Michael Bacigalupi
By Hunt Palmer
Playing baseball at LSU means handling expectations.
The team room the Tigers convene in daily has “OMAHA” written boldly on the front wall. The billboard they play in front of shows the standard — eight titles. When losses mount, pressure grows, and losses mounted early for this LSU team.
On Wednesday, Jay Johnson took some of the blame for those losses due to the way he handled the early wins. The Tigers started 11-1 and immediately followed that up with a 12-21 stretch.
“I think it it’s the nature of what you have to do in coaching now,” Johnson said. “Just where society’s at, I’ll just use him as an example. I’m kind of reading a book on this right now, but like the Bobby Knight deal, everybody wants you to do that. It does not work. You know, I was very hard on the team when we were 11-1, and then we lost four out of five games. I was trying to do it to show them it’s not about winning, it’s about how we play. Did not work. Did not work. And so, you have to shift, and that is a better approach, period, with this team.”
LSU has played better of late. The approach has been rooted in fun and competition.
“If you look at where we were two weeks ago, we were talking about as a team, we have nothing to lose,” said sophomore catcher Cade Arrambide. “Let’s go out there. Let’s play hard, and let’s have fun. I definitely think it took some of the pressure off the guys. Some guys are in the lineup now that weren’t there to start. There’s no pressure with them going out there. The way we put is, no one expects them to go out there and be Jake Brown or Chris Stanfield. We just need them to go out there and just have fun and compete.”
The Tigers stormed out to a 3-0 lead in all three games at Mississippi State and held that lead into the middle innings of all three games. They were a pitch away from winning game one. Since, they’ve cruised to a pair of midweek victories and controlled the action against South Carolina for three games.
It’s a team that has been bitten harshly by the injury bug but seems to be playing its best at the same time.
“100%,” Arrambide said of the team playing its best. “Throughout the season, there’s always going to be highs and lows. I think we’re getting hot at the right time. That’s what we need right now. We need a lot of confidence going out there, especially since we’re banged up a little bit. We’re missing some of our guys. And so having confidence in each other and having confidence in the guys that maybe didn’t start at the beginning of the season, but they’re in there now, that’s what we need going forward.”
Those purple and gold expectations can beat down a struggling team. Slumps can be difficult to shake when the standard is set so high. Arrambide, a highly touted prep prospect himself, said that youth isn’t an excuse for poor play.
It’s also not causing players to misunderstand their role.
Four freshmen have emerged as everyday players since the injuries to Brown, Stanfield and John Pearson prior to and during the Mississippi State series. All four, Omar Serna, Jack Ruckert, William Patrick and Mason Braun are now contributing to winning for this team on a five-game winning streak.
“There’s definitely an expectation when you’re coming to this school and to this program, ” Arrambide said. “Just because they didn’t start at the beginning of the year doesn’t mean that they should just go out there and not expect anything. They’re all great players. They have tremendous talent…I’m not saying it’d be okay if they were going out there and striking out every single at bat. No. But, they’re just going out there competing, and they’re just letting their talent and skill take over, and it’s good enough.”
Though LSU has won five straight, the daunting task of finding four wins in six tries against two of the more talented teams in the SEC awaits. The Tigers travel to Athens on Thursday to begin a three-game set with SEC-leading Georgia. The Bulldogs are 28-7 at home and have a ballclub designed to bash homers out of Foley Field’s tiny dimensions.
Arrambide said the team and its newfound attitude is confident anywhere.
“We can go out there and beat anyone on any day,” he said. “If we go out there and play our brand of baseball, and we compete to our best ability, I think we can hang and beat anybody in the country. I’ve never given up on this team, and no one in the locker room has given up on this season. It’s just a matter of going out there and doing it.”
That confidence and freedom from a change in messaging appears to have worked. In all five seasons he’s coached LSU, Johnson’s Tigers have played their best late in the year.
His first team annihilated Vanderbilt in the season’s final weekend in Nashville and took control of the Hattiesburg Regional two weeks later with two sensational comeback wins. The 2023 group beat the best teams in the country in Omaha. The next team had to play 10-5 baseball in the second half of SEC play to make the NCAA Tournament, and they were three outs from hosting a Super Regional. Last year’s squad won its last eight games including sweeping through the College World Series for the first time since 2000.
Eventually Johnson gets the messaging right. This time?
“I think we’ve taken the bullets, been dragged through the mud, head stepped on, all of those things, and we’re still alive,” Johnson said. “And you know who’s the best soldier? The best soldier is the one that’s not afraid to be killed. There’s literally nothing to be afraid of. So, go in there guns blazing with a lot of confidence and play. And if it’s good enough, it’ll be good enough. If it’s not, it won’t. But there’s literally nothing to be afraid of at this point in time for this team.”
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