Thousands of Bulldog fans, most dressed in maroon, have descended on Omaha and taken over TD Ameritrade Park. (MSU Athletics)
OMAHA — In Cincinnati, Jeff Brantley, the former Mississippi State and Major League pitching standout, has kept up with his Bulldogs during commercial breaks while he broadcasts Cincinnati Reds games.
“In between innings. Every game,” Brantley said Wednesday morning from Great American Stadium in Cincinnati, where he was preparing for another game. “Last night it looked like a home game at Dudy Noble. It’s what State fans do.”
In Richmond, Va., Tuesday night, ex-Bulldogs Jake Mangum tore off his Binghamton Rumble Ponies uniform after a 5-2 victory over the Richmond Flying Squirrels, so he could watch State play Vanderbilt in Game 2. The two-hour rain delay in Omaha unexpectedly allowed Mangum to watch every inning. He ate it up.
Rick Cleveland
Here, in Omaha, State fans have packed the motels and hotels at outrageous prices, taken over entire taverns, gobbled down famous Omaha beef and yelled themselves hoarse at TD Ameritrade Park. Most made the 13-hour drive to get here, and some have been here for 10 days. Many came without tickets and have paid exorbitant prices for those.
Mississippi State fans really are a college baseball phenomenon.
“Don’t you just love the passion?” Mark Keenum, the school’s president and a 50-year Diamond Dog fan, said Wednesday, a few hours before State was to play Vanderbilt for the national championship.
“The love our fans have for Mississippi State and Mississippi State baseball is remarkable,” Keenum said. “It’s in our blood. I am just so proud to see so many thousands of our fans here to support our team We are a family, a loyal family, and we want to celebrate together.”
Mark Keenum, left, poses with one of State’s Tuesday night baseball heroes, Preston Johnson. (Photo by Sid Salter)
As a student at State — he graduated in 1983 — Keenum says he “drug a rig” out behind the left field fence at the old Dudy Noble Field and rarely missed a game. He was a grad student in 1985 when Brantley, Will Clark, Rafael Palmeiro were the nation’s No. 1 team for much of the season but couldn’t quite get it done here in Omaha.
“We’ve never won the national championship,” Keenum said. “We’ve never won a team championship in any sport — lots of individual championships but no team championships. We’ve come so close but never quite have gotten over the hump. Here we are on the cusp, so close, and our people want to see it. They want to be part of the history.”
No matter what happens tonight, Keenum said this State baseball team has made its mark — and so have this team’s fans.
“There’s no doubt, athletics puts a university on the forefront in a huge way,” Keenum said. “The exposure Mississippi State is getting here is wonderful. We couldn’t afford to buy this exposure. People tune in and see the passion of our people and watch them having so much fun. It’s like a three-hour commercial.”
This is part three in a five-part series about Philip Gunn’s influence in changing the Mississippi state flag. Read part one here, read part two here, and read more about the series here.
Speaker of the House Philip Gunn was watching his son play baseball in Louisiana on June 20, 2020, when he got a call from Rep. Jason White, the second highest-ranking House member and a top lieutenant of Gunn’s.
“Mr. Speaker, you’re never going to believe who I just got off the phone with,” White told Gunn.
White paused a beat and said, “Karl Oliver,” referring to the House Republican who famously wrote in 2017 that public officials who wanted to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces “should be lynched.”
“He’s in,” White said.
That was the first moment Gunn genuinely believed he might be able to secure the House votes necessary to change the state flag, and it was a signal the progress he was making inside the building was beginning to match the fervor that was growing outside the building.
Earlier that week, things looked significantly less promising. Gunn committed to a bipartisan group of House members who wanted to change the flag that he would take the temperature of his Republican caucus. Long the most prominent Republican official to publicly call for changing the flag, Gunn didn’t think at the time he could whip anywhere close to the votes necessary to pass a flag bill.
But as rallies over racial inequality raged across the state and nation, Gunn believed there was a window of opportunity, so he dispatched his three most trusted allies — Rep. White, Rep. Trey Lamar, and his former chief of staff Nathan Wells — to begin having conversations with House Republicans.
