MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Twice in the final three innings Friday, Troy had three-straight singles after two were out, and used that clutch hitting to score four runs.
The sixth-seeded Trojans needed every one of them, with two seventh-inning runs providing their first lead and two ninth-inning runs providing the winning margin in a 6-4 victory in the quarterfinal round of the Guardian Credit Union Sun Belt Baseball Championship presented by Troy University.
Troy (32-23) finished the game 7-of-16 on two-out hitting and 5-of-8 with runners in scoring position in advancing to a Saturday 3 p.m. semifinal against Friday’s Georgia Southern-App State winner.
“It means our team’s tough,” said Troy coach Skylar Moore when asked about the two-out hitting. There’s things we may lack if you evaluate all of them, but we don’t lack for toughness, we don’t lack for fortitude and I thought this was a massive indication of it.”
The third-seeded Chanticleers (36-18-1) had taken an early 2-0 lead on Tyler Johnson’s two-run first-inning homer, his 17th of the year, and after Troy came back with two in the second and two in the seventh, Coastal answered back one more time on Nick Lucky’s two-run double in the eighth inning that tied it 4-4.
However, Donovan Whibbs drew a walk from reliever Reece Maniscalco (2-2) to start the ninth, and after a failed bunt and a strikeout, Brandon Schrepf singled and Jesse Hall followed with his third hit of the game to plate the eventual winning run. Kyle Mock then added an insurance run with a third-straight two-out single.
The inning was eerily similar to Troy’s seventh inning, with Easton Kirk drawing a leadoff walk, and two outs later Trey Leonard, Schrepf and Hall all delivered singles to score two runs. The first two were bloop singles, and Hall’s slowly-hit ground ball up the middle plated Schrepf.
“They got hits, but it was like we got dinked to death the whole entire game,” said Coastal Carolina coach Gary Gilmore. “The home run was hit very well, but outside of that virtually every hit they got had eyes on it or was a soft little blinker over the infield. They all count, so give them credit. They put it in play when they had to.”
That home run was Clay Stearns’ two-out shot in the top of the second that scored Kirk in front of him and tied the game 2-2. After that, pitchers Rigsby Mosley of Troy and Michael Knorr of Coastal Carolina squared off in a pitcher’s duel, with Rigsby allowing no hits in a five-inning stint and retiring 17-of-18 batters at one point.
“Just kind of commanded my pitches,” Mosley said after the early struggles. “I knew that I was having to throw sliders for strikes, they’re a pretty aggressive team. I had to command my fast ball, I was kind of leaving it down, leaving it up, uncomfortable with it at first, then I just settled in and attacked, got ahead of hitters.”
Knorr, who tied a career high with 11 strikeouts in 6 2/3 innings, allowed only two scratch singles over the next four innings after Stearns’ homer until Troy’s seventh-inning rally.
“You’re not going to get a hit every time,” Meade said. “Hitting’s hard enough, especially with a guy like Knorr, that’s a top-five-round guy, that’s what they look like, he’s very impressive. I was very happy with the way our guys adjusted.”
Grayson Stewart (5-5) got the win in relief of Mosley despite giving up the two-run double to Lucky—who had struck out in each of his previous three at-bats. Marquez Oates gave up a one-out single but coaxed a double-play ground ball in the ninth to pick up his seventh save.
“I hate it for our kids, for the thing to end this way,” Gilmore said, “but at the end of the day the team that plays the best is the team that wins most of the time, and they outplayed us. We struck them out 13 times and they made tremendous use of the 14 outs they had. We had Mosley on the ropes the first two innings and then he went five innings without us getting a hit, and that allowed them to settle back into the game and make a game of it. We did a good job coming back, but it just wasn’t enough.”