“To beat a top ten team in the country at their place, you have to come out and play good baseball. We did some great things tonight,” Alabama coach Rob Vaughn said. “We let an elite arm off the hook early then he settled in and was tough. We simply weren’t clean in the third.”
Apart from the first inning, in which Alabama (30-10, 8-9 SEC) scored a run for the second straight game, the early going on Friday was tough for the visitors in Baton Rouge. It began in the bottom of the third when second baseman Daniel Dickinson snuck a hard-hit ball under third baseman Jason Torres, who was playing in.
It was initially scored an error and later ruled a single, but the real damage was in the scoring column after center fielder Chris Stanfield came to the plate. Stanfield led off the frame with a single but found his way to second on a throwing error. Leadoff man Derek Curiel advanced Stanfield to third on a flyout.
Dickinson himself wound up at third after another error on a pickoff attempt. First baseman Jared Jones did the rest, giving the home team a 2-1 lead. The defensive lapses on the Alabama side were not over.
In the fourth, two batters after a leadoff double by Tigers third baseman Michael Braswell III, Stanfield sent a ball in the air to the outfield that Crimson Tide center fielder Richie Bonomolo Jr. likely should have caught. The ball landed instead, and LSU had runners placed on second and third with one out.
Curiel singled to center and brought both men home, chasing Alabama starting pitcher Riley Quick from the game after 3.1 innings. It was here that the Crimson Tide bullpen stepped up. First to answer the call was senior Braylon Myers, who worked 3.2 scoreless innings and fanned six.
After Myers was Coulson Buchanan, who stranded the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth while LSU was up 4-2. The second Alabama run had come in the top of the seventh, when a pair of two-out hits by left fielder Kade Snell and Bonomolo led to Snell scoring on a Bonomolo single.
Snell is up to six RBIs on the weekend after he had four on Thursday. He added a second for Friday’s game (he recorded an RBI groundout in the opening frame for the contest’s first run) with a sacrifice fly in the ninth, bringing the game within a single run. He made the second out on that play, and the Crimson Tide could not tie it up thereafter.
LSU (34-6, 12-5 SEC) only threw two pitchers. Starter Anthony Eyanson bounced back from a challenging first inning, which did not turn out as bad as it could have and completed six innings with only one run. He struck out 12 batters and tossed 115 pitches.
Eyanson was followed by Zac Cowan, who worked three innings and got his sixth save of the 2025 campaign. Eyanson loaded the bases in the first and fourth innings but left the runners stranded on both occasions. Each team had a lot of potential runs on the table; Alabama stranded 12 men, and LSU left 10 on base.
Stanfield was 4-for-4 and Dickinson logged three hits. Separately from his runs batted in, which were not the result of hits, Snell went 2-of-4. Alabama right fielder Bryce Fowler also had two hits. Both times the Crimson Tide left the bases juiced, a swinging strikeout on a 3-2 pitch ended the threat.
Zane Adams, who has traditionally been the first starting pitcher in weekend series for Rob Vaughn’s Alabama team, will be tasked with starting Saturday’s third game in the series. The action gets underway at 5 p.m. CT on SEC Network. The Crimson Tide is yet to be swept in 2025; while the series is not at stake Saturday, that particular statistic is. Alabama is 0-3 in its last three SEC series.
“[We] gave ourselves a chance at the end but couldn’t quite get it done. I love the fight, and I love the toughness. We just need to come out and play a clean game of baseball tomorrow,” Vaughn said. “I told these guys coming in that ‘fortune favors the bold’. We need to live that tomorrow, myself included. We will come out ready to send it tomorrow afternoon.”
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