More than ’possumble LSU will turn it around

Published 7:43 am Friday, April 7, 2017

Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn, who hosts LSU this weekend for purposes of baseball, was discussing the Tigers’ problems here early in the conference season.

“A lot of teams start out bad and end up good,” he told reporters up there in the Ozarks. “I’m sure they’re not real concerned about it.”

Silly him.

He heavily underestimates the panic potential when it comes to LSU baseball.

Concern?

Sorry, Dave, but “concern” doesn’t scratch the surface.

LSU has lost two consecutive SEC series, and that’s FEMA-worthy in these parts.

He’s probably thinking that, being used to success for three decades, he would be talking about a fan base that should know better.

They should know that any baseball season is a long and winding road, filled with ups and downs and slumps and surges.

Mainly, it’s NOT football.

But they never learn.

So with the Tigers 20-10 and just 5-4 in the SEC, it’s easy to forget that last year’s team started the league 4-5 and did not disintegrate.

It didn’t help that Thursday came one of those way-too-early NCAA tournament projections, and D1 Baseball did not even have LSU hosting an NCAA regional — let alone one of the top eight seeds.

That early April prediction is fluky at best, the college baseball version of the presidential Iowa caucus, but it can light up a message board.

No regional? The projection has the Tigers being shipped to the TCU regional as a lowly No. 2 seed.

An NCAA regional in Baton Rouge is an LSU birthright. If it’s not there, right on schedule, how will Louisiana know that summer has arrived?

Trouble right there in Red Stick City.

Well, just settle down. Take a deep breath.

I tend to side with Van Horn on this one.

Really, it’s one swing of the bat we’re talking about.

And stuff happens in baseball. It’s unavoidable.

Yes, LSU has had the occasional midweek faux pas, but If normally reliable closer Caleb Gilber doesn’t hang a ninth-inning curveball last Saturday in the final game against Texas A&M, and if it doesn’t produce a moon-shot Aggies home run and 4-3 loss snatched from the jaws of a 2-0 victory, we’re not having this conversation.

LSU would be 6-3 in conference, on a comfortable pace through the long and winding season.

Then the feeling would be that LSU had won three of four conference games since losing the first two at Florida, using the spark of its own big rally to steal the final game with the Gators.

Somebody might even remember that, with Paul Mainieri’s constant tinkering, his LSU teams invariably get better as the season goes along.

Instead, now the talking point is that the Tigers have lost four of their last six in conference. And, mostly, the sky is falling, with no end in sight. Beating Grambling 13-2 Tuesday did little to calm any nerves.

“A lot of emphasis is placed on the ones we don’t win around here,” Mainieri said. “I understand how it works.”

Mainieri is as good of a college baseball coach as you’ll find. But perhaps he unwittingly stokes those fears in a spoiled fan base.

He doesn’t have much of a poker face. He wears his emotions with bright makeup. Following the meltdown against the Aggies, he was visibly distraught.

It wasn’t hard to pick up, and surely the worrywarts did.

He’ll get over it. He’ll have his team in a proper frame of mind for the weekend trip to Arkansas.

Mainly, though, this LSU team is just too good to keep playing conference at a 5-4 pace, even if right now the SEC standings look to be flipped upside down, with Kentucky, Auburn and Arkansas all leading the race.

All that said, this might be a good weekend for LSU to start living up to the preseason billing of a veteran team.

It was the Arkansas series last year, you’ll recall, that turned the Tigers around … and spawned the Legend of the Rally ’Possum when one of the breed got lost and found himself in the outfield in prime time.

We all learned a valuable lesson that weekend, mostly from persnickety finger-waggers who pointed out that ’possums were not rodents (like nutria) but in fact were marsupials, and also that it was considered crude to drop the “o” from the more formal opossum.

That was in Baton Rouge, and while Arkansas reportedly has an abundance of ’possums — I defiantly stand by my apostrophe — there is some question as to whether any stray ones this weekend would join the LSU cause.

But the Tigers should be fine.