Just when everybody thought the LSU baseball team’s season was over, it’s not.
Fresh off being swept by Ole Miss, the Tigers held a 6-12 Southeastern Conference record on April 23 and the dubious honor of being tied for last place in the conference.
With No. 11 Arkansas coming into town this past weekend, the beat of an unforgiving SEC schedule kept on.
The chances of the Tigers having success against Arkansas looked fairly bleak after coach Smoke Laval crossed out Sunday starter Derik Olvey, mid-week starter/reliever Michael Bonura and relievers Chase Dardar and Darryl Shaffer for the weekend series.
This is a pitching staff that can’t afford to lose any player for one game much less an entire series.
LSU is next to last in the SEC in earned run average in a league where coaches can’t pick up the phone and start wheeling and dealing with other teams to bring in better pitching.
But this young team showed an enormous amount of character and pride this weekend against Arkansas.
The Tigers breathed life into their postseason lives by taking two games of three from the Razorbacks in an effort that can be considered nothing less than gutsy.
Two players stick out as this weekend’s heroes, who were the catalysts for the team’s two victories.
In Friday’s game Michael Hollander is the obvious choice.
The sophomore shortstop’s walk-off solo home run halted the Tigers’ four-game SEC losing streak and rescued the team from putting a deeper hole in its bullpen by having to go into extra innings.
“I was looking fastball, and I don’t think [pitcher Devin Collis] meant to throw it there,” Hollander said after the game. “It was a mistake and a little up in the zone. I have never done that before. That was definitely the biggest hit of my career here.”
In Sunday’s victory, the unlikely effective performance from junior right-hander Edgar Ramirez saved the day for LSU.
I use the phrase “unlikely effective performance” because Ramirez’s 7.20 ERA coming into the game is flat-out bad.
But Ramirez is clearly not having the year he and the coaching staff expected.
He was forced into the game in the fourth inning after junior Daniel Forrer yielded three earned runs in 3 and 2/3 innings of work.
Ramirez located his fastball and curveball well, which helped keep the Razorbacks off their heels for 4 and 1/3 innings. He allowed just one run in his outing and recorded six strikeouts.
So where does this leave the Tigers’ chances of making the SEC tournament – something LSU clearly must do if they expect to receive an invitation to an NCAA regional?
When you’re a team fighting for its postseason life, taking care of opponents is required.
The Tigers’ series this weekend in Auburn is one of those instances.
As of now LSU sits in 10th place in the conference with the top eight teams qualifying for the conference tournament.
Auburn sits one full game ahead of LSU in the SEC, and taking another two games out of three this weekend would be ideal.
If LSU were to do so, its conference record would jump to 10-14, and the team would tie Auburn in the standings but would hold the tiebreaker.
Predicting who will beat whom in the SEC is almost as impossible as filling out a March Madness bracket.
The parity in the SEC is ridiculously high with seven teams in the SEC in the Ratings Percentage Index top 30.
But will LSU make the SEC tournament?
Including this weekend’s series, LSU has nine more SEC games to catapult themselves into the top eight of the conference.
After Auburn, the Tigers are home for a series with Vanderbilt and close out the season on the road against last-place Florida.
A midweek win May 16 against Rice wouldn’t hurt the Tigers’ cause either.
LSU fans just need to hope the team doesn’t lay an egg this weekend and pray that this young squad is starting to hit its stride at the right time of the year.
 
Kyle is a public relations freshman. Contact him at [email protected]