LSU’s No. 8 won’t throw a single pitch this season
Gavin Guidry’s 2025 season is officially before it ever began.
Guidry has not pitched at all this season and following LSU’s 10-3 win over McNeese State Tuesday night, LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson confirmed that Guidry won’t take the mound at all this year.
“Unfortunately, he’s going to have a procedure on Friday, a back procedure that is going to knock him out for the rest of the season,” Johnson said.
“I am optimistic the recovery from the surgery is only three-to-four months, so we expect him to be back. We expect him to pitch for us and just want to support Gavin in the best way possible,” Johnson said. “It’s kind of been like a roller coaster of things. The last time he pitched was February 7, which was one week before the season. He actually threw a bullpen on the Monday after the first series of the year against Purdue-Fort Wayne. There was no point in using him because those were blowout scores.”
Johnson said that Guidry was set to start the February 19 game against Nicholls but that game was postponed due to rain, and Guidry’s back started to act up again. He threw a bullpen at Texas and things took a turn for the worse.
“He threw a bullpen at Texas and then the next week we felt like we were moving closer to “go.” It wasn’t feeling good, tried one more round of treatments, re-imaged it and basically the medicine was masking pain for a little while but not fixing the issue,” Johnson said. “After that, we’ve tried a couple more things and it got to ‘hey, we’ve got to get this procedure done so he can get this behind him’ and we expect him to make a full recovery.”
It’s certainly a blow for LSU’s College World Series hopes as we enter the second half of SEC play. The Tiger bullpen outside of Zac Cowan and Casan Evans is LSU’s weakest link, and Guidry headed into the season as the most experienced and trusted arm in the pen. The hope all season long was that Guidry would be able to return to the pen and give LSU one more reliable arm.
Now, Johnson and Nate Yeskie are going to have to hope someone outside of the Cowan-Evans tandem can step up and be an out-getter.
LSU’s set to take on Alabama this weekend at Alex Box Stadium. LSU’s coming off being swept at Auburn and really need a series win to get back on track. First pitch is scheduled for Thursday at 7:00 P.M.