LSU coach Paul Mainieri promised to re-evaluate his team following the Tigers’ poor performance against Appalachian State this past weekend.
Mainieri said, though he never wants to lose, losing early in the season shows the team’s flaws and provides them an opportunity to improve.
“When you have a couple games like we had, it does tell you some things about your team early enough in the year that you can still tweak some things and make your team stronger,” Manieri said. “If there’s a silver lining in it all, that’s what it is.”
The first adjustment Mainieri will make will be changing the top of the lineup when No. 14 LSU (5-2) faces Grambling State (5-2) tonight at Alex Box Stadium. Concerned about speed, Mainieri will move former football players Arby Fields and Jared Foster to the No. 1 and 2 spots in the order.
“Our team speed at the top of the order has to be better than it is,” Mainieri said. “We had a chance in the first inning on Saturday … and we hit into a double play. That’s something that just can’t happen, especially at the top of the order.”
One of those two players will start in left field, and the other will be the designated hitter. Foster, a freshman who was a walk-on quarterback this season, has started three games this year, hitting .357 with five RBIs.
Fields, who was a running back at Northwestern before transferring to LSU, has appeared in five games but didn’t get his first hit until Sunday, a RBI-triple in the ninth inning when the Tigers trailed Appalachian State by 11.
“Some people may have said that was an irrelevant at-bat, but to me it wasn’t,” Mainieri said. “You give a kid an opportunity, and you start to see something in a player when you give him a chance, and that chance parlays into additional chances.”
The struggling LSU offense will try to find its stride against Grambling State starting pitcher Joel Deleon. The sophomore lefty threw 5 1/3 innings against Stephen F. Austin last week, surrendering six runs on seven hits with four walks and two strikeouts.
“He pitched well for about five innings, and then they got to him,” Mainieri said. “His line score didn’t look so good, but he pitched well early in the game.”
Starting opposite Deleon will be freshman lefty Cody Glenn, who will make his first career start. Glenn threw three innings against McNeese State last week, giving up two runs and striking out four.
“It’s going to be very important for Cody [to start well],” Mainieri said. “Especially for a team that hasn’t swung the bats well for a couple of days, the last thing in the world you want to happen to that team is to fall behind in the game and the players start to press.”
Mainieri said he hopes his adjustments will take effect immediately, but he remains adamant that his team’s performance against Appalachian State is not evident of the squad’s full potential.
“I still have an awful lot of confidence in them,” Mainieri said. “We’re not all of a sudden a bad team. I’ve been around this game so many years to know that sometimes circumstances create a situation. We’re not that bad of a team as it looked like [Sunday].”
 
—-
Contact Hunter Paniagua at [email protected]