Everybody talks about it. But, like the weather, nobody does anything about it.

And it’s not that they aren’t trying.

It’s just about to drive LSU head coach Jay Johnson crazy and he insists his baseball team is working on it almost every day.

Like most teams, the Tigers take infield practice before each and every game, outfield too, occasionally without injuring any innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire.

But more than halfway into the season, their defense remains an eyesore and constant topic of terror among Alex Box Stadium fans, sure-fire giggles when they take the vaudeville act on the road.

Maybe they’re thinking about it too much.

It’s like a golfer with the putting yips. Perhaps it’s gotten in their young heads.

But the errors keep mounting.

Sometimes LSU has a workaround, sometimes enough fireworks to power through it, other times enough bullpen to pitch around it.

And often not.

Prior to this weekend’s three-game Southeastern Conference series against Georgia, 22 percent of the runs LSU has allowed were unearned.

It’s baseball. Stuff happens. But it sure seems to happen to the Tigers more than anywhere else, often at the most inopportune times.

The sheer number of errors — 56 at last count— don’t begin to tell the whole story, of course, this litany of gift-wrapped door prizes to opponents. The official scoring rules seem to be tilted heavily in favor of protecting the fragile feelings of fielders and, sadly, you still can’t assume a double play.

The scoring tribunal is also quite lenient when it comes to misjudgments or overruns and the like, to say nothing of unforced collisions (and for sure it takes a full-blown committee to come up with some of the hijinks the Tigers have unveiled).

But other teams surely have similar tales that went unrecorded, if not nearly as many. It probably evens out.

So that percentage of unearned runs is probably a pretty fair indicator as to how charitable a team’s defense is, how much solid pitching goes to waste.

That 22 percent of the opposing damage is dead worst among the SEC’s 14 teams, of course, as are most of LSU’s other fielding statistics.

No other SEC team is higher than 15 percent on the Unearned Runs Boot-o-Meter. Four teams are under 10 percent. The league-wide average is right at 12.4 percent.

Good thing LSU can hit and that the pitching has been well above average, especially the bullpen.

If this defense was going to get better, you’d think it would have by now, 40 games into the season.

In troubling times like these, it often gets recalled as a disclaimer that the team that set the LSU record for errors in a season, 1993, made amends by winning Skip Bertman’s second national championship.

That was right at the dawn of the storied Gorilla Ball days, with nuclear bats, when defense eventually became an afterthought during seasons of home run derby.

But even in that age of laissez-faire defense, Bertman always made enough concessions not to challenge the staple of being “strong up the middle.”

While loading up on the heavy artillery, he might have had to swallow hard filling out parts of the lineup. But he had future major leaguers up the middle in Todd Walker at second, Russ Johnson at shortstop and Armando Rios in center field.

LSU right now is fine in center field with the best player on the team in Dylan Crews.

The outfield, to its credit, has improved as the season goes along.

The infield is Mayhem Waiting to Happen.

There are 23 errors — and countless other unmade plays — at the shortstop-second base combo of Jordan Thompson and Cade Doughty.

With a third baseman in DH’s gloving in Jacob Berry, they have just about eradicated the term “routine groundball” from the baseball lexicon.

And that’s with arguably the country’s best defensive first baseman, Tré Morgan, cleaning up a lot of misfires.

It’s probably too late to think they’re suddenly going to clean this up.

They are what they are.

It’s just a matter of working around it.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com