Hitting is contagious.
When a few guys are swinging the bats well, confidence spreads through a lineup like wildfire, and the whole team follows suit. During those stretches, the game is fun and players can’t wait to get to the
ballpark every day.
The door swings both ways. When guys hit the skids, especially if they are some of the better hitters on the team, it can spread through the lineup and drag the whole group down into a hitting slump.
Coming off a weekend sweep at the hands of Florida, it doesn’t take a medical degree to see the LSU baseball team has come down with a serious case of the common cold. The Tigers caught the bug after spending three games facing
Vanderbilt’s lights-out pitching staff on the opening weekend of Southeastern Conference play. It wasn’t cause for concern then — most teams would struggle to score runs against Vanderbilt — but two weeks later, LSU still looks like it’s feeling the symptoms.
After slumping through the first three weekends of SEC play, it’s not quite time to assume LSU’s cold spell is actually a far more
serious ailment, but it’s getting close. With Mississippi State coming to town this weekend, LSU needs to get healthy in tonight’s midweek matchup with McNeese State.
Everyone deals with a cold differently. Some believe it’s best to power through it and let it go away on its own, while others take a more proactive approach and try to heal through a combination of medication and rest.
Then of course there are
old-time, outside-the-box remedies for a cold spell. I’d like to offer to LSU coach Paul Mainieri one I heard often growing up in New York.
When his teams were going through the worst kind of slump, legendary Yankee manager Billy Martin would pick his lineup out of a hat to shake things up. Legend holds he did it four times throughout different stops in his career — it worked three of them — most notably to spark Reggie Jackson and the tumultuous 1977 Yankees out of an early season skid.
By letting fate choose the lineup, it takes some of the pressure off by putting people in spots they aren’t used to being in. By making players adapt to a spot they’re unfamiliar with, it gives them no time to think about the slump, which usually is a huge step toward breaking it.
On at least one occasion, Martin had one of his players do the honors of picking the names. Ideally for LSU, this honor would belong to shortstop Alex Bregman, who doubles as the team’s best player and the guy in the biggest slump.
Mainieri has tried a number of things to get his biggest bat going, from moving him up in the order to ordering a media silence, but it’s only made things worse. While those moves draw more attention and pressure to Bregman’s troubles, shaking the whole team up helps lessen the stress and shift the spotlight elsewhere.
The perfect remedy may be to give Bregman the day off entirely against McNeese tonight. It’s not a benching or a knock on Bregman. It would be an opportunity to just exhale and take in a ballgame — something Hall-of-Fame manager Joe Torre used to call a mental health day.
But given Mainieri’s comments to the media on Monday, that probably won’t happen. Instead, it seems the two have elected to go with regiments of extra batting practice and a shot of belief.
Working harder and harder isn’t always the best way to get out of a hole; sometimes it just digs it deeper. From time to time, it’s better to take some of the pressure off instead of piling it on.
Just food for thought. I’m not really a doctor.
James Moran is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Beacon, N.Y.