Hoover, Ala. — After a 17 inning marathon game Wednesday that put LSU in the losers bracket of the SEC Baseball Tournament, the Tigers pulled-off the victory Thursday in a must-win game. The Tigers trailed 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th inning against Auburn with runners on second and third and one out, when a wild pitch and an error allowed the game-tying and game-winning runs to come home on a crazy play that gave LSU the 4-3 win. It was their 5th walk-off victory of the season.
Destrehan’s Landon Marceaux started for the Tigers and went 6.2 innings, giving-up 2 runs on 7 hits and striking-out 5. But it was reliever Todd Peterson (5-2) who got the win for LSU, finishing-out the final one and two-thirds innings of the game. He gave-up one hit and struck-out 2 of the 7 batters he faced.
At the plate, Josh Smith and Saul Garza were the only LSU players with multiple hits– each going 2-4 on the day. LSU only had 8 hits as a team in the game.
The 5th-seeded Tigers (36-24) now advance to play on Friday against the loser of the #1 Vanderbilt/ #4 Mississippi State game, which is being played later Thursday night. The Tigers just lost to the Bulldogs 6-5 in their second game of the tournament on Wednesday– the longest game in their program’s history– which went 17 innings and lasted nearly 7 hours.