LSU just spanked Jacksonville St. by a score of 19-1 in 7 innings. Hitting is starting to come around. This team will be an outstanding one.
Strangely, despite scoring 40 runs in the series, I believe the Tigers only hit one dinger. Actually, that's not a bad thing. The Texas San Marcos team we play next weekend took 2 of 3 from ULA (I understand that's their preferred moniker du jour) and pitched a shutout today. Should be a test for the 5 time National Champs.
It was nice and all but I wished be played some better competition. There's no reason why we shouldn't be playing a series with the likes of Arizona St, Miami, Long Beach State, Texas, Stanford, etc. Those would be some very exciting series.
LSU baseball is going to rock this year, the pitching is going to be the best we've had in several years and this team is going to hit the living sh!t out of the ball.
This year's team seems to be improved over last year's team in several areas. The pitching seems much better and pretty solid throughout, with Meier, Mestepey and Dirks as your weekend starters, numerous options for weekday starters, Determann as a good middle reliever, and Faircloth as a closer. I thought the greatest strength of last year's team was that there was not an easy out in the batting order, and that continues to be the case this year. I still think it remains to be seen how well we will be able to hit really good pitching, but unlike last year, whoever we play will be having to face the same issue since we should be able to make opponents face good pitching through an entire series. So far it also looks like our defense is improved over last year. Since last year's team went to the CWS, it sure looks like with this team we should not only go to the CWS but make some serious noise while we are in Omaha.
College baseball programs don't have a lot of money, so it's hard to schedule cross country trips. You just don't see alot of great non-conference matchups. We did a home and home with Long Beach state and Arizona State recently. And we are trying to get Rice next year. LSU is one of the few schools who can afford to make these trips, but it's difficult for most other schools. They generally schedule regional schools. Maybe we can schedule more big name schools from up north, since they usually travel down South this time of the year due to the weather.