Over 30,000 Mississippians get stories like this delivered to their inboxes for free.
Sign up for The Today, our daily newsletter, and continue to read this story.
OMAHA — You scratch. You claw. You somehow fight you way through three dramatic, one-run victories to get to the championship round of the College World Series. And then, who do you face?
Why, defending national champion Vanderbilt’s much-feared, soon-to-be-multi-millionaire Jack Leiter, of course.
Mississippi State has a chore on its hands tonight in the first game of the CWS best-of-three championship series that begins at 6 p.m. at what will be a jam-packed TD Ameritrade Park.
“Best arm in the country,” Tanner Allen, Mississippi State’s SEC Player of the Year, said Sunday. “Unbelievable talent.”
Leiter, son of former Major League star Al Leiter, probably will be the first college pitcher chosen in next month’s Major League draft. He won 10 games for the Commodores this season. More impressively, he struck out 171 batters in 104 innings. He throws a 95 mph fastball that he can accelerate to 98. His curveball, which seems to drop off the face of the planet, is devastating. And he has a terrific slider, too. He commands all, which is why some Major League team is going to write him a huge check later this summer.
Funny, Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said Sunday he didn’t know if he would start Leiter. He said it with a straight face, too. Forget that. Leiter will pitch tonight. He would have thrown against North Carolina State Saturday had the game been played. Now Leiter has had another 48 hours of rest.
Even so, State knows Leiter can be beat. After all, the Bulldogs beat him in Nashville back in April. The Bulldogs lost two of three in the series, but they did scorch Leiter. Rowdey Jordan homered to lead off the game and the Bulldogs scored four runs on six hits in five innings off Leiter en route to a 7-4 victory. Logan Tanner also homered. Tanner Allen had two hits and scored twice off the Vandy ace.
So, it can be done, and the Bulldogs know it.
To win, the Bulldogs will need a terrific pitching performance of their own. They are counting on left-hander Christian MacLeod to provide that. MacLeod (6-5, 4.61 ERA) blanked Vandy for three innings in the opener of that April series before Vandy knocked him out of the box with four runs in the fourth inning en route to a 6-2 victory.
“I had some pretty good stuff early,” MacLeod said Sunday. “My changeup was really working well.”
MacLeod struck out seven over those first three innings before he lost command of his pitches, especially his changeup. He fell behind in counts. The results were not good.
“I left some pitches up,” MacLeod said. “They made me pay for it. That’s a good lineup they have over there.”
It is. Vanderbilt, the defending national champion, has won eight of its last nine games.
“They have been here,” Chris Lemonis said. “They know how to win. … They know how to play the game and they are really well coached.”
Said Tanner Allen, “Vanderbilt is an unbelievable team… They have good arms and they can really swing it. We’ll have our hands full, but like I said, we didn’t expect this to be a cakewalk. We’re ready for it.”
Vandy is, too. These two Southeastern Conference teams have played some memorable games over the last few springs. There’s no reason to expect anything different here when the stakes are even higher.
READ OUR FULL COLLEGE WORLD SERIES COVERAGE
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.