West Virginia baseball suffered a 16-9 loss to LSU on Saturday in game one of their Super Regional against No. 6 LSU.
The Mountaineers sent their ace Griffin Kirn to the mound, but he didn't make it out of the fifth inning. The pitching moves that followed were the ones that ended up mattering the most, as more unproven guys were used in what was a two-run ballgame. That game then got out of hand in a hurry as the bullpen blew up and WVU couldn't recover.
"Kirn’s been so good for us all year. He's our workhorse, so I didn't think Kirn was quite as sharp. And it probably had something to do with the fact that he threw twice in a week for the first time all season last weekend. So he started game one of the regional and closed out the regional. And then obviously the conditions today, being so hot, so humid, a little bit shorter rest for him. He wasn't quite as crisp. Less about the results, he gave up a couple of runs. But it was more about the crispness of the pitches. We felt as a staff that we'd be better off going to somebody else," WVU head coach Steve Sabins said.
Sabins took Kirn out of the game at 82 pitches, while he had just allowed a single off the wall to start the fourth inning. It was Kirn's second hit he allowed, with the first being a three-run home run in the inning prior.
Next came JJ Glasscock and Cole Fehrman out of the bullpen, two guys who had not pitched more than seven innings all season.
Glasscock threw nine pitches and just one strike, while all three batters Fehrman faced reached base.
"We had some players throughout the season make these big jumps, and so there's always some risk associated with it," Sabins said.
Kirn exited with WVU trailing 3-1, and then, when the inning ended, WVU trailed 10-1.
"We felt like some of these pitchers had been really, really great throughout some smaller outings, some shorter outings, some [simulated] games. We think that they're ready to compete at the highest level, and they certainly are. Didn't go their way this week, but when you trail in the game, there's always some balance of making sure that you go to win the game, but also that you have enough arms to compete and win a series. So there's always that balance," Sabins said.
WVU's offense would end the afternoon scoring nine runs, but the bullpen carousel never allowed anything their offense did to ultimately matter.
"I think every game situation is going to dictate who you decide to go to. So there's too many variables to decide. But certainly, score is one of them. But who's hitting, what the score is, the situation, how far along in the game you are, all of that plays into those decisions," Sabins said.
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