“We expressed some concerns,” Lamar said of the assignment. “We had to counsel him and say, ‘Look, there is an unknown out there if we push this hard.’ Can we push this hard and get the votes? It was doubtful at that time. It wasn’t a very positive outlook at all. But outside just that, we didn’t know what Philip’s speakership looks like on the back end of any effort. You know, you force House members into taking this vote, you may have issues when the next speaker’s race comes up, or even before then. There may be some problems there, and it was one of those things that we wouldn’t be doing our job as advisors, you know, in his inner circle, if we didn’t make him aware of that.”
The first few conversations the group had with House Republicans did not go well. Gunn said he began feeling discouraged, and there was little movement inside the Capitol between June 11, the day Gunn committed to asking around his caucus, and June 17.
The lack of movement inside the building that week certainly did not match the mounting pressure outside the building. The public at large had joined the chorus of activists who had been leading the charge in demanding that leaders remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. Dozens of local leaders of Mississippi cities and counties made public their opposition to the old flag. Business leaders had begun publicly calling for a change, and several lobbyists who represented those leaders were pulling lawmakers aside in the Capitol hallways making their cases.
Public polling was released that showed Mississippians were warming to the idea of a change. Even NASCAR had announced that week it was banning the Confederate battle emblem from its racetracks.
“I know it must have looked promising from the outside, but inside, we were still such a long ways off,” Gunn said. “It didn’t feel like a productive few days.”
A critical turning point was June 18, when the Southeastern Conference publicly announced it would not allow Mississippi schools to host SEC championship events until the flag was changed. Before the SEC statement, Gunn believed he had 12 Republican votes to change the flag — well shy of the roughly 40 he needed.
Lamar, a former Ole Miss football player, had long shared privately that he would be willing to vote to change the flag. Shortly after the SEC released its statement on June 18, Lamar issued a statement of his own on social media.
In doing so, Lamar called to change the flag and became Gunn’s first major committee chairman to publicly take that stand.
“The SEC statement certainly was not the reason I wanted to change the flag, but it provided the opportunity for me to come out publicly,” Lamar said. “The reason was that it was just the right thing to do. I believe in my heart that it was the right thing to do because there were fellow Mississippians that were hurt by its depictions in the way that hate groups had co-opted it. Those with hate in their hearts had co-opted this symbol and still others refused to deny themselves… and refused to put their other fellow human beings before themselves over a piece of cloth. You know, that’s the reason to change the flag.”
Lamar’s statement went viral nationally. House colleagues blew up his phone — some supportive, some questioning why he’d taken the step — and he wasn’t sure if the statement would help the leadership’s efforts to whip the votes.
Gunn later said that Lamar’s post inspired several House Republicans to come on board.
“Trey (Lamar) was with Rep. Nick Bain and Rep. Jody Steverson that night he released the statement, and he reported back to me the next morning that the two of them were on board,” Gunn said. “So as far as I knew, I previously had 12 (Republican) votes. Bain and Steverson made 14. So it felt like it was starting to move a little bit.”
The next day, on June 19, the NCAA released a statement that it would ban postseason championships and tournaments — including college baseball and softball regionals — from Mississippi until the state flag came down. Gunn said his sergeants had gotten a couple more soft commitments that day, but they still could only feel certain of 14 Republican votes — about two dozen fewer than needed.
Then the next day, June 20, the probability came into clearer focus with the news that Oliver had flipped.
“So Karl (Oliver) calls and says, ‘I’ve been talking to my wife, talking to my daughters, I don’t want them to be disappointed in me and I don’t want them to be embarrassed by me,’” Gunn recalled.
That reasoning from Oliver echoed the charge Gunn shared with the entire Republican caucus in an unplanned, emotional speech just a few days before on June 11.
“After we got Karl, I’m starting to think that this thing’s got a chance,” Gunn said. “And then we began to get word that others may be on board.”
Gunn hung up with White, and still watching his son at the baseball field in Louisiana, he dialed Shawn Parker, the newly elected president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention. Gunn, a former Baptist deacon himself, knew that public support from religious leaders could only help his effort to swing more Republican House votes.
“He’d been on the job for three months at that point, and all of a sudden this gets dumped in his lap. He’s a preacher, he just wants to share the gospel. He ain’t worried about politics,” Gunn said, laughing at the wild nature of the moment. “I told him it would be a big help if he could publicly support changing the flag, and he immediately agreed.”
While certainly a big ask, Parker had some cover. In 2016, the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution urging the discontinued use of the Confederate battle flag in their churches — a decision that made headlines in Mississippi and across the nation.
Gunn, who in 2016 was serving as a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was among the thousands of Baptist leaders who voted to pass that resolution at the convention.
