BATON ROUGE – The 2019 LSU Baseball team has reached its final week of fall practice in Alex Box Stadium, Skip Bertman Field. Below are three strikes that have been critical to the fall practice schedule over the past week.
The fall practice session will continue through November 2. All workouts at “The Box” are free and open to the public.
Changes to the Purple-Gold World Series: With only six arms available for the Tigers in Clay Moffitt, Aaron George, Trent Vietmeier, Riggs Threadgill, Will Ripoll and Jaden Hill, the Purple-Gold World Series has been changed to one game, which will take place Friday, November 2 at 7 p.m. in Alex Box Stadium, Skip Bertman Field. It will be an eight-inning contest with a 20-pitch limit in each inning except for the eighth and the if-necessary extra inning. Should the Tigers need to play the extra inning, it will be played with international tiebreak rules, meaning runners will start the inning on first and second. There will only be seven batters in each lineup with a manager playing left field for both teams because there are not enough position players to field two teams. Hill will get the starting nod for one team, and Threadgill will start for the other. Each will throw three innings before turning it over to Vietmeier and Ripoll for the next three. The two closers in Moffitt and George are scheduled to throw two innings with a third inning if necessary.
“Because of the injuries to our team, our annual Purple-Gold World Series has been changed to the Purple-Gold World Series Game 7,” head coach Paul Mainieri said. “It’s winner take all. One game. We only have six pitchers, so there will be three pitchers for each team. We will play one eight-inning game.”
Rain, Rain Go Away: This fall it has been raining nonstop on the LSU baseball program both literally and figuratively. The amount of rain in the forecast has caused the Tigers to miss many scrimmages and practices because of the inclement weather, but on top of that, injuries have plagued the Tiger pitchers, causing a limitation on the scrimmages themselves. Early this fall Zack Hess, Devin Fontenot, Todd Peterson, Eric Walker and Landon Marceaux were shut down to preserve them for the spring season. However, this leaves many questions up in the air. Last week, Week 5 of fall practice, the Tigers were available to scrimmage twice, and once was in an exhibition game at UNO, which ended in a 3-3 tie after using five of the six healthy pitchers available. The Tigers were successful with those guys and without the pitch count restrictions and inning limitations, LSU would have most likely come away with the win, which is promising. However, the unknown about the team due to the weather and injuries is what concerns Coach Mainieri as the fall winds down.
“It’s just been crazy between the amount of rain that we have had and how much it’s affected our ability to practice plus the injuries that we’ve had to our pitchers and the ones we have decided to shut down. It’s just been the strangest fall we’ve ever experienced. Fall practice has always been what I consider a necessary evil. You have to do it, but you’re never happy coming out of fall because on a given day if your pitchers pitch well, then you wonder if your hitters are not good enough. If your hitters hit well, then you wonder if your pitchers aren’t good enough. That’s the nature of intrasquad scrimmages. I have always thought fall was a pain, but you had to do it because you needed to create a competitive environment, and you need it to teach your players how to play the game in your system. This fall, we haven’t been able to do any of that. We can drill them. We can do a lot of things indoors to try to create game situations in other ways, but the reality is we’ve scrimmaged twice a week maybe all fall. Whereas in past years, we would scrimmage five days a week, but because of the rain and of all of the pitchers this fall, we feel like we really didn’t do that much. It leaves you with an awkward feeling. Hopefully, January and February will be good to us in preparation for the season.”
Hill Turns the Corner: Last Friday at UNO, freshman right-hander Jaden Hill fired three innings and gave up two runs, both in the first. He gave up three hits, walked one and struck out four. Hill showed what he was about after the first inning with his mid-90s fastball and swing-and-miss changeup. Hill has the ability to pound the strike zone and showed what he is capable of doing. The most impressive part of this may have been his turn at an opponent’s field and taking in that environment.
“Jaden Hill after the first inning stepped up and pitched really well, which is what we have been waiting to see out of him, just better location of his pitches,” Mainieri said. “They hit a couple of good pitches against him and got a couple of runs, but he really settled in. The last two innings I thought he was tremendous.”
Lagniappe: Coach Mainieri’s favorite week of the year may be Halloween week. If you recall, last season the head coach dressed up as former Tiger shortstop Kramer Robertson, and LSU has always held its annual Halloween scrimmage where the players come to the field dressed in costume. However, this year, the Tigers were in for a treat leading up to the Purple-Gold World Series Game 7. The 2019 squad took the field Monday expecting an intense conditioning test, but Mainieri had trick up his sleeve, taking the team to the 13th Gate Escape Rooms to work on some team bonding to break up the intensity of the fall schedule. Instead of practice on Tuesday, the Tigers bonded some more as they went fishing. Wednesday was their annual Halloween practice, and Thursday is the yearly three-man ball scrimmage before culminating the fall with the Purple-Gold game on Friday night at 7 p.m. CT.