HATTIESBURG – After being held out of a start last week at Florida International, and only pitching one inning two weeks ago against Western Kentucky, junior Nick Sandlin returned to the Southern Miss rotation Saturday.
The Golden Eagles swept a Saturday doubleheader with Middle Tennessee State 11-2 and 8-0, as Sandlin started the second game of the day. The two wins gave Southern Miss its first three-game conference sweep of the season, too, and it was the 10th consecutive conference series win.
Southern Miss is now 28-11 overall and 13-4 in Conference USA play.
“I thought our pitching staff just absolutely dialed it up this weekend against Middle,” Southern Miss coach Nick Sandlin said. “I think they were hitting .279 coming in, so they had a clue about how to hit, but our guys really made pitches well, Oz called great games against them, our offense backed it up, and defensively, we played really well.”
Sandlin pitched five innings of one-hit ball while striking out 12 MTSU batters. His career-high for strikeouts was 14, which he’s done twice this season, entering the contest. Sandlin was on a pitch count, and combined with the big lead, there wasn’t any reason to send him back for the sixth inning.
“Earlier this week,” Berry said when asked when he felt confident in Sandlin coming back. “He was feeling a lot better. It’s almost like that tightness went away probably around Tuesday. He threw a ‘pen on Wednesday, and he said he felt very good. I wanted to see how he felt on Thursday, and he came out and tossed and said, ‘I feel great,’ so that’s when we made the decision to go ahead and start him on the second game (Saturday).”
Sandlin said the final decision of him getting the start came down Friday, and he confirmed it was shoulder tightness that bothered him the past couple of weeks.
“I had confidence that I was going to feel good today,” he said. “The last few days I’ve felt good, and just before the game I’ve felt like regular, so I was looking forward to coming out here today and getting back at it.
“I felt good. I felt as good as I’ve felt in a month or so, so I can’t complain about that.”
Of Sandlin’s five innings, he pitched four 1-2-3 innings and struck out the side in the first, third and fifth innings.
“Yeah, it’s a bit of a relief, just knowing you didn’t really lose anything, you know, lose any progress, any feel or anything like that,” Sandlin said.
Southern Miss will host South Alabama Tuesday at 6 p.m.
