Maybe LSU will pack a few bats for Omaha trip

Published 9:47 am Monday, June 8, 2015

BATON ROUGE — Nice of LSU to finally locate some bats for the trip to the College World Series.

It would be first on the packing check list for any such trip, and it’s not like this pending jaunt caught anybody off guard.

This is expected of LSU.

True, UL-Lafayette made it far more squeamish than the average Tiger prefers before LSU finally scraped up enough offense together to get by the Cajuns in straight sets with a 6-3 victory Sunday night.

But, they should know what to bring along by now. Goodness, this will be LSU’s 17th trip.

You better bring bats. Good, solid and hot ones.

That LSU aluminium is not exactly smoking right now. They haven’t looked much like threatening weapons lately, so getting them through airport security for the flight to Omaha shouldn’t set off any alarms.

But they might better think about rearming those things once they set about the chore of making it a long Omaha stay.

There was a hint in Sunday’s cliff-hanger, if only late, that maybe they were heating back up.

They sure took their sweet time.

First of all, give Gunner Leger, the ULL freshman lefthander out of Barbe, a lot of credit.

He flat-out dominated LSU for six innings on just two hits, allowing only one runner to second base.

But he was also the fourth straight pitcher in the NCAA tournament who seemed to have LSU off-balance all night.

This was a very familiar opponent, but LSU must have been having Stony Brook flashbacks, the Cinderella Story that will always be the low point for LSU home super regionals.

That awkward weekend in 2012 LSU’s formidable bats went stone cold in frustrating fashion against a team they’d never heard of.

This was different.

In the relief of Saturday night’s win, head coach Paul Mainieri said “We’ve got to quit putting so much pressure on our pitching staff.”

Sunday they were right back at it again.

The Tigers basically got past UL-Lafayette with one swing Saturday night — Chris Sciambra’s walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth.

Sunday the Cajuns — specifically Leger — upped the ante.

The Tigers weren’t touching Leger, and LSU starter Jared Poché had to use everything in his arsenal to keep the pesky Cajuns off the scoreboard.

When LSU finally got a 1-0 lead on maybe the one bad pitch Leger threw — Kade Scivicque’s no-doubter home run to left in the seventh — four of the five runs LSU had scored this weekend had come via the long ball.

That’s not a good strategy for wide open expanses of TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha.

And not one Tiger fan in The Box Sunday thought it would hold up Sunday night.

One swing wasn’t going to cut it.

This time LSU needed at least one whole inning of offense that resembled something that the Tigers deployed in hammering their way to the SEC regular season title.

They finally found the crooked number they’d been looking for with four runs in the eighth.

The tack-on run in the top of the ninth didn’t hurt either.

But the key players had to bring a smile to Mainieri’s face.

Alex Bregman is the All-American, spitfire face of the program. Scivicque was LSU’s most consistent hitter most of the season.

Both were mired in slumps not just for the weekend, but for the entire NCAA tournament.

Scivicque broke the ice Sunday with the long ball.

Bregman, incredibly, was 0-for-the-NCAA tournament, zippo for 15, when he came up in the eighth with two outs and runners at second and third, LSU still clinging to a 1-0 lead.

And he promptly drove in the first two runs of what became a four-run inning.

It looked a little like a breakthrough, some hitting that might be contagious.

Or maybe they finally relaxed.

Before the game Mainieri was talking to athletic director Joe Alleva about his team which had already won 52 games.

“If we hadn’t won that 53rd one, somehow this season would have felt unfulfilled in so many ways.”

Not to worry.

“Maybe,” Bregman said when asked if LSU put too much pressure on itself. “Maybe we pressed a little bit at times when we’d have a quick inning.

“But this offense is very confident. We’re going to be very confident in Omaha.”

We don’t know the when and the how that LSU’s season will end yet.

But we know the Tigers will end it where they are always supposed to.

“That’s where we belong,” Mainieri said.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU sports. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com

LSU head coach Paul Mainieri (AP Photo)

Vasha Hunt