Some times you gotta pop out and show em…
If there’s any reason to doubt this LSU baseball team, I haven’t seen it yet.
Let’s start with a quick review:
- LSU zips through a 16-2 start to the season before stepping into SEC play.
- They then drop five consecutive series to open the conference, leading to a dismal 3-12 conference record.
- LSU picks up the next two series against the two teams who missed Hoover to get off the schneid.
- They then upset the then #1 team in the country, but then drop a heartbreaking series to Alabama with two one-run games.
- With the season on the brink, they emphatically sweep Ole Miss and win four in a row in Hoover, reaching the Championship Game after starting the week on Tuesday, and come within a run again of winning the whole thing.
- Oh, by the way, every team LSU lost a series against comfortably made the NCAA Tournament.
When everyone wrote them off, they came together and not only played their best ball, but became one of the hottest teams in the country. It’s the exact same thing we saw late in the year last year when the LSU pitching staff beyond Paul Skenes went from a complete liability to the lone reason we added a seventh year to The Intimidator.
And from a more pragmatic standpoint, it’s getting harder to find a glaring weakness in the LSU lineup. Luke Holman and Tommy White have been capital D Dudes for LSU all year long, and Steven Milam’s had a truly excellent freshman campaign.
But the leaps Gage Jump, Michael Braswell, Jared Jones, Alex Milazzo, and Jake Brown have taken over the past few weeks have really transformed the Tigers from an underperforming team to the hottest team in the nation, and a scary opponent for anybody from this point forward.
Jump in particular has been a huge reason for the Tigers’ success. Over his past five starts, he’s allowed just eight runs in 31 innings, and more impressively just four (4) walks against 32 punchouts. Paired with Holman, who has allowed just seven earned runs and two (2) extra base hits in a similar timeframe and the emerging Nate Ackenhausen, suddenly the Tigers have a rotation as good – if not outright better – than any other team in the country.
At the plate, Braswell has emerged, hitting .381 (8/21) in the SEC Tournament, eclipsed only Monster Milam’s .476 average during the tournament. And again, that was against some of the best teams in the country.
Now, I’m not calling my shot by any means. What lies ahead isn’t easy by any means. While I do think LSU’s pitching staff is performing better than North Carolina’s down the stretch, the Tar Heels mirror LSU in a lot of ways, and what I say for the Tigers’ depth applies to them as well. That’s how the game works.
But what I love the most about the NCAA baseball tournament is that not only do you have to earn your championship against the best teams in the country, you have to do with your whole team contributing, not just a dozen or so players.
And LSU is a team that found its groove and is playing complete baseball at high level at the right time from a lot of guys. It’s not going to be easy, but that’s a challenge that this – and last year’s – team seemed to relish. The mark of a champion is finding a way to elevate your game when you need to, and this team seems to have that trait.
If there’s any reason to doubt this LSU baseball team, I haven’t seen it yet.