BATON ROUGE — Coming of his first National Championship and the school’s sixth, LSU head coach Paul Mainieri addressed the media on Wednesday afternoon at the program’s annual Media Day.
LSU HEAD COACH PAUL MAINIERI
Opening statement…
“Well, ready or not I guess we are going to go for it again. It sure has been a lot of fun this offseason. You may have heard it culminated for me the other night riding in the Krewe of Orpheus parade. That was one of the more unique and enjoyable experiences that I have ever had. I spent a lot of quality time with (New Orleans Saints head coach) Sean Payton, and that was really neat too. I got to hold the Lombardi Trophy. Actually my son, Tommy got to hold it first, and he was a little panicked about dropping it, so he handed it to me. Of course I held on to it very tightly. It was a wonderful experience, and all the experiences in the offseason have been wonderful. We’ve done an awful lot of things and been asked by a lot of people to be involved in their events. We’ve been flattered every time we’ve been asked, and hopefully we’ve been able to help out some good causes.
“But, I was hired to be the baseball coach here, and that’s what we do, so it’s time to start another season. We’re thrilled about the opening of the 2010 season. There are some really neat additions to the ballpark that you’ll see when you arrive at the field with us. It’ll be pretty obvious. Some of the new additions will still be in the construction phase, but others will be done. I think it enhances the atmosphere of the ballpark, and our fans should really enjoy it. I know our players are really enjoying it.
“This is the first season that I’ve ever had the experience of being the defending national champion. I’m kind of looking forward to that actually. I hope we can experience that in future years also. I’ve been asked that question a lot about do you feel additional pressure to repeat and these types of questions. I can tell you that we are approaching this year just like we have approached every year. I feel that every season is an entity into its own. One of my favorite things I say to my players is that the new season does not begin at the point that the last season ended. Every year is a new year, and guys that performed last year need to continue to perform. Otherwise, somebody is going to take their place. New players will come in, so the makeup of your team will certainly be different to a certain degree. People say, ‘Well, how do you replace (Jared) Mitchell, (Sean) Ochinko, (Ryan) Schimpf, (DJ) LeMahieu and (Louis) Coleman.’ It’s impossible to replace those kinds of guys man for man. What has to happen is the whole concept of synergy. We just have to be greater than the sum of the parts. That means guys like Austin Nola, Micah Gibbs, Mikie Mahtook and all the returning players have to be better than they were last year to make up for the difference.
“Last year you guys wrote a lot about the decision we made to put Nola in and move LeMahieu over and so forth. There was a little bit of ulterior motive besides just thinking that would make our team better last year, which I think it turned out to do. But, the other thing about putting Nola in as well as (Tyler) Hanover and Mahtook was I wanted to go into the 2010 season with some experience on our team. Going into last year, if we had played our starting lineup the whole year from the first game of the season, assuming we were going to also lose Blake Dean, I thought there was a real possibility we would lose seven of our nine starting players. As it turned out, even though we lost five starters that were in the lineup in the last game of the College World Series, I don’t feel like we’ve lost as much because Tyler Hanover and Leon Landry were not starting players in Omaha, yet they started I think approximately 50 games each last year, so when you add them into the lineup and of course Blake coming back, I really feel like we have six starting players returning to our team. Obviously Gibbs is behind the plate, Nola and Hanover are the double-play combination, and then, Mahtook and Landry are in the outfield along with Dean at first base. That gives us six returning players.
“You add to that Matt Gaudet, who was our starting designated hitter two years ago until he started having some back problems about 15 games into the season and had to go on the disabled list for the rest of the 2008 season. Everybody knows that he didn’t play last year, but he’s back as our starting DH, so he has starting experience. You add to that Trey Watkins, who is going to be a very exciting player for us. He spent one year at LSU-Eunice. He’ll be our starting left fielder and lead-off hitter. Quite frankly, throughout my 28 years of coaching, I have not had a lot of true lead-off hitters – guys who can take pitches, get on base any way that they can, still be good hitters, steal bases and also have a bit of power. Trey Watkins may be the best lead-off hitter I’ve had in a decade since my days at Notre Dame when I had a kid named Steve Stanley. I’m really excited about what Watkins can bring to the team.
“The big question mark in my mind was going to be third base, but we have a youngster by the name of Wet Delatte out of St. Amant High School who is really coming along. His preseason workouts, he seems to be improving with each passing day, so he gives us a lot of confidence. I think we are going to have a really good starting nine as we go into the season. I think our pitching staff is going to solid, if not spectacular at times. Any time you start a staff with Anthony Ranaudo and Matty Ott, you’re going to have a pretty good pitching staff. What we need to do is fill in the holes.
“I feel really good about the makeup of this team. It’s not an extremely deep team in terms of position players. In fact, our numbers are a little bit small. Everybody may remember that last year was the first year of the 35-man limitation imposed by the NCAA rule. Last year was a transition year where we were going from a larger than 35-man roster to 35 men, so in the end, we had to actually let a couple of players go to make the 35-man roster. For example, Matt Gaudet had to be let go from the team last year in order to have a 35-man roster. This year we went into the beginning of the fall semester with what we thought would be our 35-man roster, but then what happened was you may remember we lost a player during freshman orientation. Well, you can’t replace that player. You can’t go out and recruit a player to replace him.
“We also had a young man by the name of Mike Lowery. At the time we signed Lowery, an infielder from a Texas Junior College, we thought he would compete with Nola for the starting shortstop job assuming DJ LeMahieu signed after his sophomore year. Remember, we signed him a year ago in November, so at that time, we thought he would compete with Nola, but as Nola emerged as our shortstop last year, it was pretty apparent to me that Nola was going to continue to be our shortstop. But, I thought Mike Lowery could be a guy that could back up Nola at shortstop and a candidate to play third base for us. He showed up to school this fall with a stress fracture in his back. He had to have season-ending surgery, so he’s out for the year. You add to that a catcher by the name of Wes Luquette that we had signed during the end of the spring season of high school last year. He played for Newman High School in New Orleans. He blew out his elbow and ended up having to have Tommy John surgery. All of a sudden, you’re down to 32 players. Then, what happened is Chad Jones declares for the NFL Draft. You’re down to 31 players. These kind of things happened. We filled those slots with some walk-on players, but obviously the quality of the player is not the same as what you would get in the recruiting process.
“We are starting to feel the effects of a 35-man rotation. I’m not using these as excuses of course. I don’t make excuses. I’m just telling you that our roster is going to be a little thinner in some areas than we were able to experience last year. I do think it’s going to be quite important for our team to remain relatively healthy. We have a few guys we think can be capable backups, but we just don’t have the versatility and the depth in our bench that we had last year. Last year was really a coach’s dream that you could make some moves to strengthen your team. I don’t know that we’ll have as much flexibility this year.
“With all that being said, I still think we have an outstanding starting nine. In some ways, it’ll be very comparable to last year’s teams. In some ways, it might be a little bit different. For instance, I think our speed is going to be outstanding. When you’ve got guys like Watkins, Landry, Mahtook and Hanover in the lineup, these guys can steal bases. There are going to be some times we are going to need to steal some bases, and we’re going to certainly utilize that as part of our offensive attack. I do think we still have some good power. Let me tell you; having Blake Dean back for his senior year, to me made all the difference in the world as far as the confidence of our team offensively. He’s taking to first base as though he’s played it his whole life. He’s going to be outstanding there. I think whenever you write out the lineup you always start out with No. 34 in that three-spot and fill in around him, and you know you’re going to have a pretty good offensive team. I feel confident about all those things. I’m anxious to get out there on the field and see these guys starting to play.”