Around the Horn: Frigid bats lowlight brutal week

By Hunt Palmer

There are problems.

LSU’s offense has ground to a halt over the last two weeks, and the five-inning outburst on Friday is the outlier. It’s been talked about. It’s been written about. Questions have been asked in press conferences. The answers haven’t really shown up on the field.

LSU lost four games in five tries last week.

The statistics are bleak. LSU hit .193 (26/135) in the losses. That number drops in every meaningful statistic. Removing Friday, the Tigers mustered seven extra-base hits in 135 at bats for the week. They were 13-for-73 (.178) with runners on and 6-for-40 (.150) with runners in scoring position.

As I’ve often written, my concerns with situational hitting are minimal assuming the overall numbers are good. Hitting with runners in scoring position isn’t a skill. Hitting is. If you can hit with no one on, you can hit with a runner at third. If you can’t hit with no one on, you can’t when scoring opportunities arise. Approach is key, and you can be asked to shorten up to get the ball in play with less than two out. But hitting is hitting. It’s about creating opportunities often enough to allow the statistics to break in your favor.

LSU isn’t creating enough opportunities.

A .193 overall batting average is the cause of the .178 average with runners and on and the .150 number with runners in scoring position. More directly, LSU isn’t struggling with runners on base, it’s just struggling.

Will it continue?

To this extent, no. LSU isn’t going to hit sub-.200 for long. But if I’m going to grade the starting pitching on a championship curve, and I have, I have to do that with the offense, too. This is not nearly good enough.

Jake Brown and Derek Curiel are hitting. Over the eight-game lull, they’ve both got 11 hits and have combined to go 22-for-59 (.373) with eight extra base hits.

Everyone else has fallen flat. The rest of the lineup is 40-for-226 over eight games. That’s a .176 average. Brown and Curiel have combined for eight of the 22 extra base hits. That leaves 14 for the other seven starters, whoever they may be, in eight games. That’s anemic.

I’ll just lay the eight-game stats out.

Cade Arrambide: 3-for-23 (.130), 1 XBH

Zach Yorke: 5-for-27 (.185), 2 XBH

Steven Milam: 4-for-27 (.148), 2 XBH

Trent Caraway: 4-for-22 (.181), 1 XBH

Seth Dardar: 3-for-23 (.130), 1 XBH

Braydon Simpson: 3-for-13 (.231), 0 XBH

You can’t win like that.

LSU is shuffling left field while Chris Stanfield recovers from what simply must have been a hand fracture. I’m completely fine with coaches withholding injury information. That creates doubt and speculation, though. You don’t miss a month with a bruised hand. When Stanfield comes back and gets comfortable, he’ll hit .300ish with a bunch of singles and doubles.

The rest of the group has to step forward.

Arrambide, Yorke, Caraway, Dardar and Simpson don’t have SEC track records. They’re likely to fill out more than half of LSU’s lineup on Friday when conference play cranks up.

I’ve stewed on this offense for two weeks and settled on this. They’ve played four weeks. Two have been great, and two have been awful. Neither is probably indicative of how the final 10 will go.

Sacramento State threw strikes, and LSU didn’t hit them hard. This team probably isn’t the offensive juggernaut it showed in Jacksonville and isn’t the disaster it’s been since returning. Every Jay Johnson team has found its stride in April and May no matter how things have started.

I still believe this team will hit, but there’s understandable doubt creeping in at the moment. Friday felt like an ice breaker. The next two days put things back in the deep freeze.

PITCHING PROGRESS

Buried in the offense’s ineptitude was Casan Evans‘s best effort of the year. He was perfect through five with nine strikeouts and absolutely electric in the process. He fastball sat at 95, and it touched 99. More importantly, he commanded it. He only went to two three-ball counts and struck out both hitters.

Evans did not command his pitches well enough in the first three weeks. Too many walks and hitter’s counts. He flipped that on Friday and showed why he can be an ace in the SEC.

William Schmidt‘s line wasn’t great (5.2 IP, 4 H, 4 R, 3 ER, 0 BB, 8 K), but he was much better than that. After he exited, the bullpen allowed a hit by pitch, a walk and a single to plate three runs. He didn’t walk anyone and only went to three three-ball counts. His slider was sharp, and the fastball really popped.

Cooper Moore wasn’t sharp but kept LSU in the game on Saturday while the offense scuffled.

To this point, the starting pitching is a positive. That’s the most important aspect of any team. This weekend, they struck out 21 and walked three with just 11 hits allowed in 16 innings.

My biggest question mark entering the year was the starting staff, and they’ve been very good early on. That’s truly a very strong indicator of where things will settle with this team although that’s hard to focus on with the slumping sticks.

LSU will take Monday off and get back to action Tuesday was a Creighton team that is 5-7 to this point. The Blue Jays took 2-of-3 from Gonzaga over the weekend at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha.

That place feels like a long way away at this point.