By all accounts, LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson is the baseball version of Nick Saban. With two College World Series championships in the past three years, he has the Tigers positioned as the sport’s gold standard.
Despite LSU’s stumbles and wobbles over the past month, does anyone really doubt Johnson’s 2026 club will make at least a deep postseason run? Have Tiger fans cancelled their hotel rooms in Omaha? Has Rocco’s lowered its Jell-O order?
Johnson has displayed a Midas touch that has college baseball’s modern-era goat, Skip Bertman, beaming with pride as he watches the program he built doing the things he made possible.
Except Sunday’s cloud-parting bat flip by home run hero Seth Dardar.
The moment was electric. The bat flip itself, predictable. From the big leagues to biddy league, bat flips have become as frequent as President Trump’s posts on Truth Social.
There was, as there has been since before Ty Cobb pulled up stirrups and sharpened his spikes, plenty of bench banter between the clubs. Sunday’s game decided the series. Kentucky wanted a statement win. LSU needed, for at least its own self-respect, to defend Skip Bertman Field, Alex Box Stadium.
Dardar’s tape-measure, three-run sixth-inning bomb put LSU ahead to stay. He justifiably bounded around the bases, feeding off the crowd energy and the joy of his teammates. Goosebump stuff.
But that bat flip. To call it exuberant doesn’t do it justice. I’ll say excessive, at least. Of all the bats ever flipped, this may have been the most majestic/mortifying, depending on your perspective.
“Put it in the Bat Flip Hall of Fame,” said my pal Matt Moscona, the tone-setting Baton Rouge sports talk show host. “And if there isn’t a Bat Flip Hall of Fame, create one for this.”
Nobody in the LSU math faculty or department of science has calculated just how high the bat went. I expect more from the school that had a seismograph reading within hours after Eddie Fuller’s game-winning touchdown in the 1988 “Earthquake Game” win over Auburn at Tiger Stadium.
The stick could be seen tumbling, downward, to the level of the top of the outfield bleachers, as ESPN’s home plate camera panned to track the homer sailing toward the huge Intimidator sign listing the program’s eight CWS crowns, above and behind the right field stands.
Like most other NCAA regulations, the recent (2023) rule on bat flips has been unevenly, and recently, rarely enforced. It’s designed to avoid bench-clearing incidents. But the same rule, 5-17 Unsportsmanlike Conduct, also claims a standard preventing “negative comments directed at an opponent, umpire or spectator” and we all know that’s as valid as a Congressional investigation.
There is, however, common sense. Dardar was beyond excited. It was a spectacular moment, at an intense time. Few players could resist a bat flip. Fewer still could flip their sticks to threaten birds flying overhead. He tossed it FarFar.
The SEC umpiring crew briefly conferred and inexplicably didn’t eject him, presumably because the bat didn’t land near a Kentucky player. The Wildcats dugout was on the third base side. Nobody’s safety was threatened, partly because of Dardar’s accidental accuracy. Kentucky raged, and the Wildcats’ pitching coach apparently challenged Johnson to a scrap in a briefly heated dugout-to-dugout exchange, as the crowd cheered on.
If a player pulled a comparable act in a football or basketball game, at the very least there would be flags or technical fouls. In baseball, there at least should have been warnings issued.
Postgame, an understandably elated Tiger coach said, smiling, “I told him to flip it a little lower next time.” Johnson didn’t want to be the buzz kill.
Backstage, based on who he’s been and what he’s stood for, have to believe Johnson probably found a moment Monday to share with his players that Dardar’s heave – which appeared to be delivered with the same thrust used by an Olympic hammer thrower – was more than a bit much.
Hope so. I’ll give Dardar his due, but not to the height that bat flew.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com