Clarkdale baseball coach Scott Gibson said all year his team has found ways to win despite not always putting up stellar offensive performances. When a team has an ace on the mound like University of Southern Mississippi signee Cal Culpepper, its batters typically just need to put enough balls in play to win a low-scoring game.

But even an ace can have an off night, requiring his teammates to pick up the slack. Culpepper did not throw his best game on the mound for the Clarkdale Bulldogs against the Southeast Lauderdale Tigers on Tuesday, but did enough to put T.J. Gordon in position to close out a 4-3 win in the final inning.

“We kept battling,” Gibson said. “I thought our guys really stayed the course. We had a lot of adversity there, and they just kept grinding it out. Cal didn’t have his best stuff by any means, and I just thought it was great for the rest of the team to pick him up and get some hits.”

Culpepper threw 62 strikes and 11 strikeouts in his start, but also gave up four walks and four hits before he was replaced by Gordon to start the seventh inning. Gordon needed just seven total pitches to throw a groundout, a flyout and a game-sealing strikeout.

“He came in there full of confidence, man, and we just believed in him, and he got it done,” Culpepper said. “It wasn’t my best stuff today, but I’ll tell you what, I have teammates behind me rooting for me and just pushing me to just keep going, and I couldn’t thank them enough.”

The Bulldogs put up just three hits against the Tigers’ pitching trio of Shade Hollingsworth, Tyson Marlow and Jacob Hostetler. The Tigers’ pitchers threw six strikeouts while giving up six walks and four errors.

Culpepper said his team fought hard while facing a lot of adversity from the Tigers. Gibson said his team may not be a great offensive squad, which likely means the Bulldogs will need to continue to fight and scrap for wins on defense.

“We’ve got to put more barrels on balls. We just do. But right now I’ll take the fact that we had one more run than them,” Gibson said.

The Tigers finished with four hits, one more than the Bulldogs could manage, and looked to be in position to win the game up 3-1 after the third inning. Logan Flaskamp got two of those hits to help give the Tigers a run and an RBI.

However, Southeast Lauderdale coach Shay Cooper said there is a reason why Culpepper is going to Southern Miss.

“We did have some good at-bats against a quality arm, so I can deal with that,” Cooper said. “We played decent defense, we just have got to pitch better. At times we looked pretty good, but it just wasn’t for seven innings.”

These teams will play again on Friday at Clarkdale, but fans planning to attend Friday’s rematch should pay close attention to weather reports as Cooper said the game may be moved to Thursday.