LSU Baseball
By Hunt Palmer
The weekend’s result was loud. Friday’s quotes were louder.
LSU’s season sits on the brink, and the issues are everywhere. Jay Johnson lamented his roster construction on Friday with 14 SEC games to play. His team followed that up with two more punchless performances.
BRUTAL BATS
One week after LSU allowed the Ole Miss Rebels to hit .348 for the weekend, 92 points higher than their four-week SEC average, and score 26 runs over three games, 11 more than their previous high, LSU allowed a struggling and thin Texas A&M pitching staff to smother its bats for three days.
The Tiger offense went 22-for-101 over the weekend, a .218 average. It only got worse when scoring became a possibility. LSU was 7-for-40 (.175) with runners on base and 1-for-17 (.059) with runners in scoring position. Missouri has won two of its last 22 weekends in SEC play. Those Tigers scored 18 runs on Aggie pitching three weeks ago. Vanderbilt scored 14 in one game. Tennessee Tech scored 14. Georgia hit 10 homers. LSU mustered eight runs.
The season has become a big game of whack-a-mole. The pitching and defense held up for portions of the weekend. The offense vanished.
It’s easy to tip a cap to an Aggie offense that boasts two top 10 prospects in Caden Sorrell and Chris Hacopian. Gavin Grahovac was the SEC Freshman of the Year two seasons ago and will play in the big leagues. The group led the SEC in hitting, runs, doubles and slugging entering the weekend. Tipping that cap to the Aggie pitching staff is a tougher swallow. It’s a staff low on talent and depth, and LSU looked feckless for 27 innings.
COACH’S QUOTES
Johnson made waves on Friday with his quotes.
“I made some mistakes in constructing the team and trying to replace two guys that were irreplaceable where we should have looked at replacing them through guys that were already in the program and then replaced the guys that were athletic and could play defense and be more complete players,” he said. “Ok, we won’t make that mistake again. The power moving forward will be from players that start their career here and develop into it like Jake (Brown) has.”
What he said checks out. LSU brought in players with a power profile that have not hit for power in the SEC. I’m just not sure Friday was the time to say that out loud. With 14 SEC games to go, Johnson gave an honest answer that sounded like a season-ender.
LSU’s head coach is a relentless competitor that doesn’t distract himself at home with kids or golf or a glass of wine. His team’s performance means almost everything to him, and seven weeks of bad baseball has worn on him like it has the fanbase.
Friday’s comments were a result of that.
I’ve heard from many people who loved the honestly. I just didn’t think it was a great message to the team with half the SEC slate to play. He labeled players on the roster as incomplete and more or less suggested the issues are not fixable.
That may be true, but the group still has a lot of baseball in front of it.
BETTER BULLPEN
The three starters struggled, but LSU’s bullpen held up over the weekend.
Tiger relievers combined to fire 14 innings and allow just five earned runs on 11 hits. They walked eight and struck out 25. Deven Sheerin‘s spectacular 4.1 innings on Sunday were the highlight. He fired a season-high 61 pitches and just dominated A&M’s offense with a 97 mph running fastball and good command of his slider.
Marcos Paz fanned three in his two shutout innings on Saturday. He’s been excellent in SEC play. That was his fourth league outing, and he’s totaled five innings of work allowing two hits and one run with eight strikeouts and no walks.
STARTER STRUGGLES
LSU’s starters were beaten over the weekend. Their performances varied in effectiveness, but the end result was not nearly good enough. Casan Evans, William Schmidt and Zac Cowan allowed 17 earned runs on 17 hits in 13 innings. That’s an 11.70 ERA with five home runs allowed.
Evans had only allowed one run through four. He was keeping LSU in it. He surrendered a second leadoff walk in the fifth, and it came around to score on a damn good piece of two-strike hitting by Hacopian. Evans located a good changeup on the outer edge, and Hacopian just guided it up the middle. Then Jake Duer plated two more with a two-strike single up the middle.
That probably should have ended Evans’s night at 4-1. LSU scored in the bottom half to make it 4-2. Johnson sent Evans back out in the fifth, and he hung a breaking ball to Jorian Wilson who launched it into the trees beyond the wall in left to essentially end the game.
Schmidt left way too many pitches in the heart of the plate. Bear Harrison hit one out. So did Grahovac. Hacopian doubled. Schmidt tried to hold the rope while his offense did nothing against Aiden Sims. He ran out of gas in the sixth and walked three straight.
Cowan had no command at all.
Johnson was constantly managing from behind all weekend, and he couldn’t go to his best bullpen arms while trailing. That meant trying to squeeze a little bit more out of Evans and Schmidt which cost them some earned runs when they were out of gas late.
LSU is 2-4 in Evans and Schmidt starts individually. That’s 4-8 total. Evans’s SEC ERA is 5.94. Schmidt’s is 5.46. LSU has far greater issues than those two right arms, but they haven’t been SEC aces.
Cooper Moore‘s absence continues to hurt. He did not appear over the weekend and never warmed up in the bullpen. Johnson has suggested a return could be imminent, but it didn’t materialize against A&M.
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