OVC CHAMPIONSHIP NOTEBOOK: Lucchesi bookends things for Southeast Missouri State baseball

JACKSON, Tenn. — The Ohio Valley Conference tournament began and ended the same way for the Southeast Missouri State baseball team — with ace Joey Lucchesi on the mound.

The two-time OVC Pitcher of the Year pitched a complete-game shutout in a 3-0 victory against Morehead State on Friday, and on Sunday evening he recorded his first save of his two-year Southeast career with three shutout innings against Jacksonville State in the championship game.

The performance secured him another honor: OVC tournament MVP.

“We hung the tournament on him and he did what he had to do,” Southeast coach Steve Bieser said. “He went out and won his start. He came to us today. He saw how the Jake Busiek and those guys were really sucking it up and going after it and just every time asking for the ball, telling me that they can go, they can go. Joey walked in today and said, ‘I’ve got at least two innings for you guys today. Just wherever you want it, just pick it out. We knew that we had to script it with Joey and make sure that we had it set up, so that he could be successful.”

Lucchesi’s routine is central to his success, so Bieser had to choose the right moment to play his ace that would allow him time to prepare properly.

Pitching coach Lance Rhodes asked the senior lefty if he had a few innings left in him before the team left its hotel Sunday morning, and Lucchesi told him he’d have his answer once he stretched out at The Ballpark.

“I felt good, so I told him, ‘Yeah, I’ll go two,’” Lucchesi said. “It ended up being three but I felt good out there, I felt loose. I dominated.”

Bieser planned for senior Alex Siddle to enter the contest as the first reliever if starter Robert Beltran got into trouble, which happened after 1 2/3 innings.

Siddle was able to get out of the inning but faced three batters in the third and didn’t record an out before Bieser made a spot decision to throw in Brady Wright, who got the win in four innings of relief.

At the same time Wright entered, Lucchesi jogged down to the bullpen past Southeast’s third-base dugout. He gradually went through his normal warmup, which was key.

The Chabot College transfer started out last season, his first at Southeast, in the bullpen, but was never comfortable and didn’t excel in the role. In three relief appearances he had an ERA of 13.50. Bieser moved him into the Redhawks’ weekend rotation to start conference play and the regimented nature of a starting role suited him much better. He went 7-1 in the regular-season and had a 2.87 ERA heading into the OVC tournament.

On Sunday he was able to fit his usual routine into the time that it took from the third to the seventh inning.

“This year I have a routine and I know how to get myself ready and how long it’ll take,” Lucchesi said. “That’s why I was down there so early. Compared to last year, I didn’t really have a routine, I was sort of finding myself. Everything worked out. I was stretched out and ready to go.”

Once Southeast regained a 9-8 lead in the bottom of the sixth inning, Bieser found his time to send out Lucchesi, who’d thrown 119 pitches two nights before.

“The only tough decision was [because] Joey’s got a future in this game. Joey’s going to play beyond college baseball,” Bieser said. “Knowing that he threw on one day’s rest, that was always a concern and the last thing I wanted to do was have him throw in a non-meaningful situation. Making sure that the situation was right but still also knowing that we had to have enough time to prep him or he would not be the same guy. That was the toughest thing — what is that timing?

“I wanted us to be tied or have the lead before we went to him because right when Joey hit the field the adrenaline and the emotion — and not only in our dugout because our team has seen him all season long. They knew what was going to happen and they knew he was going to settle the game for a couple innings to give them time to stretch the lead out.

"That was one of the best moments, I think, of this season, just listening to the fans get excited when they saw Joey with his funny little trot out to the mound. That was really neat.”

He struck out three in the seventh, working around a one-out error. In the eighth he coaxed the Gamecocks into a fly out and pop out to center before snagging one hit right back at him for a groundout.

The only hit he allowed came with one out in the ninth, and a 6-4-3 double play ended it before Lucchesi tossed off his glove and was mobbed by his teammates for their championship celebration.

“When we scored that final run that put us up 14-8,” Southeast senior shortstop Branden Boggetto said, “I knew Joey was going to go up there, shut the door and there was no worries.”

Quick turnaround

Southeast baseball coach Steve Bieser couldn’t quite nail down what impressed him the most about his team’s performance in their OVC tournament championship run, but finally settled on their ability to adapt and compete in unfavorable situations.

First the Redhawks had their tourney opener delayed a day due to rain. Then they had the start of the second game pushed back two hours because of an extra-inning contest before theirs.

Then Saturday and Sunday they had to play doubleheaders in a span of 24 hours with two being elimination games and the final a winner-take-all.

“You think about little things like Brian Lees catching two straight doubleheaders in the heat and being able to contribute and very few balls got by him in four straight games,” Bieser said.

“Just flat-out worn out, finishing late last night, turning around on a short night’s rest — just all those guys, every guy left everything out on the field, and I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

Southeast had six players recognized for their performance in the tournament, with Garrett Gandolfo, Joey Lucchesi, Hunter Leeper, Dan Holst, Chris Osborne and Scott Mitchell named to the all-tournament team.

Shoring things up

Most of the time five errors would’ve been cause for disappointment with Bieser, but Sunday was the exception.

He acknowledged the miscues in the championship game were less than ideal, but advancing to the program’s first NCAA regional since 2002 despite them made it a little easier to put on the back burner.

“The teams that we are playing are very good teams, and any team that’s playing at this time of the year is a good team,” Bieser said. “Obviously the thing that can’t happen in a championship game is us having five errors. To me, there was more pressure in this setting than there’s going to be this weekend. I think guys will feel confident now. … When you’re supposed to do something that’s the toughest thing. Nobody’s expecting us to do much, but I kind of like our chances. I like our guys that we’ve got on the mound that can match up with anybody. We’ve just got to get the rest of our starting pitchers to have to have a very good weekend. But I think that they got through this and now that nervousness that they had here they can move on from because they are good pitchers.”

The grind of the double elimination tournament didn’t help the Redhawks defensively.

“It was pretty sloppy this weekend, but that’s in the past now,” Gandolfo said. “We can move forward. We’ve got a couple days of practice ahead of us that we can improve on and just get back to the basics.

"You never really like errors but we were tired out there and some of them come from being tired. We can shake it off, we can come back and we’ll be fine next week. As long as we can clean it up defensively and can keep pitching it well and swinging it well I think we have a really good chance.”