Coastal Carolina made win look easy
Published 7:16 am Tuesday, June 14, 2016
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">BATON ROUGE — Perhaps it was just as well. Maybe the whole Rally‚ Possum thing was getting a bit dated, if not clich?.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But it says something about the spell that critter put on LSU baseball that just about an entire packed house stuck around Alex Box Stadium through one frustration after another against Coastal Carolina Sunday night, mostly watching Tigers stranded helplessly in scoring position.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Inning after inning. Long into the night.</span>
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<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">There was a lot of hopeful chanting, but in the end more groans than cheers for the crescendo. But they hung around expectantly into the wee hours, long enough, finally, to see LSU suffer its first walk-off loss in the new Alex Box Stadium.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It was dang near midnight before they were finally put out of their misery.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">What were they thinking? That a possum was going to save them again?</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">LSU teased them one last time by accidentally tying the score with a run in the ninth, but the Chanticleers used basic baseball to settle things once and for all with a run in the bottom of the inning for a 4-3 series-clinching victory.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Anything can happen in baseball — Alex Box Stadium has proved that over the years with many tales of unlikely derring do — but the better team won this time.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">What’s so hard to figure out about that?</span>
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<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Whether it was inspired by the legend of the marsupial or not, LSU had done a lot of good things at the tail end of the season.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It doesn’t take much to raise LSU fans’ expectations, and Paul Mainieri might have done one of his best coaching jobs to get this inexperienced team playing its best late, playing well enough even to steal one of the coveted national seeds for the NCAA tournament.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Not bad, although those national seeds might not be so coveted anymore the way home teams were abused in their home ballparks this postseason.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">The Tigers certainly weren’t alone.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">What was veteran Texas A&M’s excuse? I still think the Aggies are the best team in college baseball, but they won’t be in Omaha, either.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Or Mississippi State. The experienced Bulldogs won the SEC. They got a nice trophy for it.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But around LSU baseball that’s not the way the logic works.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It’s Omaha or bust (and blame it on the coach).</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Most teams would get the season stamp of approval for getting to the super regionals.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">At LSU, “Not much solace right now,” Mainieri said.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“You feel like you’re going to win right up to the end, and then it’s over.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“It’s like a punch in the gut.”</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Not sure what made Mainieri think he was going to win until the very end.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Maybe he was buying into the possum business, too.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">For 18 late-night innings over the weekend, it was pretty obvious that Coastal Carolina was the better team.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Certainly the Chanticleers — and don’t you love that mascot name — were the more veteran team, which is apparently more important in postseason than possum power.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“If we had been playing more fundamentally sound, I think we’d be playing tomorrow,” Mainieri said. “I’m the one that takes responsibility for that.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“We had some miscommunications, we had some poor baserunning.”</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">What they didn’t have was much timely hitting — and when the bulk of your arsenal is singles, you kind of need that.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">LSU, instead, went to great extremes to turn potential big innings into minor flesh wounds, if that.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Baserunners in scoring position, at least one of whom should have already scored, were standing out there all night looking like jilted lovers, maybe training to be Maytag repairmen.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">The Tigers stranded 12 in all, nine in scoring position, mostly on pop-ups. There were eight left on in the final three innings alone.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But that final inning was perhaps the most disappointing game-tying “rally” in memory.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">LSU was still scratching its head trying to figure out how it only scored one run in the third inning — it’s complicated but the Tigers had a walk and back-to-back doubles — when Coastal Carolina, right on cue, finally started unravelling in the ninth inning.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">An unforced error. A timely walk. And another error. Tie game and the tidal wave was building, still with no outs.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">LSU fans had seen this movie before. Give the Tigers an opening and all of a sudden they’re burying you with a 7-spot on the board.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">The Chanticleers, so sound for 17 innings, suddenly seemed to be begging the Tigers to remind them that they’d never been to Omaha before.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Over the weekend, however, it looked like the Tigers would have to bat around to score more than a single run in an inning.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">And the tie-deflating ninth was no different.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">LSU managed only that single run, a combination of bad luck, bad swings and more confused baserunning.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Coastal Carolina made it look easy in the bottom of the inning. Routine, at least.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">That’s what veteran teams do.</span>
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<p class="p1">Follow Scooter Hobbs on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/ScooterAmPress">twitter.com/ScooterAmPress</a>
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