By Hunt Palmer
I’ll agree to disagree with William Schmidt.
Minutes after he worked into the eighth inning for the first time as a Tiger and shut Dartmouth out with nine strikeouts and no walks, he started his assessment of the outing with a critical eye.
“It wasn’t my sharpest outing of the year so far, but just when runners got in scoring position, I hunkered down and made the pitches when I had to,” said the sophomore right hander.
Wasn’t your sharpest outing? We’ll call it modesty instead of analysis, because it wasn’t only his sharpest outing of the year, it was far and away his best collegiate outing.
Jake Brown saw it from right field.
“I don’t think there’s a team in the country with better pitching on Sunday than we have,” Brown said. “Obviously, Schmitty going out there and giving a great outing. He said it wasn’t his sharpest. I feel like that the best I’ve ever seen him throw.”
Schmidt was right about making pitches when runners were in scoring position. He just didn’t run into that problem until the sixth inning. His first four were perfect, 12-up, 12-down.
A 12-hopper into right for a leadoff single put the first Big Green runner of the day aboard in the sixth, and Schmidt moved him to second with a poor pickoff throw to first. He calmly struck out the next two hitters and got a weak infield chopper to hang another zero.
In the seventh, a single and a wild pitch put a runner on second with two outs. Slider, strike three, zero.
Swing & A Miss @_williamSchmidt | SECN + pic.twitter.com/90rT34becc
— LSU Baseball (@LSUbaseball) March 1, 2026
The kid’s growing up.
“I would say next pitch mentality,” Schmidt said of his growth. “There were a lot of outings last year where I would be in the fourth inning, and a leadoff double would happen. I wouldn’t be able to make it out of that inning. Just learning next pitch mentality. It doesn’t matter what happened the previous at bat or the previous pitch. It’s all about winning this pitch.”
He nearly won them all on Sunday.
Not only did Schmidt avoid walks, an issue that absolutely plagued him a year ago, he avoided hitter’s counts. Only three times all afternoon did he pitch to a three-ball count. He retired all three hitters. Thirteen of the 27 hitters he faced had to hit with a two-strike count.
“Absolutely suffocated the zone,” said LSU head coach Jay Johnson. “That’s hard to hit when a guy’s landing that many pitches for strikes with that kind of stuff. It’s strikes pressure. It’s pitch pressure. And what I mean by that, none of them are easy to hit. That’s execution.”
Schmidt’s development is vital for this LSU team that entered the season with a proven SEC starting pitcher.
Casan Evans has gotten huge outs in league play. Cooper Moore proved himself in the Big 12, a power league. Mid 90s fastballs and high-level breaking balls are walking all over the LSU dugout, but a few candidates re going to have to do something they’ve never done to make this rotation a championship-level outfit.
None of those candidates possess the package of physical gifts Schmidt has from his 6-foot-4 frame to his mid-90s fastball to his devastating array of breaking balls. It was all working on Sunday.
After a solid freshman season that featured some ups and downs, Schimdt is stacking stellar showings early this season.
“Kind of saw the things that I needed to see last year to know where he was headed, and then I think the fall was really positive for him,” Johnson said. “Elite command for him today, again, nine strikeouts, no walks. And then the time from we got back from break until Opening Day was really critical. And I feel like the three outings of scrimmage games really provided me what we needed to do with him.”
It didn’t hurt to watch Kade Anderson and Anthony Eyanson help LSU to a title last year.
“Playing with first round picks and second and third round picks and seeing how they went about their business and how they got the job done out there, I know what it takes to win, and I know what it takes to be a good pitcher here,” Schmidt said.
LSU has now authored back-to-back Sunday shutouts by blanking UCF in Jacksonville and holding Dartmouth without a run back at home. Neither the Golden Knights nor the Big Green are going to challenge for an SEC championship this spring, but this is clearly a step in the right direction.
Sunday’s have been a sore spot for LSU the last two seasons. The Tigers were 2-8 in SEC game threes in 2024 and 5-5 a season ago. That’s a .350 winning percentage. Over those two seasons, LSU has played .625 baseball in games one and two thanks to Gage Jump, Luke Holman, Anderson and Eyanson.
If Schmidt sticks in the Sunday slot, it could be a difference maker. Johnson said as much after Sunday’s stellar showing.
“We’re going to be hard to beat when he throws the ball like that.”
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