LSU Athletics
By Hunt Palmer
LSU’s slumping bats stole the storylines for a couple of weeks.
Run production was no problem in Nashville over the weekend. It was the run prevention that became an issue. LSU pitching allowed 33 runs on 29 hits to Vanderbilt, and the staff’s ERA (5.24) is the worst in the SEC after 21 games.
That’s alarming.
So is the fact that LSU has allowed the most home runs (18) in the conference and only Vanderbilt and Missouri have walked more hitters. On the plus side, LSU does lead the league in strikeouts as it has the last two seasons.
The common thread in those two seasons is pitching coach Nate Yeskie. He came to Baton Rouge from College Station prior to the 2024 season and has handled LSU’s pitching since.
His two-year track record is very strong.
In his first season, Yeskie helped Gage Jump return from injury and blossom into an SEC ace. LSU won six of Jump’s last seven starts, and he struck out 61 against 17 walks facing league hitters. The A’s selected him in the second round.
Meanwhile, Luke Holman dropped his ERA from 3.67 at Alabama in 2023 to 2.75 at LSU under Yeskie. The walk rate dipped, and he struck out 40 more hitters in just 10.2 more innings.
Griffin Herring became a star, and after three years of failing to fully harness his electric arsenal, Christian Little threw his best baseball as a college pitcher late in the season.
In Little’s last 11 appearances, he threw 17.2 innings and only allowed eight earned runs. Eight of the 11 outings were scoreless. He struck out 24 and walked eight. He was injured in Hoover and couldn’t help in the Chapel Hill Regional, but April and May were his best two months. Little was something of a mess for three years prior.
Fast forward to 2025, and a little-used freshman with a 27.00 ERA in SEC play emerged as the best pitcher in the country. Kade Anderson’s entire college career was under Yeskie’s direction. Playing Robin to Anderson’s Batman, Anthony Eyanson struck out 152 batters on the season, a 67-whiff improvement over his sophomore year at UC San Diego facing West Coast Conference hitters.
That may be the best duo in program history, and both made huge improvements over the course of the season in 2025.
Eyanson was touched up for five runs on seven hits by Nebraska on March 1. Missouri, which was swept nine of 10 SEC weekends last year, collected seven hits and four earned runs before Eyanson could finish the fourth inning. A week later, Texas struck for four earned on four hits in 4.1 innings. Auburn knocked him around in an LSU loss.
Anderson was plagued by the home run ball early. He allowed 12 in his first 10 starts. Mississippi State hit three, and Alabama bashed four. He only allowed four in his final eight starts despite the weather warming up and the competition level improving.
How about Chase Shores? He was dominant most of May and June after pitching so poorly in March and April that he lost his rotation spot.
Yeskie deserves a ton of credit for those improvements, and all of them took place beyond this point in the calendar.
It’s a relative certainty that some of LSU’s pitchers will throw the ball much better in May than they are now. The question becomes, who? If it’s one of the freshmen or a situational bullpen piece, that helps, but it doesn’t move the needle too much.
It needs to be Casan Evans, Cooper Moore, William Schmidt and a closer. That’s how seasons turn. See Jump, Holman and Herring of 2024 and Anderson, Eyanson and Shores in 2025.
Yeskie wasn’t around for Ty Floyd’s late renaissance in 2023, but Jamie Tutko was on the pitching development side. Tutko also played a key role in Eyanson’s pitch usage last season. He’s still in the LSU dugout and video room.
Expecting record setting June efforts like Floyd’s and Anderson’s is ambitious. That’s not going to happen every year. I’d also suggest that completely discounting improvement under this coaching staff would be ignoring very consistent work the last three seasons.
It’s happened every year.
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