Ole Miss' Hunter Elliott growing into his role within the weekend rotation

The starting rotation for Ole Miss baseball appears to be stabilizing and turning things around at the best possible time. Hunter Elliott is becoming a big reason why.

With Friday nights seemingly in good hands with Dylan DeLucia, Elliott has taken the reigns on Saturdays and lately provided strong results.

The most recent evidence to support this is Elliott’s outing against Missouri this past weekend. He worked seven innings, a new career best, and allowed only one run off four hits while walking one and setting another career best with nine strikeouts.

Saturday’s performance was encouraging to see after DeLucia did not have his best stuff on Friday but the Rebel offense suddenly awoken against the Tigers pitching.

It earned Elliott his first SEC weekly honor, Co-Freshman of the Week.

Last weekend was also the second time Elliott worked into the sixth inning of an outing of his freshman season.

“That’s always what I wanted to do,” Elliott said of being able to go deep into games. “I wanted to be a starter. Wanted to give the team a ton of innings, a lot of zeros and been fortunate to do that the last couple weeks.”

Over the last couple weeks Elliott has put together back-to-back career outings with each on building off the other.

That includes a strong effort at Arkansas, experiencing the Baum-Walker Stadium environment for the first time. Elliott worked six innings, allowing three runs off four hits and struck out eight Razorback batters.

The atmosphere did not appear too big for the Tupelo native.

“(Elliott’s) been terrific and not just in that outing, I mean he’s been terrific all year,” said head coach Mike Bianco ahead of the Missouri series. “You look at his numbers they’re about as good as anybody’s. His ERA is low threes and obviously doesn’t have the amount of starts as some other guys. … He’s been really good and he’s going to be a superstar. He just needs to keep going out there and we need to score some runs for him and he needs to keep doing what he’s doing.”

Elliott is part of a positive shift in a Rebels weekend rotation that has drastically improved its numbers over the last several weeks.

In the Rebels first 12 SEC games, their starting pitchers had a 6.89 ERA. In the past 12 SEC games, the starting pitching ERA is 3.90.

Over his last six outings, Elliott has allowed eight earned runs over 25.1 innings, five of those starts were in conference play.

For an offense that has been feast or famine with home runs or no scoring at all over the middle to back half of the season until this past weekend, getting a pitching staff to cut their combined ERA by more than half eases the pressure at the plate.

For the hitters, that was starting to become evident.

“That always takes a breather off you,” said Kevin Graham. “When you know you only need to go score three or four it takes a lot of pressure off and lets you go score eight or nine. Our starting pitching has been huge for us. It hasn’t always been pretty for those guys but they’ve all fought for us and gave us a chance to win.”

The Rebels (27-19, 10-14 SEC) are still trying to stay above water when it comes to their Hoover and postseason chances. They travel to No. 14 Southern Mississippi (32-16) on Wednesday before heading to Baton Rouge to take on No. 17 LSU (32-15, 14-10) for their final road series of the regular season.