“We had already been working on possibly issuing some kind of statement when Philip (Gunn) called,” Parker told Mississippi Today. “But there was probably some sense of apprehension in all of our minds, and his call was a great source of encouragement for us to continue moving forward. I appreciated his determination.”
After the call with Parker, Gunn called Ligon Duncan, the chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary in Clinton and a nationally prominent Presbyterian leader. Duncan, like Parker, told Gunn he would also issue a public statement in support of changing the flag the next week.
Gunn traveled home from his son’s Louisiana baseball tournament that weekend feeling confident that the momentum was pushing them forward and that he would be able to whip the remaining necessary votes.
But on the morning of Monday, June 22, Gunn got a call from Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann that reminded him how fragile the moment was and that a single misstep could halt the progress made inside the Capitol. Gunn knew he needed to act quickly and decisively to keep it from falling apart.
Part four of the Mississippi Today’s series will publish on July 1, and part five will publish on July 2.
Three of Mississippi’s four congressmen either voted against or say they oppose legislation passed by the U.S. House to remove all Confederate monuments from the United States Capitol.
Although there are multiple on display, the vote has unique implications for Mississippi since it is the only state in the nation that displays at the U.S. Capitol two statues of Confederates: Jefferson Davis and James Zachariah George. Davis was a slaveowner and president of the Confederacy, and George was a lead architect of the 1890 state Constitution that stripped voting rights from nearly 150,000 Black Mississippians. Neither man was born in Mississippi.
The Mississippi statues were placed in 1931 after they were approved by the state Legislature in 1924. Congress in 1864 authorized each state to donate and display two statues at the Capitol of citizens “illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services.”
Reps. Steven Palazzo of the 4th District in south Mississippi and Trent Kelly of the 1st District in north Mississippi voted against the bill that passed 285-120 Tuesday. Rep. Michael Guest of the 3rd District, which is primarily central Mississippi and parts of southwest Mississippi, said he did not vote because he was delayed in returning to Washington, D.C., because of the funeral of a family friend, but would have voted no.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents a large part of western Mississippi and is the state’s only African American and Democrat in Congress, voted with all other Democrats in the U.S. House to remove the monuments.
On social media, Thompson said he voted for the legislation because “statues of those who served in the Confederacy or supported slavery or segregation should not have a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol.”
In the past, Mississippi’s Republican members of Congress said they believe it should be up to the states to decide the monuments representing them in the U.S. Capitol.
“I would be opposed to the federal government ordering or dictating Mississippi to remove those statues,” Guest has said in the past.
Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, both Republicans, have made similar comments.
Wicker told WJTV last summer, “It would be a mistake for Congress to remove statues placed in the U.S. Capitol by Mississippi or any state. In my view, such an overreach would be counterproductive to the healthy conversations on race happening across the country. Under federal law, state governments are solely responsible for selecting and replacing the statues that represent their states.”
Other southern states, such as Arkansas and Florida, are taking steps to remove from the U.S. Capitol monuments tied to slavery or the discrimination of African Americans.
OMAHA — Baseball players call it “spitting on” a pitch. They are not talking about tobacco juice.
To spit on a pitch is to let it go by. To not chase a breaking ball out of the strike zone. Just watch it. Spit on it. Wait for a better pitch in the zone.
Rick Cleveland
What is essential for Mississippi State tonight in order to win a national championship: Spit on Vanderbilt pitcher Kumar Rocker’s wicked sliders, which often break down and out of the strike zone. Make him throw his 96 mph fastball in the zone. Then, tee off.
Easier said than done.
Said State coach Chris Lemonis Tuesday night after State trounced Vandy 13-2, when asked about Rocker: “One of the keys is to grind him out and make him throw his breaking stuff in the zone. A lot of his breaking stuff is out of the zone. So for us to have good at bats, we have to be locked in, to make him work, which is what we do. That’s usually our goal anyway, but with Kumar Rocker it definitely is. Like I said, he’s one of the best to ever pitch in college baseball.”
Rocker won 14 games and lost just three for Vandy this season. He struck out a whopping 173 in 117.2 innings. Opponents bat just .164 off him. When State faced him on April 23 in Nashville, Rocker was dominant. He pitched the entire nine innings, gave up only three hits and one earned run in a 6-2 Vandy win. Rocker struck out eight Bulldogs. He threw 109 pitches. Simply put, State didn’t spit on enough on those Rocker breaking sliders.
