Evans found his rhythm in sensational second SEC start

By Hunt Palmer

Baseball presents more opportunity for slumping players. It’s part of the charm of the sport.

The frequency of games means an 0-for-4 hitter can usually get in the box the next day to atone for it. For starting pitchers in the college game, the wait is a week. Following his rough outing at Vanderbilt, Casan Evans had a bad taste in his mouth for the last five days.

“Last week, personally, I was embarrassed by my performance, just the way I played,” Evans said. “Sometimes it’s just baseball. It’s what happens. You’ve got to forget about it and come back and play the game how it’s supposed to be played.”

Evans used the week to improve and delivered a sensational outing on Thursday night. He worked into the eighth inning and allowed just one unearned run with 15 strikeouts and a single walk. The 15 strikeouts were the most by an LSU pitcher in an SEC game since Paul Skenes at Auburn in 2023.

He struck out three Sooners in the first inning and didn’t face a three-ball count until the sixth. His second and final three-ball count came on his last hitter with two out in the eighth. A 96 mph fastball just missed the zone for a walk to end his wildly successful evening after 110 pitches.

Asked where the effort ranked in his time at Alex Box Stadium, head coach Jay Johnson reflected.

“It’s right up there,” Johnson said. “No surprise to me. He’s one of the best pitchers in the country and growing. And we haven’t lost very much when he takes the mound. It’s too bad the walk off homer last week because we haven’t lost very much when he takes the mound. He’s only going to continue to get better.”

That progression is vital to LSU’s season moving forward. That was obvious to Johnson who is clearly leaning on his coaches a little bit more during LSU’s three-week swoon.

“I’m just asking everybody around here to step up their game,” Johnson said. “It’s great when you’re putting up national championships, and everybody thinks you’re the greatest. The players actually need us the most right now. I have the best pitching coach or one of the most successful pitching coaches of the modern era. I have a great analytics guy. But we need to get better.”

If Evans’s start is any indication, improvement is coming.

The sophomore starter is a position player by nature. He was a star high school shortstop and an exceptional athlete. His delivery is tight and quick. A week ago in Nashville, Evans was out of rhythm. He walked five and hit another in three innings as Vanderbilt racked up six runs, the most a team has scored on Evans in his college career.

This week the rhythm was there from the start.

“Last week it was just slow on the mound, slow tempo,” Evans said. “This week we were going to speed it up like I had been doing before. I really think that was the reason last week did not go the way I wanted. Today we were speeding up the tempo. I wanted the ball back right after I struck somebody out. Just got myself in the right headspace and went after the next batter.”

The effort also took Johnson back, this time out of Alex Box Stadium and to Omaha for one of the best pitching duels in college baseball history.

“It just felt like it was 0-2 to everybody,” Johnson said. “He did that a different way, and I don’t know how you get on a guy like that when they’re landing four pitches for strikes and coming at you. It reminded me of (Wake Forest’s) Rhett Lowder a lot. We faced him in Omaha. He was beating them in the strike zone, and there wasn’t much they could do with it.”