By RON HIGGINS, Journal Sports
BATON ROUGE – There’s no telling how many notepads Jay Johnson has gone through as he starts his 13th season as a college head baseball coach.
It’s a well-known fact that Johnson, who begins his fourth year guiding LSU when the Tigers open the 2025 schedule with a three-game series at home starting Friday at 2 p.m. vs. Purdue-Fort Wayne, usually scribbles starting lineups and pitching combinations whenever he has idle time 365 days a year.
But heading into this season, the Tigers, who are ranked No. 2 by Perfect Game as well as No. 3 by Baseball America and the USA Today Coaches poll, have a plethora of talent at all positions.
“I think we’ve got three teams that can can truly win a national championship,” said sophomore returning pitcher Kade Anderson, who figures to be LSU’s opening day starter. “That shows you the kind of guys that Coach Johnson brought in.”
Baseball America magazine rated LSU’s newcomer class of D1 transfers, freshmen signees and JUCO transfers No. 1 in the nation for the 2025 season. The Tigers’ class nine players that were listed among Baseball America’s top 100 college transfers and 11 players in the magazine’s ranking of the top 500 prospects for last July’s major league baseball draft.
The abundance of new talent forced Johnson to do something different.
“Notoriously, I’ve burned through a lot of paper by now (in the past) on options and combos,” Johnson said. “I did not do that this year intentionally. I want to kind of let this whole process play out of seeing everybody. We made some adjustments with some players on both sides of the ball, so that some guys are different than they were in the fall in a really good way, particularly on the pitching staff.”
Johnson said he didn’t start digging into potential batting orders and pitching scenarios until last week.
Today, we’ll look a projection of LSU’s opening day position players followed by a Thursday preview of the Tigers’ pitching staff and catchers.
1st base: Returning junior Jared Jones is the bell cow of the Tigers’ offense. Rated by D1 Baseball as the No. 1 first baseman in college baseball, Jones hit .301 (69-for-229) for LSU last season with 14 doubles, two triples, 28 homers, 59 RBI and 56 runs.
“Plate discipline and swing decisions like taking walks and working the count were great for me moving through the year last year,” Jones said. “I’ve been working to take that to another level.”
2nd base: Junior Daniel Dickinson, a transfer from Utah Valley, is rated as college baseball’s third-best second baseman. He had a .369 career batting average in two seasons at UVU with 27 homers, 95 RBI and a .457 on-base percentage.
“I can affect the game in a bunch of different ways that you may not see very often,” said Dickinson, who came to Utah Valley as a preferred walk-on. “I’m a confident player playing with a huge chip on my shoulder.”
Shortstop: Returning sophomore Steven “Monster” Milam started 59 games at second base last season and was a first-team Freshman All-American after he hit .326 with 40 RBI and eight homers. He’s already rated by D1 Baseball as college baseball’s No. 6 shortstop as he moves to another position.
“He’s probably the best defensive infielder that we have,” Johnson said of Milam, who hit a team-best. 386 in 10 postseason games including two walk-off homers. “If you played him in shortstop, third base, or obviously second base, he would do a great job.”
3rd base: Senior Michael Braswell III, who started 64 games as LSU’s shortstop last season after transferring from South Carolina, slides over one spot to third base. After a slow start a year ago, Braswell finished hitting .311 with 36 RBI and four homers.
“At the beginning of last season, I kind of wasn’t in the right mental space at the plate and really in the field,” Braswell said. “I was dealing with tendonitis in both knees.”
Left field: Newcomer Derek Curiel, picked by D1 Baseball as the preseason SEC Freshman of the Year, is the only freshman signee to crack the starting lineup.
Curiel, a native of West Covina, Calif., batted .314 with 33 hits (including 10 doubles), 21 RBI and 19 stolen bases in his senior year at Orange Lutheran High School. He was ranked as the No. 10 overall high school player in the country and as the second-best high school player in the state of California by Perfect Game.
“West Coast high school baseball is a bit of different breed,” Curiel said a couple of months ago. “I felt like that helped prepare me for college baseball just because of the talent we get from southern California.”
Center field: Auburn junior transfer Chris Stanfield started 91 games in his first two seasons at AU. Last season when he started 51 games in center, he hit .276 with 25 RBI, four home runs and tied for the team lead with 16 multi-hit games.
“I was like a chop and run hitter (at Auburn),” said Stanfield, who had two hits as a freshman off LSU ace Paul Skenes and had three hits vs. the Tigers last year in Alex Box Stadium. “My first two weeks here were shaky because I was breaking out of habits that I’ve been doing my whole life. But now the (improved) results are showing up in batting practices and in (intrasquad) games.”
Right field: Sophomore returnee Jake Brown started 21 games (12 games in centerfield, nine games in right field) as a freshman in last season. He batted .264 with 13 RBI and four homers, including .286, five RBI and two homers in LSU’s postseason games.
“Coach Johnson talks about the big jump from a player’s freshman year to a sophomore year,” Brown said. “I’m a lot more comfortable. I was able to work on my mental game a lot in summer ball and applying that one pitch at a time.”
Designated hitter: Senior Josh Pearson “has been in the middle of a lot of our most significant wins the last three years,” Johnson said. He has played in 166 games in his first three seasons at LSU with 123 career starts. He’s just a .256 career hitter, but also a three-time NCAA Regional all-tourney team member with four doubles, two triples, five homers and 19 RBI in NCAA tourney games.
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com