OMAHA – For a group of pitchers identified as a person, it seems fitting that a reliever with the last name Person, which is pronounced differently than the common noun, will toe the rubber first for the LSU baseball team on Thursday night.
Senior left-hander Zac Person will lead Jack Wholestaff into the Tigers’ (54-11) rematch against TCU at 7p.m. at TD Ameritrade Park, looking to once again avoid elimination from the College World Series.
With only two solidified starters all year, Jack, or Johnny, Wholestaff has become the term LSU coach Paul Mainieri uses when the starter and subsequent relievers have an inning limit in midweek games or the third game of a weekend series. Designed to keep the opposition off balance, Mainieri usually determines how long each pitcher goes based on the flow of the game, but he acknowledged Person (2-0, 3.34 ERA) could go longer because of his experience.
Whether Person pitches deeper into the game, the Wholestaff approach has been favorable for the Tigers. In the games Mainieri has planned on using multiple pitchers, LSU is 13-0. Although Person, who hasn’t appeared since he threw ⅔ of an inning against University of Louisiana-Lafayette in the Baton Rouge Super Regional, has become the Tigers’ setup man for most of the season, he was an easy choice to give the ball to first.
“My thought was he hasn’t appeared yet in these first two games and, arguably, he’s one of our top four pitchers,” Mainieri said. “I didn’t want to wait until the eighth inning or seventh inning to bring him in if we were losing by six runs. I’d rather have him pitch meaningful innings when the game is still in doubt. Let’s see if he can get us off to a good start, and we’ll see where we are after the first couple of innings.”
Before coming to LSU, the southpaw was a starter at his native junior college, LSU-Eunice, and was the pitcher of record in LSU’s 6-2 win against Auburn earlier this season. That weekend, freshman ace Alex Lange did not pitch due to a minor injury, allowing Person to start the first three innings in that victory.
Person, who was a ninth round draft pick by the Houston Astros, also is tied for the most appearances on the team, and opponents have the lowest batting average against him among all LSU pitchers.
Following the Tigers 10-3 loss to the Horned Frogs (50-14) in their opening game in Omaha, Mainieri had a lengthy discussion with his club, sharing his vision of how LSU could rebound and make run in the tournament. After the meeting was over, Person reminded Mainieri of a similar situation his Eunice team faced in 2012.
“Zac came up to me after the meeting and says, ‘Coach, I don’t if you remember, but when I was at Eunice, we lost the first game [of the JUCO World Series] one year and came back to win it all,’” Mainieri said. “He’s a really confident kid. He’s very poised and experienced.”
Person will certainly need to show off his poise against a hungry TCU team, which is coming off a gutting 1-0 loss to Vanderbilt in a winner’s bracket game Wednesday night. Horned Frog junior left-handed pitcher Alex Young held the Commodores hitless through the first six innings before Vandy junior first baseman Zander Wiel launched a solo home run to open up the top of seventh.
Despite notching just three hits, it ended up being all the Commodores needed to send TCU to an elimination game against the Tigers. But when LSU faced the Horned Frogs on Sunday, TCU took advantage of several Tiger miscues, including four errors, five walks and three hit batters, to turn in double-digit run performance.
Person, though, felt like the Horned Frogs ability to capitalize on the mistakes was bigger than the mistakes themselves.
“You don’t get to this point without capitalizing, and that’s what they’re really good at,” Person said. “They’ll drive the ball when they need to. They’ll hit to the guy they need to hit it to to get that run in, things like that. … We had the two errors to put the two men on base, but still, without them executing base knocks, those guys don’t score anyway. … If you give them a little bit, they’ll take what you give them, and then they’ll add on to that.
“They’re a kind of team that likes to apply pressure. If we don’t give them enough, they can’t apply any pressure, like Vanderbilt did [Wednesday] night.”
No better example of not giving a team an inch to work with was what Lange did in the final eight innings against Cal State-Fullerton. After giving up three runs on four hits in the first inning, Lange was dominant, striking out 10 batters while allowing just two hits on his way to a complete game in the Tigers’ 5-3 win.
But Lange needed a boost from the offense to finally get the Tigers their first win at TD Ameritrade Park, and it finally came in the third inning. With an adjusted lineup, which featured junior shortstop Alex Bregman in the leadoff spot, the Tigers exploded for four runs on six hits to take a 4-3 lead. In total, LSU tallied 13 hits, but it was dissatisfied with the run production
Although the Tigers will face TCU’s talented redshirt freshman right-hander Mitchell Traver (9-2, 1.60 ERA), Bregman feels the lineup is on the cusp of its first truly dominant performance in Omaha, even in a large park with a usually strong, inward wind.
“We want to have a big game,” Bregman said. “We think that it is coming soon if we just keep putting together good at-bats, like we did [Wednesday]. If we get 13 hits, we should score more than five runs. … In Omaha, you can’t really hit the ball hard up. You got to hit the ball down. Anything that gets above the outfield bleachers is an out. … If we hit the ball on a line here, we’re a lot better team.”