By RON HIGGINS, Journal Sports
BATON ROUGE — Lose the No. 1 and 2 players taken in the 2023 MLB Draft, 7 of 9 position starters, your pitching staff ace and the best reliever off a national championship team.
Even with a highly-rated incoming recruiting class and key transfer portal pickups, there should be some drop-off expected.
But completely from the face of college baseball?
Halfway through the 30-game Southeastern Conference schedule vs. 10 opponents, defending national champ LSU’s chances of not making the NCAA tournament field for the first time since 2011 is now a real possibility.
Not even the Tigers’ best pitching to date in a league series this year could overcome LSU’s chilly bats killing almost every possible scoring chance in getting swept at Tennessee this past weekend.
LSU, now 22-15 overall and 3-12 in the SEC’s West Division, lost its fifth straight league series to open the season. Despite holding Tennessee to 17 runs and 21 hits, the least in both categories in a league series vs. the Tigers this season, LSU also had its worst SEC series offensive output (8 runs, 17 hits).
“We got hits but we didn’t get significant hits off Tennessee,” said LSU third-year head coach Jay Johnson, whose team hosts UNO tonight at 6:30. “It’s frustrating. It’s almost like football. You get in the red zone you have to score. And probably one of the reasons I’ve made it to the point where I’m the coach at LSU is because we’ve had good offensive teams that play situational baseball really, really well. We have not done that with this team.”
Again, LSU’s lack of clutch hitting doused any spark that could have ignited rallies vs. the Vols. For the series, the Tigers hit .222 (6 for 27) in 2-out situations, .191 (9 for 47) with runners on base and .174 (4 for 23) with runners in scoring position.
The problem of the Tigers rarely getting hits when needed started with the opening SEC series loss to Mississippi State. It progressed through subsequent series losses to Florida, Arkansas, Vanderbilt and finally Tennessee. In SEC play, LSU is batting a chilly .229 (35 for 153) with two outs, a frigid .217 (50 for 230) with runners on base and a frosty .194 (24 for 124).
That’s 50, 64 and 86 percentage points respectively under last year’s final stats in SEC games by an offense powered by Golden Spikes Award-winning outfielder and No. 2 overall MLB draft choice Dylan Crews.
That offense and the fact that No. 1 overall MLB draft choice Paul Skenes was 8-2 as the starting pitcher in the opening game of every SEC series gave LSU the confidence to win 7 of those 10 series.
The Tigers have had none of that with the second half of its league schedule starting Friday at Missouri.
“If we get off the field with two outs and two strikes that limit them (opponents) from getting those hits with runners in scoring position,” Johnson said on his Monday radio show, “and if we can just get somebody to hit a line drive in the gap with two guys on base. . .that’s what winning teams do. That’s why we’re not winning right now.”
LSU is 11th in the 14-team SEC in batting average (.250) in league games and 11th in earned run average (7.45).
Johnson has fiddled with the batting order, infused some freshman talent at times, switched the order of his pitching rotation and tried three different starting hurlers in LSU’s five game 3 losses.
“We have good players in our program that are not playing good right now,” Johnson said “We have to own that. And for me, it’s about what can you control. We can control our attitude or concentration or effort in the game.”
While LSU supposedly has faced the toughest part of its SEC schedule – four of the first five league foes were ranked nationally in the top six – serious roadblocks remain.
The Tigers’ bare minimum second-half SEC performance to possibly nudge into the NCAA Tournament should be 10-5, and likely having to win at least one game in the SEC tourney.
Even then, nothing is assured.
After visiting Missouri (16-21, 5-10 SEC East) this weekend, LSU is home for the next two weekends. The Tigers have home series vs. Auburn (18-16, 2-12 SEC West) and Texas A&M (32-4, 11-4 SEC West), which climbed to No. 1 nationally on Monday after sweeping Vanderbilt this past weekend.
Then, they travel to Alabama (24-12, 6-9 SEC West), a team that won a home series this past weekend over then-No. 1 Arkansas. LSU finishes the regular season at home against struggling Ole Miss (20-16, 5-10 SEC).
“This whole season, you’re going to get everybody’s best shot,” Johnson said of being the defending national champion. “I thought maybe we would be a little better prepared for that because last season we had high expectations since we were ranked number one.
“It’s definitely different coming off the national championship. The way I explained it (to his team) is we have to play 30 to 50 percent better, because everybody’s going to play higher than that when they’re playing against us.
“We’ve seen some of that. But the bottom line is we want to be better and we don’t like where we’re at.”
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com