BATON ROUGE — Two days before opening the new Alex Box Stadium, LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri was all smiles when he addressed the media prior to the season at the 2009 Baseball Media Day press conference. Watch it now.
LSU Baseball Media Day
February 18, 2009
LSU BASEBALL HEAD COACH PAUL MAINIERI
Opening Statement…
“I don’t know if we have enough story lines for you; a brand new stadium, our team is ranked pretty high and coming off a College World Series season and we’ve got some new staff members so hopefully you can find something to write about. Obviously, the understatement is that we’re extremely excited about what we’re going to have here Friday night and beyond. The stadium looks absolutely gorgeous. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of people who are going to be given thanks and applauded for this beautiful facility, beginning with the architects and the contractors. I know there was a lot of doubt on whether the facility would ever be finished in time, but the naysayers are going to have to eat their crow now because we’re going to be playing there Friday night. It’s absolutely gorgeous. There are a few things that they still have to do, but it’s not going to affect the ballgame or the competition at all. It’s not going to affect the enjoyment that the fans are going to have. It’s going to be a wonderful facility. I think it’s going to be a crown jewel in college baseball. There are some really nice facilities that have gone up this year. I received my copy of Baseball America newspaper today and there are some of the other facilities highlighted as well as ours in that publication, and you can see that this facility is going to keep us right on the cutting edge of recruiting the best players in the country. It’s always been a happening to come to Alex Box Stadium, and it will continue to be that way in the new stadium.
“The only thing that remains is for us to put a ballclub out there on the field that’s worthy of us using such a beautiful facility. I’m pretty excited about what we have going for us. It’s been pretty well chronicled that we have a very experienced team coming back. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to think about the lineup we’ll be using for Friday, but I’ll go ahead and give it to you, anyway:
“We’ll be leading off with Leon Landry, who will be playing center field. Our two-hole hitter will be Ryan Schimpf, who will be playing second base. I think Ryan was just named to a couple of All-America teams. Our three-hole hitter will be Blake Dean. It has not been determined if he’ll be in left field or at DH. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Our four-hole hitter will be Micah Gibbs, a catcher. Five-hole will be D.J. LeMahieu, our shortstop. Batting sixth will be Jared Mitchell, who will be playing right field. He moved over from left to right field this year. Our seventh hitter will be Sean Ochinko, who will be playing first base. Our eight-hole hitter will be Chad Jones, and that will either be at DH or left field. The reason that is in question between Blake and Chad; I’m going to play Chad most of the time that he’s available. We’re going to lose him for 20 games and during that time Blake will step in and play left field. I want to get Chad as much time as I can in left field before he goes on his hiatus to play spring football… The reason I’m not sure who is going to DH and who is going to play left field is because both Chad and Blake are nursing little injuries right now. Chad has a sore throwing arm and Blake has a sore quadriceps. We’re going to see which of them heals best by Friday and one will be in left field and one will be DH. If Chad’s ready to go, he’ll be in left field. Our nine-hole hitter will be Derek Helenihi, our third basemen.
“Louis Coleman will be our starting pitcher. The plan right now is for Louis to go four or five innings, probably a 75-pitch maximum, and then Nolan Cain will be the first guy out of the bullpen and hopefully burn up four or five innings and then we need to see who we can finish up with.
“Saturday our starting pitcher will be Anthony Ranaudo and Sunday our starting pitcher will be Austin Ross. Obviously, everybody else will be available out of the bullpen.
“We think our club is ready, with the exception of those two little bumps and bruises with Chad and Blake, everybody else is healthy. We’ve had a great three weeks of practice, quite frankly. I think we’re just about as ready as we can be. I think the guys are feeling really good about themselves.
“We have a very formidable opponent this weekend. I know in this part of the country you don’t hear much about Villanova as a baseball team, but I can tell you that they will be a very representative team. They know how to play and have an excellent coach in Joe Godri. They have a lot of young, hard-nosed kids. They are very young this year; they lost three or four of their better players to graduation. I expect that they’ll come in and play with a lot of spirit and a lot of energy and play very well. We get distracted by the new stadium, but at 7:15 the first pitch is thrown and the idea is to go out there and play a good ball game.”
On how much he talks to his players about how it’s a long season and they probably won’t be number one wire-to-wire …
“That’s a good question. I was really happy that the first poll came out in December because that gave us two months to digest it, deal with it, put it in perspective and move on. I don’t think there’s any talk among our team about what we’re ranked in the polls. I thought it was great when the ranking came out. I remember when the publisher called me for information that they needed and he asked me how I would feel ranked as number one and I said, ?What would you rank us if we weren’t number one?’ and he said, ?Number two.’ I said, ?Heck, what’s the difference?’
“I think our kids have put it in totally proper perspective. It doesn’t spot us any runs in the opening game. It doesn’t give us any extra victories. It’s not something that we can put in our bank and call on during a tough time of the season. It was something that was talked about among fans and media people for a couple of months. I think it shows that we’ve come a long way in a short couple of years. I’m very proud of the fact that we have the number one team in the country. I hope that we can maintain it and I hope that we have it at the end of the year. Like you said, it’s very difficult to maintain that. You’re going to have your lulls in the course of the year and you always have to have proper perspective. I think that’s where the coaching staff comes in and makes sure the kids keep the right mindset when we hit potholes during the season. I think we’ll get knocked off from number one during the season, but hopefully we’ll do enough to qualify for the postseason. And once we get there, we hope we’ll be worthy of hosting here at the brand new Alex Box and then hopefully we’ll do enough to hoist ourselves into Omaha. When we get to Omaha, hopefully we can win when we’re there.
“To answer your question, we’ve talked about it and gone over it extensively and I think now it’s in a great perspective and we realize that everything we gain we have to earn on the field.”