No. 1 LSU finds the late hits it needs in a 6-5 win over Southeastern
On a damp, cold windy Tuesday evening in Alex Box Stadium when motivation was in short supply for No. 1 ranked LSU, the struggling Tigers were seeking a hit to ignite a late-game rally against winless Southeastern Louisiana.
That hit happened to be LSU junior shortstop Josh Smith taking a 90-plus miles per hour fastball in the chops, passing a brief concussion test and then scoring the game-tying run in the seventh inning of what became a 6-5 victory.
Just a couple thousand or so hearty souls in the stands who stayed until the end were rewarded in the eighth. That’s when LSU coach Paul Mainieri correctly pushed pinch-hitting buttons to manufacture the winning run, followed by Tigers’ junior reliever Todd Peterson hitting 98 mph on the radar gun closing out the victory in the ninth.
The way the game transpired for the 4-0 Tigers and the 0-4 Lions was a prime example that baseball can be damned mystifying, that a fastball in the teeth and two bloop singles can change a team’s fortune in a heartbeat.
“Baseball is the most humbling sport,” said LSU catcher Brock Mathis, whose seeing-eye RBI single to shallow left field in the eighth scored pinch-hitter Giovanni DiGiacomo with what proved to be the game-winning run. “You’re just mishitting balls and then it takes a bloop hit to help your team succeed.”
For the first six innings, the Tigers were trying to find a spark against Southeastern Louisiana starting pitcher Trey Shaffer.
Shaffer, after throwing six wild pitches in the first three innings, settled and retired the next 10 of 11 batters including nine flyouts. It happened after LSU evened the game at 4-4 in the third inning on Tigers’ first baseman Drew Bianco’s left-field line hugging RBI double.
At that point, SLU’s best attribute might have been its short memory. Just this past weekend, 11 Lions’ pitchers got rocked for 43 hits allowing 41 runs in getting swept at home by Louisiana Tech in a season-opening series.
You wouldn’t have known it the way lefty Shaffer was calmly setting down the Tigers’ batting order, holding LSU scoreless in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings.
Mainieri admitted he was concerned about Tuesday night because of the lousy weather (“The conditions were just brutal,” he said), the low turnout (the game was moved to a 4 p.m. start from 6 p.m. to avoid more inclement weather) and the fact the Tigers didn’t practice Monday because it’s the day they normally rest heading into the week of play.
But all that fretting took a backseat when Smith, who sat out almost all of last season with a back injury, couldn’t get out of the way of a Shaffer fastball that dipped inside on the opening pitch of LSU’s seventh inning at-bat.
“I swear to God when he got hit in the mouth, I saw the whole season going down the drain,” Mainieri said of Smith, who entered the game hitting .667. “That kid is so valuable to our whole team. . .he’s hitting about .8000 so far, he’s our leader, he’s our shortstop.
“His mouth is bloody. He has a fat lip. He said no teeth felt loose. They did a quick concussion test out there and he answered every question correctly.”
When Smith asked for his batting helmet and continued on to first base – he then advanced to third base on a throwing error on a Brandt Broussard sacrifice bunt and scored the game-tying run at 4-4 on a Antoine Duplantis ground out – he lit the fuse of Peterson who made his relief season-debut with two outs in the SLU eighth.
“Seeing No. 4 take one in the mouth, putting his helmet, go to first, come back out and continue to make plays for this team, that fired me up man,” Peterson said. “Right then and there, I knew I was going to do anything for this team.
“This team is my family. We love each other, we’re brothers, seeing that happen (Smith hit in the mouth) I’ll die for him. I’ll go to war for any of these boys on this team.”
While Peterson used 12 pitches to retire the four batters he faced to secure the win, Mainieri called upon consecutive pinch-hitters DiGiacomo and senior Chris Reid to squeeze out the game-deciding run in the bottom of the eighth.
DiGiacomo barely tapped a dying flare over SLU shortstop Cody Grosse, and then advanced when Reid intentionally swung at a wild pitch to protect DiGiacomo’s stolen base journey to second base on a called hit-and-run.
Then, Mainieri switched the call and had Reid lay down a perfect sacrifice bunt (“The pitch tailed out more than I anticipated, and I had to reach out a little more,” Reid said) a few feet in front of the plate just inside the third base line. DiGiacomo took third base, then raced home when Mathis’ soft RBI single died perfectly in open space between a backpedaling Grosse and a couple of fast-closing outfielders.
“I thought our approach at the plate wasn’t very good, we made a lot of easy outs,” said Mainieri of his team which finished with eight hits. “We were fortunate to scratch across the runs we did. It wasn’t a stellar performance by any stretch of the imagination.”
The Tigers had been scheduled to play at Northwestern (La.) State in Natchitoches on Wednesday night. But due to rain and field condition, the game has been postponed until March 12.
LSU plays again Friday when it starts a three-game home series against Bryant College, a member of the Northeast Conference located in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The Bulldogs, who play their home games in a 500-seat home stadium, joined Division 1 in 2009. They were the third seed at the 2014 Baton Rouge Regional and were eliminated after losing two one-run games in Alex Box Stadium.