Boston College Athletics
Photo by: Rob Davis
Mudd Dominates As Eagles Advance to Sunday
May 30, 2026 | Baseball, #ForBoston Files
Tyler Mudd's performance is officially entrenched among some of BC's greatest postseason performances.
Tyler Mudd arrived at Foley Field on Saturday morning with a secret confidence that nobody in Athens, Georgia fully comprehended. Even with a core tenet in the pitching staff telling him to avoid any assumption about the suspended blowout between top-seeded Georgia and No. 4 Long Island University, he'd gone to sleep one night earlier with terabytes of information dancing through his head. He knew everything about the Sharks and formulated a game plan implementable once the 18-2 thumping went to a final score. Planning for LIU began while the team's offensive hitters had outs remaining against the Bulldogs, and the clear message from head coach Todd Interdonato signaled Mudd's first start in 15 days as long as the baseball gods didn't turn the Athens Regional on its head.
The preliminary work allowed him to mentally jumpstart his foundational first innings before he stepped onto Foley Field's artificial turf mound, but even the tandem combination of Mudd's pitching and the BC offense couldn't prepare the early afternoon Georgia crowd for the level of dominance it was about to witness. Trusted with the ball in a situation where a misstep could have cost Birdball its entire season, Mudd earned a playoff-extending victory in an 8-4 win that included one of the best pressure performances in 10 years.
"I felt great," Mudd told The Podcast for Boston after the game. "I didn't get the chance to pitch last week [in the ACC Tournament], so I was very well-rested, and that was the best my arm's felt in a really long time. So I just felt totally prepared. I'd met with our pitching coach, Ryan Forrest, before the game, and I thought we could win with a good game plan, and then as the game progressed, we got out to an early lead that made my job really easy as a pitcher. The offense was going, the defense played unbelievable behind me…it made my job easy to just be efficient and get off the field."
Mudd's work through the Long Island offense kept the Sharks without a base runner through the first two innings and kept all but one hitter off of the base paths until the fifth inning. He retired the side in the fourth after disallowing Jake Kelleher from advancing beyond first base in the third and later struck out the side in the fifth despite surrendering a Joe Durso on a 1-1 changeup that missed up in the zone. Two more strikeouts ended the sixth with a third base runner reaching on an error, and the seventh likewise ended with a single runner failing to move to second base after the middle of the LIU order produced two additional strikeouts and a Durso flyout to center.
Returning to the hill for the eighth inning, he finally reached 100 pitches and surrendered a pair of base runners before Ryan Rivera hit a three-run homer, but closing the gap to a four-run ballgame did little to quell the damage inflicted on the LIU offense. Just seven of the 30 batters facing Mudd reached base via a hit, and four of those batters - including two of the three extra base hits that he surrendered - were in that eighth inning. Nearly two dozen of the hitters either started out with a first pitch strike or light contact, and he finished with 10 strikeouts and no walks - a ratio that was arguably equal or better to Justin Dunn's 11-strikeout, one-walk performance in a seven-inning Oxford Regional win over Tulane in 2016.
"First and foremost, talking about first pitch strikes, that's one of our three pillars on the pitching staff," said Mudd. "That's the most important pitch of the at-bat most times, and I was really confident that I could throw my slider for a strike. Typically hitters are sitting off-speed for that first pitch, so Forrest and I agreed to drop a slider [on hitters]. Throwing it for a strike [meant] that we were going to be in a good spot.
"College baseball has all of the analytics now," he continued, "and we knew that a big thing to highlight was LIU's first-pitch swing rate. If they were going to be super aggressive or overly aggressive on the first pitch of an at-bat, that was a good time to drop [the slider] and hope that they missed."
Mudd eventually turned the game over to Chase Hartsell, and Kyle Kipp recorded the final five outs of LIU's season by whiffing sluggers Nick Matson and Cord Dobrinski in the eighth and Noah Sorensen in the ninth to end the game.
"It was an incredible season from LIU," said Interdonato in his postgame remarks. "I feel like every time I look up, they're representing the NEC [in the postseason]. [Head coach Dan Pirillo] does an incredible job, and given the funky schedule, they had to go through [a struggle] with the delay [against Georgia]. He told me that they were up at 6 a.m., and they played as hard as they did through the end of [the two games]. Then again, once you watch them on the field, you understand why they represent the NEC so often.
"I know we got the offense in there early," he continued, "but I thought the story of the game was Tyler going as far as he did and as efficient as he was. Then it was nice for us to get to our style of play on the field before Kipp did an amazing job finishing it off."
