t enough, Southern Miss has developed a smothering bullpen, with redshirt freshman Tyler Stuart, true freshman Tanner Hall and sophomore lefty Ryan Och as the set-up guys for closer Graham Ramsey.
Ramsey, a sophomore transfer from Hinds Community College, has been called on seven times already in save situations, and he’s been perfect in all seven. He’s allowed just four hits in 7 2/3 innings with 14 strikeouts and 1 walk and has yet to allow a run, earned or otherwise.
Berry and pitching coach Christian Ostrander will need to find a fourth starter for the conference weekend series, and the leading candidates for that role will probably be a pair of second-year freshmen lefties, Drew Boyd and Chandler Best.
Both have shown flashes of what it takes to succeed at this level, but consistency has been an issue. USM could also go for the committee approach that worked Tuesday against Bama, when 10 Golden Eagle pitchers took the mound, allowing just four runs on seven hits and recording 13 strikeouts.
Through 19 games, the spectacular pitching has helped the Golden Eagles overcome a collective early-season struggle at the plate.
While Southern Miss is at or near the top in every meaningful pitching statistic among the 12 Conference USA teams, they rank at or near the bottom offensively.
The Golden Eagles are last in the league in team batting average (.208) and on-base percentage (.321), next to last in runs scored (86) and hits (123), and 10th in RBIs (78).
Despite those shortcomings, Southern Miss has shown a knack for getting hits and producing runs when the absolutely must have them.
Just in the past two weeks, the Golden Eagles have used timely hitting to win four games in which they otherwise didn’t do much offensively.
In the first game of the weekend series against ULL, the Golden Eagles enjoyed their biggest inning of the season, an eight-run outburst, crowned by Christopher Sargent’s grand slam, for a 13-4 win.
The following Sunday, March 14, it was Reed Trimble who smashed a walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the 11th inning to complete the sweep of the Ragin’ Cajuns.
And it was Trimble, a second-year freshman out of Northwest Rankin, who again had the big blow in Sunday’s win, a run-scoring triple.
Tuesday at Alabama, it was Gabe Montenegro who delivered the game-winning hit, a two-run double in the seventh. Montenegro was 3 for 4 for the game against the Crimson Tide, and that could be big for the Golden Eagles.
Starting his fourth season in the program, the junior from Guatemala started this season in a dreadful slump. At one point, not long ago, his batting average was in the .190s. Now he’s batting .239 and has drawn a dozen walks.
No question, Trimble and Sargent have had the most dramatic hits so far, but USM’s best offensive player through 19 games has been second-year sophomore Charlie Fischer, another of the Minnesota boys that Berry has been bringing to Mississippi in recent years.
Fischer has taken on the role of designated hitter and the third spot in the batting order, behind Montenegro in the leadoff spot and Trimble in the 2-hole.
He leads the team in hitting at .313, plus he’s been walked 19 times and been hit once. His OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) of 1.057 is by far the best on the team. For non-baseball readers, trust me, that’s pretty dang good.
Defensively, the Golden Eagles have been middling, and could use some cleaning up in that area. Their fielding percentage of .964 is ninth in C-USA, and they are third in the league with 24 errors.
But the defense hasn’t really cost them, for the most part, and at key moments they have made some spectacular plays in the field. Two stand out that I’ve seen.
In the first inning of series finale against ULL, Trimble created a two-run swing that was pivotal.
In the top of the inning, he threw out a runner trying to stretch a stolen base after the throw from the catcher got into the outfield. In the next half-inning, Trimble went from first to third on a throwing error and scored on a hit by Fischer. That was USM’s only run until extra innings in what became a 6-3 USM victory.
Sunday, in the fifth inning against Missouri State, second baseman Will McGillis dove to his right to stop a sharply-hit ground ball in short rightfield and flipped to first for the out to keep Ethridge’s perfect game going.
Montenegro has also been spectacular at times, and his speed is matched by that of Trimble in centerfield and Reese Ewing, a sophomore transfer from Pearl River Community College.
Southern Miss jumps right into the fire in Conference USA play, with Louisiana Tech coming to town. The Bulldogs are 14-5 and have been impressive lately, with a shutout of Arkansas, a 13-1 blowout over Ole Miss and two shutouts in a sweep of Tulane.
That’s been good enough to get La. Tech into the Top 25 in at least one poll, at No. 23 in the d1baseball.com rankings.
The Bulldogs have relied on offense this season, batting .287 as a team, third-best in the league, and they are second in C-USA in runs with 138. The La. Tech pitching has also been solid, with a 3.21 team ERA.
Former Southern Miss assistant coach Lane Burroughs, now in his fifth season, has weathered two years of turmoil, instead of just the one year of Covid-19 upheaval suffered by everyone else.
In April 2019, a tornado seriously damaged the Bulldogs’ stadium, forcing them to finish the season on the road. That stadium has been rebuilt, and the Bulldogs will host the C-USA Tournament in May.
That gives this opening series added importance, especially since the Golden Eagles face a return trip to Ruston, Louisiana for a four-game series April 16-18.
If Southern Miss is to win a third consecutive C-USA championship, the Golden Eagles will have do so in a hostile environment, unlike the previous six tournaments which they have hosted, in Biloxi (2017-19) and Hattiesburg (2013-16).
That means taking care of business at home this weekend is vital for USM, and the Eagles have been tough at home, as always, going 10-2 in the friendly confines of Pete Taylor Park so far this season.
Baseball is a sport where Conference USA is taken seriously, so it’s possible it will be a multi-bid league when the NCAA Tournament field is announced.
But no one in C-USA wants to depend on an at-large bid to get into the tournament, and there are several other quality teams in the league, most notably Old Dominion (14-4).
So, it’s way too early for Golden Eagle fans to start up with talk of another trip to Omaha, Nebraska, for the College World Series, with more than half of the season remaining to be played.
They must hit more consistently in general, particularly in the lower half of the batting order, and they need to smooth out some sloppy play on defense.
Nevertheless, Southern Miss is right where it wants to be heading into conference play. The Golden Eagles have established some positive trends in the early going, and if they build on those and improve in those select areas, this has a chance to become a special season.
Stan Caldwell is a veteran sportswriter with more than 35 years of experience in the Hattiesburg area.
