Oxford Regional Day Two Recap

Oxford: From walk-offs to a ball game full of explosive plays, the Regional in Oxford today was full of excitement and left the fans longing for more. Sunday at Swayze was full of thrilling baseball and has set up the Championship Monday where the Ole Miss Rebels will face off with the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles for the second time this weekend. Ole Miss won Sunday afternoon nine to eight in a heart-pounding baseball game at Swayze Field.

St. Louis Billikens and the Missouri State Bears faced off in the first game on Sunday with the loser going home. The Bears got the best of the Billikens outlasting them by a score of 9-8 in a game that seemed to go forever. Missouri State advanced to play Tennessee Tech after the Golden Eagles lost to Ole Miss.

In game two of the day, the Ole Miss Rebels came out with bats swinging and got the best of the Golden Eagles. With the 9-8 win, Ole Miss advanced to the Championship round to face the winner of the late game between Tennessee Tech and Missouri State.

Mike Bianco had this to say about the win for his Rebels – “An unbelievable college baseball game. You can tell there was a lot riding on that game. Both teams, I thought, played really well. They competed for nine innings. I don’t know how long the game was, four hours? It seemed like twelve. I am just proud of my guys for hanging in there. We come out with the flurry early and (Marcus) Evey hung in there. He started putting up some zeros. I thought Brady (Feigl) did a great job mixing early, but when you make a mistake to that good of an offense, they make you pay. We were still able to extend the lead, obviously. Huge inning, (Parker) Caracci getting us out of the 7th after they got a couple guys on with no outs. You know we can make it exciting and we did. I am proud of my guys for staying in there.”

The crowd was also a huge for the Rebels as another sell out crowd filled the stands to cheer on the Rebels.

Head Coach Matt Bragga on his Golden Eagles facing the crowd at Swayze – “Early, we didn’t do a good job. It is what it is, but in the Ohio Valley Conference, maybe even them (Ole Miss) during the regular season, it isn’t quite like this. We don’t play with two, three or four thousand people quite that often. Maybe Vandy on a midweek Tuesday we get four, but the electricity is still not the same. I think you can see in our at-bats early on that we were just swinging through balls. We asked, “what is going on?”

Brady Feigl took the mound today for the Rebels pitching four innings, striking out eight, eight hits and gave up four runs. Parker Caracci came in to pitch for the Rebels and earned the win for Ole Miss. Houston Roth earned his first save of the season.

James McArthur will take the mound for Ole Miss in the Championship game on Monday morning. McArthur has been one of the Rebels main aces all season long.

In the late night game at Swayze Field, Tennessee Tech got the best of the Missouri Bears to survive and advance to face the Ole Miss Rebels. The Golden Eagles won the low scoring game by a score of 2-1. With the win, the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles are the first team in College Baseball to reach 50 wins on the season. With the loss, Missouri State will end their season after a very successful season having won not only the regular season title but also the conference tournament championship.

The action at Swayze will start up at noon as Championship Monday gets underway. Ole Miss will face the two seed in the Oxford Regional for a spot in the Super Regionals with the winner of the Austin Regional. One thing is for certain the action on Monday will keep fans at Swayze Field on the edge of there seats.

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