By David Steinle
Special to LSUsports.net
To be sure, very few, if any, people who even remotely follow college baseball could have predicted what happened to the LSU Fighting Tigers last weekend at Alex Box Stadium when the Kansas Jayhawks came to town and swept a three-game series from LSU, which was ranked as high as sixth at the time.
First, three-game sweeps are rare, especially in this era of parity in college baseball. Funny things can and do happen in this era of 11.7 scholarships for everybody.
Second, as hard as sweeps are to achieve, they’re even harder to achieve on the road in a foreign environment. Usually, most college baseball teams have one pitcher good enough to beat any given opponent in a three-game series, and even without a good team, usually the home field advantage is worth one win, sometimes two.
And for a team like Kansas to come to The Box and sweep, that’s very rare. The Jayhawks’ last visit to Baton Rouge came way back in 1990, and LSU won all three games in that series, and a lot has changed since that March weekend 13 years ago.
Between Kansas’ visits to the LSU campus, the Tigers have won five national championships, six SEC championships, visited Omaha eight times, and have hosted 13 consecutive regionals. The Jayhawks made the CWS in 1993 and another regional trip in 1994, but in the past eight seasons, have suffered through seven straight losing seasons.
Was it a shock for the Jayhawks to come in and sweep LSU? Of course it is. But is it a fatal prognosis for the Tigers? Hardly.
As is the case in football, basketball and every other sport, championships are never won in the second week of the season. Remember, this isn’t the first time LSU has been swept by a supposedly inferior team. Remember the Arkansas series in 2001? LSU came in ranked first in the nation, the Razorbacks had lost two-thirds of their games in the SEC, and the Tigers still left Fayetteville with three losses.
Of course, the sweep by Arkansas came in the first weekend of May, and the effects proved to be devastating — an end to SEC championship dreams, a road trip to Tulane for the super regional, and no Omaha for Skip Bertman in his final season.
But the calendar on Sunday said it was Feb. 16. Omaha is still four months away, and there’s a lot of baseball remaining. Not to say that these series in February don’t mean as much as the 30-game gauntlet of the Southeastern Conference, because the Tigers will get a good test of just where they are in the next two weekends.
When the LSU baseball schedule was released in October, most fans pointed to a pair of back-to-back weekend series as being the Tigers’ first true tests of the 2003 seasons, and that’s still true. This weekend’s series at home against Houston and next weekend’s journey to Long Beach State will still tell more about LSU.
For the moment, let’s lay Long Beach on the table for a week and focus on the Cougars, who have won Conference USA three of the last four years under Rayner Noble.
Houston comes in at 2-5, but a check of the Cougars’ slate shows losses to Big 12 powers Texas A&M and Baylor, a pair of solid west coast programs in Washington and UC-Santa Barbara (yes, Tiger fans, they play more than women’s basketball), plus a 3-0 setback this past Tuesday to Rice. And certainly the Cougars found out just what LSU was feeling like last June after an encounter with the Western Athletic Conference’s baseball empire, as Houston lost, 3-0, the same score by which Rice ended LSU’s 2002 season.
The Cougars are still a dangerous team despite the record. Houston features a sure-fire first-round draft pick in right-handed pitcher Brad Sullivan, who has struggled so far this season, a trend that hopefully won’t reverse itself this weekend. Behind Sullivan is a talented corps headlined by junior left-hander Danny Zell, who takes a 2-0 record and a microscopic 0.64 ERA into Friday’s meeting with the Tigers’ Jake Tompkins.
Tompkins will be a big reason why the Tigers’ luck might be different than it was last year in Houston. Tompkins did not pitch the series finale as scheduled at Cougar Field, and while seven errors by LSU may not have changed the outcome, a 12-11 Houston victory, the eight-run sixth inning in the finale might have given LSU a larger lead than its 11-7 pad after the big uprising, LSU’s second eight-run inning of the series.
At the plate, the only team in the city of Houston that may be hitting lower than the Cougars were the 1968 Houston Astros. Noble’s team comes in with a team batting average of .222, with only designated hitter Thanos Papavisiliou having any kind of success, batting a team high .400.
That’s not to say the Cougars don’t have talented hitters, because Houston features several of the same faces that scored 27 runs in last year’s series, most notably center fielder Michael Bourn, who seemed to steal at will on the Tigers’ catchers in last year’s series, which was often.
For LSU, the Tigers seemed to be back on the straight and narrow with Tuesday’s victory over Louisiana-Monroe. Sure, seven hits against a mid-major team isn’t usually anything to write home about, but the Tigers maximized their efficiency, getting nine baserunners on without a hit (seven walks, two hit batters), and turned five of their seven hits into extra-base hits, which is what good teams do offensively.
At the plate, the big finds of the early season appear to be outfielders Ryan Patterson and Quinn Stewart, sophomore transfers from junior college who have been able to take some of the offensive pressure off of veteran Aaron Hill, who has struck out only once in 36 plate appearances this season, quite remarkable indeed.
If Dustin Weaver can return to full health at catcher, he will give Matt Liuzza a chance to concentrate on calling a game, which is one of the biggest differences on this year’s team than in most years. Unlike the days when Bertman and Dan Canevari called the pitches, the catchers now have the freedom to run the game, and that’s a tough adjustment for a true freshman.
Bo Pettit is scheduled to make his season debut on Sunday, and having a healthy rotation for the first time this season will certainly be a big help. It appears that Nate Bumstead was comfortable coming out of the bullpen in Tuesday’s game, and of course, in post-season play, you’ll need every available arm on the staff to advance, so the Las Vegas native’s days as a starter are not over.
Justin Meier has proven to be a nice find in the mid-week rotation, and he and Bumstead will give the Tigers nice options in the post-season or for a spot start during the SEC wars should one of the three top pitchers get hurt or need to move to the bullpen.
As for the LSU bullpen, Brandon Nall had one bad outing against Kansas, but every closer goes through that cycle a couple of times a season. If LSU doesn’t have to rely on Nall to close two of every three games, and the middle relief committee of Billy Sadler, Jason Determann, Greg Smith and others comes together, the Tigers’ pitching staff will more than overcome the blip that was the Kansas series.
LSU could lose a few games over the next two weekends, and it would not be a cause for concern. If LSU wins its traditional 18 games in the SEC, plus takes care of business in the mid-week games, there’s no reason why the NCAA will pass up the cash cow that is a regional in Baton Rouge for the 14th consecutive year.
But, of course, the bugaboo has been the super regionals, and everyone feels that the national seed will unlock the final door to Omaha. Yes, winning these series against Houston and Long Beach could go a long way in helping LSU reach its ultimate goal of playing in Rosenblatt Stadium in June.
However, keep in mind that no championships have ever been won in February. Win or lose these next two weekends, nobody is expecting anything less than a strong LSU push for Omaha.