HATTIESBURG — Southern Miss catcher Blake Johnson knew the decision wasn’t his to make. Still, he couldn’t ignore what he was seeing.
An unproven freshman named Tanner Hall was mowing down Ole Miss hitters in a game the Golden Eagles had to win to extend their 2021 season. More than the results, Johnson saw the psyche of a young righthander proving his worth on the national stage.
“The way he was acting, his demeanor, he kind of carries that big dog status,” Johnson said.
“I remember he came off the mound in his third our fourth inning, we went in the dugout and I told him, ‘This is your moment. I want you to finish this game.’ ”
Hall answered Johnson’s challenge, closing out a game he entered in the fifth inning with a 9-7 lead. He held the nation’s fifth-highest scoring lineup scoreless, conceding only one hit as he secured a vital Golden Eagles victory that forced a winner-take-all decider against the Rebels the next day.
Ole Miss won that game to advance to the super regionals, but the foundation for Hall’s ascent into the elite tier of college baseball arms was built. When he takes the ball against the Rebels on Sunday in a super regional, he’ll do so as an All-American, holding a 2.60 earned-run average with 140 strikeouts and 13 walks in 103⅔ innings.
“It let me kind of prove myself,” Hall said of that outing. “Not just to other people, but to myself. I feel like I needed to do that for myself because I hadn’t seen the chance enough to prove it to myself that I still had that ability. In high school, that type of stuff is common, to go out and throw five shutout innings, but to do it in college kind of reassured me. Like, OK, I actually do belong.”
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When Hall took the ball from Tyler Stuart that day in Oxford, he’d allowed 18 runs in 23⅔ innings, pitching mostly in relief. From there, Hall’s five-inning journey to self-assurance began.
He sat the Rebels down in order in that initial frame, generating a groundout and closing the inning with a pair of whiffs.
When another perfect inning followed in the sixth, he said the belief truly started to flow.
“I was in high school the year before so I had known that the SEC was supposed to be these big, crazy good players,” Hall said. “But that just kind of made me realize that they were just as good of a team as we were. It just gave me a lot of confidence.”
Hall worked around a hit batsman and a pair of wild pitches when he returned to the mound for the seventh. Aware that the freshman had only once pitched more than three innings in a game that season, pitching coach Christian Ostrander approached Hall to ask how he felt.
Sufficiently convinced by Hall’s response, Ostrander sent him back out for the eighth. Hall allowed a single, but nothing more. By now, the natural freshman reservation was beginning to wear away. Ostrander once again approached Hall when he returned to the dugout.
“I feel like I wanna finish the game,” Hall told him.
And he did, pounding his chest as Christopher Sargent trotted to first base to secure the final out.
Johnson, USM’s catcher in that game, said he always saw Hall as a talent. But that day in Oxford, as Hall worked his trademark sinker on the corners, teasing hitters with a changeup that can run or cut, and mixing in an occasional slider, Johnson knew he could be special.
In the Southern Miss dugout, head coach Scott Berry took notice, too.
“From that point on, I think he just really planted a seed in our mind that this is a guy that needs to be tagged as a starter for us next year,” Berry said. “That’s what we did in the fall, we started grooming him for that. And he hasn’t disappointed.”
Reach Southern Miss writer David Eckert at [email protected] or on Twitter @davideckert98
