Chanticleers Sonty-cold reminder not to get cocky

Published 2:27 pm Friday, June 9, 2017

The picture has been on Kramer Robertson’s cellphone for right at a year now.

In fact, it’s his screen saver.

Most people have pleasant memories or loved ones as a screen saver.

I know I’ve got a picture of me teeing off on the 18th hole of Pebble Beach, somehow almost looking like I knew what I was doing. And I like to bring it up whenever possible, even, as you can see, gratuitously.

Not Robertson.

Every time he checks his phone there’s a grim reminder.

It wasn’t a selfie. He wasn’t in the mood.

But the picture shows him kneeling near the mound at Alex Box Stadium, clutching his head.

In the background, right at his shortstop position, there’s a very fine dog pile filling up with celebratory Coastal Carolina Chanticleers.

They had every right to be happy. They were heading to Omaha for the College World Series.

LSU wasn’t. And Robertson had been planning on it.

“I look at that every single day,” Robertson said after LSU won its regional last week to again advance to this weekend’s super regional. “There hasn’t been one day since that game ended that I don’t think about it.”

He’s confident he’ll be replacing that gawd-awful reminder after this weekend when the Tigers again host a super regional, this time against Mississippi State.

At least Mississippi State will need no introduction.

LSU swept a weekend series against the Bulldogs just three weeks ago, in Starkville, and the last two weren’t all that close.

But if recent years have taught LSU anything, it’s that there are no guarantees.

In retrospect, losing to Coastal Carolina wasn’t so embarrassing.

The Chanticleers — you remember, a Chanticleer is somehow related to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” — went on to win the national championship.

But do you want to feel old?

It’s been five whole years now since Stony Brook waltzed into Alex Box Stadium as a total unknown and stole everything purple and gold but the family china.

It only seems like it was yesterday, maybe because Stony Brook remains the gold standard for shocking a proud, perhaps overconfident program.

Stony Brook didn’t win the national championship. A classic one-hit wonder, the Seawolves did a brief toe tap in Omaha and returned home to Long Island, never to be heard from again.

But that weekend the Seahawks — no known relation to Chaucer — were better than LSU, which was the No. 7 national seed.

Baseball happens like that, even if you’ve never heard of the team that just ruined your season.

It just seems to happen a lot more with super regionals, no matter how sweet the setup looks going in.

This is the 19th year for the super regional formula for Omaha, which has been in effect since 1999.

With the two-tiered super regional system, LSU has been to Omaha seven times in the last 18 years, with two national championships.

Any school would sell its chemistry department for that, Bunsen burners and all.

But LSU fans like to think Skip Bertman invented college baseball, and frankly I’m not prepared to argue with them. At any rate, the Tigers get held to a different standard.

LSU was probably better suited for the old road to Omaha, which involved eight six-team regionals, which catapulted you straight to the College World Series.

After breaking through in 1986, LSU went to Omaha 10 of 13 seasons with that formula and won four national championships.

Never mind that there wasn’t the parity in college baseball back then that there is today.

In the six-team regionals, true marathons, most teams were going to run out of pitching long before LSU was.

If you were LSU, all you had to do was be patient. That 18-run inning — late, for instance, in the seventh inning of a 29-13 win against Georgia Tech in the 1996 regional final — was coming.

That kind of thing doesn’t often happen with the four-team regional prelim, let alone the head-to-head, best-of-three super regional.

Not necessarily good for LSU.

But most would agree it’s better for college baseball, which is kind of built around three-game weekend series in the regular season.

The Tigers have been in 12 super regionals in those 18 years and are 7-5 in advancing through them.

They’re 7-2 when hosting the things, which are pretty good odds.

But as long as Stony Brook is a memory, as long as Coastal Carolina is Kramer Robertson’s screen saver, LSU should know never to take anything for granted.

“We’ve experienced it in the past,” Robertson said. “We used it to motivate us this year. (We know) anything can happen. We’ll be ready to go.”