CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The final score said it all, but St. John’s coach Ed Blankmeyer said it anyway: “It was a hitter’s day, and a pitcher’s nightmare,” he said.

Blankmeyer’s team scored eight runs in the bottom of the first inning and kept scoring because it kept needing to as the Red Storm beat Ole Miss 20-16 Sunday in a wild Charlottesville Regional elimination game. It featured 40 hits, 13 of them for extra bases, and earned the Red Storm (42-19) a chance to play host Virginia, which has been swinging hot bats, too.

But even the Cavaliers haven’t done what the Red Storm did to the Rebels.

“We couldn’t stop them,” Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said. “Throughout the game, it just seemed like every time we got close, they would answer.”

St. John’s sent 14 men to the plate in the first, when every batter in the lineup reached at least once, and added a pair of five-run innings as it finished with 22 hits.

“I wasn’t sure it was going to keep going like that,” St. John’s second baseman Matt Wessinger said. “Maybe one or two runs and inning, but not five, and then five again.”

Ole Miss lost despite 18 hits and 16 runs, and scored 10 runs in the last three frames. Matt Snyder went 5 for 6 and homered twice, including a grand slam with two out in the ninth, and six other players — five of them for St. John’s — finished with at least three hits.

Bruce Kern (7-5) worked six innings, allowing 13 hits and seven runs, for the victory, and said he persevered by trying to keep the ball low and out of the wind blowing out.

“Anything up in the air had a chance to go,” he said.

Starter David Goforth (1-6) allowed seven runs in 2⁄3 of an inning for Ole Miss (39-24), which was hoping to avenge a home loss to Virginia in the super regional last year.

Goforth came into the game with an 8.41 earned run average, and was worse than that. He faced just nine batters, allowing four hits and three walks, to get the Red Storm going.

“When a team’s swinging the bats like that, you can’t afford to give them free base runners,” he said of the walks. “I couldn’t throw the ball where I wanted.”

Rebels pitchers walked only one batter the rest of the day, but that might have been because St. John’s was busy slapping it all over the park and rounding the bases.

Wessinger had four hits and drove in five runs for St. John’s, and leadoff man Jimmy Brennan had four hits and drove in four runs. Joe Panik had three hits, including the Red Storm’s only home run, and drove in three, giving the top three hitters in the lineup a combined line of 11-for-16 with 12 runs batted in and six extra-base hits.

Ole Miss answered the big first inning with three runs in the second and single runs in the third, fourth and fifth, but the Red Storm scored once each in the fourth and fifth and then broke the game open for good with five more runs in the sixth. Brennan had his second two-run hit in the rally, and Panik followed two batters later with his 10th home run.

When the Rebels made it interesting with four runs in the top of the eighth to get within 15-11, the Red Storm tacked on five insurance runs in the bottom half.

It hardly mattered. The Rebels answered with five of their own in the top of the ninth, four scoring on Snyder’s slam, before Stephen Rivera got Zach Miller to ground out to end it.

Kern, who started the day with a 5.91 ERA, gave the Red Storm the long outing they needed after being staked to the huge lead, especially with the potential for playing two more games in the regional. They needed to beat Virginia on Sunday night to earn another game today. Kern was lifted with a 15-6 lead after allowing two hits to start the seventh, and Ryan Cole allowed one of them to score, and then four more runs in the eighth.

Closer Daniel Burawa came on to start the ninth, but loaded the bases with one out, walked in a run and was replaced by Rivera.