Not even the wacky March weather can rain on the LSU baseball parade.
The Tigers are ranked No. 1, stand 16-1, and, if you divide the college baseball season into three parts, they couldn’t have asked for more in the first third.
Now the second third begins, Southeastern Conference play, and how exciting is that for a freshman who has become such an integral part of the top team in the nation?
“I’m having a blast,” freshman pitcher Alex Lange said with a big smile.
He, for one, should be. The big kid is 4-0 with a 1.57 ERA, he’s struck out 26 batters in 23 innings, and is part of the 2-3 punch that LSU throws (literally) at opponents. That’s because Lange will start Saturday’s second game of the LSU’s three-game series that starts Friday with Ole Miss. Then Sunday, the Tigers come back with another freshman, Jake Godfrey, whose line so far shows him 3-0 with a 1.69 ERA. Which is pretty ridiculous.
“Those freshmen we have pitching for us are pretty unbelievable,” LSU senior third baseman Connor Hale said. “It”s crazy how they stepped in and have been able to get the job done … Those guys showed up on a mission and they haven’t gotten off of it.”
Not to forget that LSU opens the weekend with sophomore Jared Poche’, who is 4-0 with a 2.08 ERA, he’s struck out 17 in 20 innings and opponents are hitting just .200 against him.
“Watching the young guys develop from the beginning of the fall to now, Alex and Jake they’ve come a long way,” said Poche’, who is a whole year older. “They walked on campus and proved to me they can pitch here.”
Evidently.
“I have a lot of confidence and knew whatever role I was put in I would excel and do to the best of my abilities,” Lange said. “I understood that (former LSU pitching star Aaron) Nola was leaving and I could fight for a weekend job.”
That’s what it’s all about, winning the weekends.
“The SEC is always a little different atmosphere,” Poche’ said. “We got a little taste of it last weekend (sweeping a home series against Princeton), but SEC games, well, coach always says that you’re going to win a third of the games and the other two-thirds are going to be decided by one run. It’s about what you do in those other two-thirds.”
Coach, of course, is Paul Mainieri, who isn’t about to proclaim his team college baseball’s version of Kentucky basketball by virtue of a 16-1 start.
“We’ve been like 16-1 three times in the last five years,” Mainieri said. “And when we haven’t been 16-1 we’ve been 15-2 or 14-3 or whatever. We’ve had a No. 1-ranked team at some point in six of the last seven years.”
Which is why, seriously, LSU is the Kentucky basketball of college baseball.
“We came out 16-1 and we try to take every game one game at a time,” said Hale, whose .319 batting average is only sixth best on the team, so strong offensively is LSU. “You can’t look too far ahead, so when it’s game day you’re focused on that game only. And then we focus on the next one.”
It sounds like a quote straight out of the movie Bull Durham — “Write this down: We gotta play it one day at a time… “ but it’s a credit to Mainieri and his Tigers that really buy into that theory.
“It’s been a good start of us. I’m not really surprised because we came into the season really confident, we had a great recruiting class that came in and they were really confident from the minute they stepped on campus and we meshed as a team,” said Alex Bregman, the junior shortstop who is batting .343.
“The guys in the locker room are working so hard every day so I’m not surprised. And we have a veteran offense that is really coming around and ready for SEC play.”
It’s what Mainieri termed “the 30-day gauntlet we call the SEC schedule.”
Of course, LSU won the SEC last year and was oh-so-close to making it back to the College World Series after a Super Regional the Tigers would just as soon forget. But can’t.
“All the veteran guys came back with a sour taste in their mouths from last year and we worked really hard in the offseason to get back into playing good baseball,” Bregman said.
Bregman agreed that the Tigers have set themselves up well to play in a league that he predicted would get as many as 10 teams into NCAA play.
“If we stay hot the rest of the year and continue to play the way we’ve been playing, hopefully we have about 40 more wins in us,” Poche’ said.
That, of course, would probably mean LSU’s first title since 2009 and seventh overall. Truly, the Tigers have a shot because “We’re a complete all-around team,” Hale said. “We have the pitching, we have the defense and we have the hitting and if we can keep all three of those things going we’ll be pretty good.”
All that being said, the ninth-year head coach takes it all in stride.
“I pointed out to the guys that we did all we could in the first 17 games of the season. What makes it important is that we get it done in the conference schedule. If we don’t get it done in the conference schedule the first 17 games won’t matter.”
If you have any doubt that the message is getting across, go back to the freshman pitcher Lange, who is obviously wise beyond his years.
“It’s worked out so far, I’ve had four good starts,” he said. “But I understand that it’s baseball and there are going to be the bad times and I’m prepared to handle those. Hopefully they won’t happen often and that they don’t happen at all, but they’re bound to happen and it’s how I bounce back. I’ll keep working hard and try to get better than every situation, good or bad.”
Luckily for LSU, so far most of those situations have been good and every indication is that trend will continue. And, after all, 16-1 isn’t a bad first third.