Advancing in the Athens Regional means BC plays the loser of the Georgia-Liberty game on Sunday at 12 p.m. in a second elimination game. The winner of that game advances to a second game later in the day against the winner of the Georgia-Liberty game, at which point the Regional Final turns into a potential two-day event if the loser's bracket champion defeats the winner's bracket champion in the evening matinee. Should the winner's bracket team lose, a winner-take-all elimination game to determine the regional champion will be played on Monday. Otherwise, the winner's bracket team advances to the Super Regional round.
The preliminary work allowed him to mentally jumpstart his foundational first innings before he stepped onto Foley Field's artificial turf mound, but even the tandem combination of Mudd's pitching and the BC offense couldn't prepare the early afternoon Georgia crowd for the level of dominance it was about to witness. Trusted with the ball in a situation where a misstep could have cost Birdball its entire season, Mudd earned a playoff-extending victory in an 8-4 win that included one of the best pressure performances in 10 years.
"I felt great," Mudd told The Podcast for Boston after the game. "I didn't get the chance to pitch last week [in the ACC Tournament], so I was very well-rested, and that was the best my arm's felt in a really long time. So I just felt totally prepared. I'd met with our pitching coach, Ryan Forrest, before the game, and I thought we could win with a good game plan, and then as the game progressed, we got out to an early lead that made my job really easy as a pitcher. The offense was going, the defense played unbelievable behind me…it made my job easy to just be efficient and get off the field."
Mudd's work through the Long Island offense kept the Sharks without a base runner through the first two innings and kept all but one hitter off of the base paths until the fifth inning. He retired the side in the fourth after disallowing Jake Kelleher from advancing beyond first base in the third and later struck out the side in the fifth despite surrendering a Joe Durso on a 1-1 changeup that missed up in the zone. Two more strikeouts ended the sixth with a third base runner reaching on an error, and the seventh likewise ended with a single runner failing to move to second base after the middle of the LIU order produced two additional strikeouts and a Durso flyout to center.
Returning to the hill for the eighth inning, he finally reached 100 pitches and surrendered a pair of base runners before Ryan Rivera hit a three-run homer, but closing the gap to a four-run ballgame did little to quell the damage inflicted on the LIU offense. Just seven of the 30 batters facing Mudd reached base via a hit, and four of those batters - including two of the three extra base hits that he surrendered - were in that eighth inning. Nearly two dozen of the hitters either started out with a first pitch strike or light contact, and he finished with 10 strikeouts and no walks - a ratio that was arguably equal or better to Justin Dunn's 11-strikeout, one-walk performance in a seven-inning Oxford Regional win over Tulane in 2016.
"First and foremost, talking about first pitch strikes, that's one of our three pillars on the pitching staff," said Mudd. "That's the most important pitch of the at-bat most times, and I was really confident that I could throw my slider for a strike. Typically hitters are sitting off-speed for that first pitch, so Forrest and I agreed to drop a slider [on hitters]. Throwing it for a strike [meant] that we were going to be in a good spot.
"College baseball has all of the analytics now," he continued, "and we knew that a big thing to highlight was LIU's first-pitch swing rate. If they were going to be super aggressive or overly aggressive on the first pitch of an at-bat, that was a good time to drop [the slider] and hope that they missed."
Mudd eventually turned the game over to Chase Hartsell, and Kyle Kipp recorded the final five outs of LIU's season by whiffing sluggers Nick Matson and Cord Dobrinski in the eighth and Noah Sorensen in the ninth to end the game.
"It was an incredible season from LIU," said Interdonato in his postgame remarks. "I feel like every time I look up, they're representing the NEC [in the postseason]. [Head coach Dan Pirillo] does an incredible job, and given the funky schedule, they had to go through [a struggle] with the delay [against Georgia]. He told me that they were up at 6 a.m., and they played as hard as they did through the end of [the two games]. Then again, once you watch them on the field, you understand why they represent the NEC so often.
"I know we got the offense in there early," he continued, "but I thought the story of the game was Tyler going as far as he did and as efficient as he was. Then it was nice for us to get to our style of play on the field before Kipp did an amazing job finishing it off."
Advancing in the Athens Regional means BC plays the loser of the Georgia-Liberty game on Sunday at 12 p.m. in a second elimination game. The winner of that game advances to a second game later in the day against the winner of the Georgia-Liberty game, at which point the Regional Final turns into a potential two-day event if the loser's bracket champion defeats the winner's bracket champion in the evening matinee. Should the winner's bracket team lose, a winner-take-all elimination game to determine the regional champion will be played on Monday. Otherwise, the winner's bracket team advances to the Super Regional round.
Players Mentioned
Thursday, June 04
Thursday, June 04
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Wednesday, June 03
