If the LSU baseball team wants to make a return trip to Omaha this summer, a bit of selective amnesia will go a long way toward punching its ticket.
For those who spent last summer living under a rock, the Tigers cruised into the College World Series as one of the favorites, only to be bounced out without winning a game.
LSU can use the disappointment of going 0-2 in Omaha as motivational fuel, but in order to avoid complacency, it must totally turn the page on the school-record 57-win season and all the accolades it accumulated along the way.
The first part of that equation shouldn’t be a problem. All the Tigers need to do is follow their shortstop’s lead.
Alex Bregman had one of the most-decorated freshman seasons in baseball history, collecting National Freshman of the Year, the Brooks Wallace Award for national shortstop of the year and first-team All-America honors along the way.
Despite all the awards and surpassing even the wildest of expectations placed on him, Bregman fell short of his own stated goal — winning the national championship.
And for all Bregman did to get the team to Omaha, he bears more than his fair share of responsibility for LSU’s early exit. He finished the World Series hitless and his eighth inning error allowed UCLA to score the game-winning run.
A letdown of that magnitude would crush most freshmen. Bregman instead took it as motivation.
“Baseball is a game of failure,” Bregman said. “You have to deal with your failure, get back and go after it again. I like failure because it pushes you to get better. We strive to be better around here, and when we lose a game, it motivates us that much more to go out and win the next one.”
The problem for Bregman and company is they’ve had to wait months for that next one to come around.
The worst part of getting so close to the finish line and failing is it makes it that much harder to start over from square one the next time. After such a long journey, it can be difficult to simply press the reset button.
But teams that don’t put the past season’s success out of mind risk falling into a well-known trap. It’s far too easy for a team to throw its gloves and bats out on the field and think it can coast back to Omaha just because it did it the season before.
This is especially crucial for this LSU team because most of those responsible for last season’s success are no longer part of the team.
Bregman, third baseman Christian Ibarra and ace of the staff Aaron Nola still comprise a solid core of the team, but coach Paul Mainieri will have to completely remake the right side of his infield, the middle of his batting order, the back end of his starting rotation and his bullpen.
Mainieri still has capable players on his roster, but guys like Mason Katz, JaCoby Jones, Ryan Eades and Chris Cotton don’t replace themselves overnight.
Maybe in a few months the replacements will have settled in nicely, but until then Omaha should be treated more as a goal way off in the horizon instead of the center of attention.
“We’re working toward Omaha, but we realize it doesn’t start in Omaha,” Bregman said. “It starts against UNO on Feb. 14.”
James Moran is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Beacon, N.Y.