Rocker is not invincible. Ole Miss beat him in Oxford. Arkansas got him in the SEC Tournament, making him throw 86 pitches in just 3.1 innings. The Razorbacks spit on that slider breaking out of the zone, walked four times and bunched five hits to score five runs off Rocker in a 6-4 victory.
The Bulldogs have had no such luck with Rocker. Here, in the 2019 College World Series, they faced him and managed only one run over six innings in a critical 6-3 loss in a winner’s bracket game.
Rocker, like State’s projected starter Will Bednar, will be going on short rest. Rocker threw 111 pitches over six innings in a 3-1 victory over a depleted North Carolina State team on Friday. Rocker got the win but the Wolfpack made him work, extending at bats and getting into the Vandy bullpen.
That’s the State goal tonight. And that’s what Mississippi State hitting coach Jake Gautreau preaches all the time: Make the pitcher work, don’t help him, spit on breaking balls — and for that matter, fastballs — out of the zone. When you see State batters fist-bump their own chests when they get two strikes, that’s what that means: Grind it out, make the pitcher work, extend the at bat and get that pitch count higher and higher.
Starting Thursday, people holding many professional licenses — including public school teachers — in good standing in other states can move to the Magnolia State and take a job or hang out a shingle.
House Bill 1263 would require most of Mississippi’s occupational licensing boards, agencies and commissions to issue licenses to people who hold a current license in good standing from another state and have been licensed at least a year. There are some exceptions, such as physicians and attorneys, but it covers dozens of other professions, such as accountants, cosmetologists, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists and veterinarians.
Gov. Tate Reeves at a press conference this week thanked the bill’s author, state Rep. Becky Currie of Brookhaven, and Sen. Kevin Blackwell of Southaven for the bill’s passage. Reeves said the measure is “a loss for governmental bureaucracy and red tape,” that will help Mississippi attract residents and jobs.
The measure is one of hundreds of new Mississippi laws and spending bills that take effect on Thursday, including a teacher pay raise, House Bill 852, of about $1,000 per year for Mississippi’s more than 31,000 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers and teacher assistants. The more than 100 appropriations bills that fund state agencies also will go into effect Thursday.
Most laws passed by the Mississippi Legislature take effect each year on July 1, the start of the state’s fiscal year, although some start “from and after passage,” which means immediately after the governor signs them. Others start at later specified dates. For instance, a pay raise of up to 3% for the about 26,000 state employees approved during the 2021 session will not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2022.
A look at some of the laws that take effect Thursday:
Senate Bill 2795: Centers on criminal justice reform. The new law expands parole eligibility and would allow as many as 3,000 of the state’s roughly 17,000 people now in prison to become eligible for parole within three to five years. Those convicted of violations deemed violent crimes committed without a weapon, such as simple robbery or burglary, would be eligible for parole after serving 20 years or 50% of their sentence, whichever is less. They currently have to serve 50%. And some convicted of possession of drugs or of selling drugs and those convicted of some other nonviolent crimes would be eligible after serving 10 years or 25%, whichever is less.
House Bill 1135: This bill concerns the home delivery of alcohol. The law allows home delivery of beer, wine and liquor from liquor stores and other retailers within 30 miles of the stores. Delivery would not be allowed to any “dry” areas where alcohol sales are prohibited and would be allowed only from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, not on Sundays nor on Christmas day. Purchasers would have to be 21 or older, as would delivery drivers.
H0use Bill 196: The Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act provides women in prison with minor children more opportunity to see the children and provides additional rights for pregnant women, such as allowing a newborn to remain with the mother for 72 hours unless there are medical concerns and prohibiting invasive searches of pregnant women. The new law also would provide additional rights for all women, such as access to menstrual hygiene products.
Senate Bill 2569: This bill makes it a misdemeanor to tamper with urine samples used for testing. A third conviction could result in a felony conviction.
House Bill 277: Allows tribal identification cards to be used as identification cards for various activities, such as proving age to purchase liquor or cigarettes or to purchase lottery tickets. The new law also allows the card to be used to purchase hunting and fishing licenses and for other activities. A tribal identification card including a photo already can be used to vote.
Senate Bill 2253: Allows a concealed carry permit to be combined with a driver’s license or state-sponsored identification card.
