LSU Defeats Utah Valley 7-2 in Game 1 Regional

The LSU Tigers baseball team had to wait nearly 8 hours due to a lightning and rain delay to play the opening game of their NCAA Regional last night. The weather however, didn’t seem to bother the Tigers as they did what they needed to do to win Game 1 going away over Utah State by a score of 7-2.

LSU started things off on the right foot early, with a home run from Jake Fraley in the bottom of the 1st inning. After Antoine Duplantis walked, Fraley smashed a homer over the right field fence for an early 2-0 lead.

The Wolverines did come back in the top of the 2nd inning with a double from Justin Erlandson that cut the lead to 2-1. The one run deficit wouldn’t stand for long, as LSU scored on a sacrifice in the bottom of the 2nd inning.

The Tigers continued to cruise along with Jared Poche on the mound. Poche pitched 6 innings with just one run allowed and eight strikeouts.

The biggest hurdle that Poche faced was at the top of the 4th inning when Utah Valley has runners on the corners with no outs. Poche would come up huge with 3 consecutive strikeouts to end the inning.

LSU Baseball pitcher Jared Poche (Photo courtesy of LSUSports.net)

The Wolverines would never get any closer as LSU ended up compiling 12 hits all together.

Box Score: LSU 7 Utah Valley 2

LSU will face the winner of the Southeastern vs. Rice game that plays tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. CDT. That game was also supposed to be played yesterday but was called off due to inclement weather as well.

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Tulane did play their game against Boston College but lost 7-2. Louisiana Lafayette did win their opener against Princeton 5-3.

Louisiana has five teams that are in the postseason this tournament. Louisiana Tech will play Cal State Fullerton on Saturday as well in their opener.

The weather will unfortunately be the story for most of the weekend. The forecast isn’t promising for LSU or Lafayette, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Either way, the Louisiana teams are 2-1 so far and can really make collegiate baseball a little bit more popular within the state of Louisiana, with some more wins……..