Gabe Shepard delivered a near-perfect performance as the Southern Miss baseball team remained perfect in the Conference USA Tournament and advanced to its fourth straight title game appearance with a 6-0 win over Rice on Saturday.
Shepard carved through a Rice lineup which had zero answers for his mid-90s fastball and zero hits against him. The right-hander retired 22 of the 23 batters he faced and struck out 12 Owl batters.
“That was totally different than what I’ve ever experienced,” Shepard said. “I was just totally in the zone with the fans behind me, the greatest fans. Just felt like I was on a different level than everybody else.
“It just felt like a normal day. But after the first batter, I knew I was on. I had my stuff. It was just one of those days.”
A year removed from Tommy John surgery, the redshirt freshman recorded the first out of the eighth inning and exited the mound with a no-hitter intact. He threw 91 pitches.
“Today, the decision to bring him out of there was for the future, nothing more,” Southern Miss coach Scott Berry said.
“[He’s] a young man who hadn’t gone more than five innings and was one year removed from surgery. Sometimes, just like you have to be a parent with your own kid, you make the best decisions for him. Whether you like it or not, you do the same thing as a coach.”
So, it was up to Berry’s bullpen to keep the no-hitter going, and that they did. Cody Carroll got the final two outs of the eighth, and Hunter Stanley pitched a 1-2-3 ninth to complete the combined no-hitter for the Golden Eagles.
“What a special, special game that everybody got to witness today,” Berry said.
Offensively, the Golden Eagles took a 1-0 lead in the second inning off a solo homer off the bat of Bryant Bowen. After scoring a run off a Rice error in the fourth, Fred Franklin added an RBI single in the fifth to put USM up 3-0. Even with Shepard dealing, Berry believed they needed more.
“We needed to put up a crooked number because just like the other day, in the first game against Rice, they let us hang around at 4-1, and we were able to win late,” he said. “I didn’t want to go into those late innings only up three runs.”
In the seventh, they doubled that total by putting up a three spot. Matt Wallner left yard with a solo homer, Bryant Bowen followed with his second of the day and Danny Lynch added an RBI single, as Southern Miss advanced to Sunday’s Conference USA title game with a 6-0 win. The Golden Eagles (37-19) will face either Florida Atlantic or UTSA at 1 pm for the conference crown.