Senate Bill 2606: The Mississippi Native Spirits Law allows liquor and wine produced in the state more leeway in its sales, such as allowing sales where it is produced, and allowing direct sales by bypassing the state’s liquor and wine warehouse.
House Bill 1139: This reverses a law passed in the 2000s during a budget crunch where businesses had to submit to the state early a certain percentage of sales tax collected in June.
Senate Bill 2621: This bill creates a task force to study domestic laws, including those surrounding divorce.
Senate Bill 2536: This law mandates that people identified as male at birth cannot participates in female sports activities.
On this week’s edition of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey interviews popular watercolorist Wyatt Waters.
Known for his watercolors of Southern culture, Wyatt Waters is a watercolor master who works solely on location – preferring the challenges that both plein air and watercolor present. Waters’ works have been featured in Art & Antiques, American Artist, Plein Air, and Watercolor. His artwork can be found in both private and corporate collections. A recipient of the Mississippi Governor’s Award for artistic excellence, Wyatt has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums, such as the Mississippi Museum of Art, The Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the Meridian Museum of Art and the Jackson Municipal Gallery.
He and chef Robert St. John have collaborated on four books – A Southern Palate,Southern Palate, An Italian Palate, and most recently, A Mississippi Palate. He received the MS Institute of Arts & Letters Award for An Oxford Sketchbook and the MS Library Association Special Award for Art for his collaboration with Robert St. John, on A Southern Palate.
Additionally, Waters and St. John co-hosted Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s popular Palate to Palette series for five seasons, which chronicled their travels and culinary and artistic experiences across Mississippi and Italy.
Trading international travel for the travel trailer life, Wyatt and his wife, Kristi, are documenting their travels with Wyatt’s watercolors of the Southeast for a new book, scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2022.
All of Wyatt’s work is available through the Wyatt Waters Gallery in Clinton, Mississippi.
Greenville school officials last week directed the school board attorney to draft information about the April bus driver strike to submit to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, according to attorney Dorian Turner.
“The board discussed and reviewed information regarding individual bus drivers and the alleged strike,” Turner said in a statement. “They directed the board attorney to draft for their approval documentation to submit to the appropriate authorities.”
Between 13 to 20 bus drivers for the Greenville Public School District skipped work in April to protest reduced pay and what they called poor work conditions. Following the strike, which is explicitly illegal in Mississippi, the school board reversed a previous decision to reduce the number of work days for the drivers for the next school year by five days.
Several bus drivers who previously spoke to Mississippi Today said they had not been paid by the district for hours worked. One driver said she was not paid for the duration of her quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 while at work.
In May, Turner, the board attorney, advised board members that what occurred was indeed a strike. Board officials, however, delayed taking any action for weeks.
The strike law passed in 1985 clearly states that school board members themselves are responsible for reporting the names of those who went on strike to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. For each day that those names are not reported by the board to the state, the individual board members and school administrators can be fined between $100 and $250.
The school board held a special called meeting Tuesday. The majority of the meeting was held behind closed doors in executive session, but Turner said no action was taken concerning the strike.
Turner will present the information to the board for its approval at its next meeting on July 27. Everitt Chinn, a spokesperson for the district, said the district will not be streaming that meeting or any future meetings online as it has in the past.
Emails between board members and Superintendent Debra Dace reveal some of the internal conversations between Turner, board members and the superintendent in the aftermath of the strike. Dace and board president Jan Vaugh discussed receiving calls from Mississippi Today, and both agreed they would not be commenting on the matter.
” … I guess this is one of the disadvantages of team-audio conferencing because I had no idea (the Mississippi Today reporter) was listening,” Vaughn said in reference to the streamed board meetings.
Mississippi State pitcher Preston Johnson reacts after striking out Vanderbilt’s Carter Young during the fifth inning in Game 2 of the NCAA College World Series baseball finals. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz)
OMAHA — Mississippi State for decades stacked on decades has boasted one of the elite, most beloved college baseball programs in the country. The Diamond Dogs have been to 12 College World Series, won multiple SEC, NCAA Regional and Super Regional championships. They’ve produced dozens of Major League stars, scores of All Americans.
What they have not done is win a National Championship. That could change Wednesday night, June 30, 2021.
Rick Cleveland
An estimated 20,000 Bulldog fans will cheer them against defending national champion Vanderbilt tonight at TD Ameritrade Park, which really has become Dudy Noble North this week.
