The Flames offense continues to roll as they beat No. 3 seed Longwood 9-3. Liberty will either play 8 seed Radford or the loser of the No. 1 Coastal Carolina v. No. 4 Gardner Webb game in the semifinals on Friday afternoon.
D.J. Artis and Will Shepherd combined for 6 hits, 6 RBI’s, and scored 5 runs in the contest to pace the Flames offense that seems to be clicking at the right time. Liberty would also score 3 runs on 4 errors by the Longwood defense who had a tough go of it in the field.
Liberty’s long reliever Shane Quarterley would come to relieve starter Evan Mitchell in the bottom of the 5th with the bases loaded and no outs to only give up one run. Quarterley narrowly missed giving up a game changing grand slam to Longwood’s Osinski on a foul ball that would end up being reviewed and confirmed as called on the field by the umpires. Twice the Flames pitching staff was able to work out of bases loaded situations and was able to limit the damage to one run in each of those innings.
Where has this pitching staff been all year? This Flames staff has been efficient and effective in its first two games of this tournament, something it hasn’t been most of the year. Liberty has only used 5 pitchers so far in the tournament, leaving its bullpen fresh and ready to go with an off day Thursday.
It is a welcomed sight to see this team finally start to look like the team most thought they could be coming into the season, a team that was picked as the preseason conference runner-up. Liberty has now won 8 of its last 9 games and hopefully can keep the train rolling through the rest of this tournament.
While Liberty will have to wait until after Thursday’s games to find out who they will face in the semifinals on Friday afternoon, Longwood will play the No. 2 seed High Point tomorrow at 10am.
As we look ahead, the best case scenario for Liberty would be to have Coastal win tonight, forcing Liberty to play either Radford or Gardner-Webb in the semifinals. The Flames do not want to see Coastal, who destroyed them at home in the regular season, until the winner-take-all championship game Saturday assuming both teams make it out of the semis.
