College baseball is a marathon, not a sprint, and LSU coach Paul Mainieri has said it since day one.
“What we are going to do is fight through a 56-game regular season schedule to hopefully put ourselves in a position like we were in last year,” Mainieri said Jan. 25 at Media Day. “You don’t think about Omaha right now.”
It definitely rang true in January, but don’t think it still isn’t stuck in the brains of Mainieri and his players. There’s still a bunch of baseball left to be played.
Not taking anything away from the No. 3 LSU baseball team’s 12-game win streak, first baseman Mason Katz leading the NCAA with 55 RBIs or the drubbing the Tigers put on then-No. 7 Kentucky this weekend in Alex Box Stadium, but there’s much more work to be done.
To try and discredit what this team has accomplished so far would be unfair. No team in LSU baseball history has posted a 30-2 mark to start a season.
And that’s saying something.
Former coach Skip Bertman put LSU baseball on the map. His teams won five national titles, but not one of them could match the start the Tigers have gotten off to in 2013.
As Mainieri said, this is still a 56-game schedule, and the Tigers still have 24 left mostly against upper-echelon competition in the Southeastern Conference.
LSU still has a lot of meat left on its SEC schedule. Series with No. 10 Arkansas, No. 11 South Carolina and No. 23 Ole Miss still remain on the docket.
Being the hottest team in the league will put a big target on LSU’s back. Good teams will want to prove they’re better than the Tigers and below-average squads will try to make a win against LSU their crowning achievement of the season.
It’s the price the Tigers will have to pay for starting the season blazing hot.
After LSU outscored a top-10 team 31-6 and looked nearly untouchable this weekend, expectations going forward will be astronomical.
Since Bertman and now Mainieri’s success leading the Tigers, it’s always been Omaha or bust.
If this team doesn’t reach the College World Series and bring home the program’s seventh championship trophy, no one will remember the 2013 squad. Just like how every LSU baseball fan is trying to block the 2012 season from their memory.
LSU fans probably got a good chuckle in 2012 when they found out the Tigers only had to get past Stony Brook to get to the CWS. Only problem was the Sea Wolves left town with the last laugh and a trip to Omaha.
The Tigers played well the whole season, but couldn’t come through when they needed to most. Katz hasn’t forgotten what happened last season and doesn’t want to repeat it this time around.
“A trip to Omaha and bringing home a trophy; that’s all I want. It doesn’t matter how it happens,” Katz said Jan. 25. “If something happens where I’m not even in the lineup and we go, I don’t care. I want to go to Omaha. That’s my dream. That’s the reason I came here, to win a national championship.”
Katz stepped on campus the season after the Tigers won the national title in 2009. I don’t know if there’s a player in the country who wants to hoist the championship trophy more than him.
LSU is beyond hot right now, but they would trade a 12-game win streak in the middle of the season for one to end it any day of the week.
The Tigers couldn’t have imagined a hotter start to the season. But it won’t mean anything if they end the season cold, and they know it.
Micah Bedard is a 22-year-old history senior from Houma.