The Bulldogs, with their backs to the wall, fired back for a 13-2 trouncing of the Commodores Tuesday night to force a winner-take-all third game in this CWS Championship series. The announced attendance was 24,122. Surely, 20,000 of them were State faithful.
They made a difference.
Honestly, neither Vandy’s 8-2 victory in Game One or State’s bounce-back victory in Game Two have been works of baseball art. Walks and hit batters by State pitchers contributed mightily to Vandy’s first game victory. Walks, wild pitches and errors on the part of Vandy greatly aided State Tuesday night.
Do not expect anything of the sort Wednesday night. State will go with Will Bednar on the mound. Vandy will pitch Kumar Rocker. Both are first-round Major League draft picks, soon-to-be millionaires. Yes, both are going on shorter than normal rest. But both are big, strong, rugged guys who can’t wait for this moment.
Were he here for this, good ol’ Emory Bellard, the long departed State football coach, would put it this way: “Podnuh, it’s a hoss and a hoss.”
It is.
State has one distinct advantage: These really are like home games times two. Vandy has its Whistler. State has a maroon-clad army of fans, who waited out a two-hour weather delay Tuesday night and then cheered from start to finish as if their lives, not just a national championship, depended on it.
Strikeouts were cheered like touchdowns at an SEC football game. We’ll never know how much all that noise factored into the three Vandy errors, the four wild pitches or the 10 walked batters by Vandy pitching. My educated guess: plenty.
They’ve come from all nook and cranny of Mississippi, thousands making 13-hour drives and more.
“You had to come,” said former Bulldog baseball star Rusty Thoms, who has made the trip twice during this CWS to cheer on his alma mater. “It’s expensive as the devil and it’s not easy because it’s a long, long way. But you had to come because this might be the year. Some day it’s gonna happen, and this might be the year, and you had to be here if it happens.”
Thrown into the middle of all that pandemonium was 17-year-old Vanderbilt starting pitcher Christian Little, probably the next Commodore pitching star, possessor of a 96 mph fastball and a nasty slider. He allowed an unearned run in the first but ran into huge trouble in the third inning. When Tanner Allen reached first base because his grounder stuck in the webbing of shortstop Carter Young’s glove, the State crowd thundered approval. And the State fans got louder with each of the 12 balls Little threw to the next three State batters, all of whom walked.
That was it for Little. Four more Vandy pitchers followed him, none with great success. Tanner Allen scored four runs and had two hits. Scotty Dubrule rapped two hits and knocked in four runs. Luke Hancock also provided two hits and two RBI. Lane Forsythe, the nine-hole hitter, broke out of a slump with three hits and two RBI.
Meanwhile, State’s Houston “Hootie” Harding, who pitches as if he has a deadline to meet, gave the Bulldogs four quality innings of one-run baseball, and big Preston Johnson followed him with five excellent innings.
Johnson said he got chills down his spine just being asked about pitching in front of that crowd that was cheering his every strike. “Our fans are the best in the country,” Johnson said. “And that’s just a hundred percent fact.”
Those pitching performances were just what the doctor — and Chris Lemonis — ordered for State, which has a well-rested bullpen ready for Wednesday night’s finale.
And that might be the other State advantage. Behind Bednar, the Bulldogs have master closer Landon Sims, rested and ready to go after not pitching in the first two games of the championship series. Said Lemonis, “After the game I grabbed Landon, I said, ‘Man, it was sure nice not having to pitch you tonight,’ because I feel like in every win for the last month he has been out there. So for him to have the night off and to still get the victory was huge.”
Vanderbilt is still Vanderbilt. Kumar Rocker is still Kumar Rocker. Said Lemonis of Rocker: “He’s probably one of the best to ever play college baseball.”
Still, all things considered, it could not set up a whole lot better for the Bulldogs.
Mississippi Today is creating a COVID-19 Vaccine Guide, where readers can find everything about vaccines, including the how and where of getting them in Mississippi. We’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about the vaccines. You’ll also find information about where vaccination sites are located, transportation options and a layout of the progress Mississippi has made in the vaccine rollout.
Here’s a sneak peek of what the guide will offer: View maps showing how Mississippi’s vaccination progress compares to other states across the United States. For more COVID-19 vaccine data and our full coverage, stay tuned for our 2021 COVID-19 Vaccine Guide, which will be live here.
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View all of our data showing COVID-19 vaccination progress here.
