BATON ROUGE — LSU head baseball coach Jay Johnson plopped into a chair late Monday night in the media interview tent.
His No. 6 nationally seeded Tigers had to claw and scratch to the final out to secure a 10-6 win over feisty Arkansas-Little Rock in a winner-take-all, loser-go-home NCAA Baton Rouge Regional championship game.
“Massive hat tip, massive respect,” said a visibly relieved Johnson of the Trojans, the only squad in the 64-team NCAA tourney field with a losing record. “Absolutely took us to the mat.”
After the first two innings when UALR led 5-1 and sent LSU’s starting pitcher, Zac Cowan, to the showers, a palpable feeling of uneasiness spread over Alex Box Stadium like an invisible mist.
Nightmares of massive postseason flops of the past on this very field to vast underdogs began creeping into the heads of Tigers’ fans.
Would this be another Stony Brook in the 2012 Super Regionals when the No. 7 national seed Tigers won the opening game before losing the last two, scoring a combined three runs?
Or a replay of the 2016 Super Regionals when No. 8 national seed LSU was swept by unheralded Coastal Carolina? And then Coastal proceeded two weeks later to win the national championship over a University of Arizona team coached by Johnson.
Maybe the 2025 Tigers would join the list of three other SEC teams earning top 8 national seeds and homefield advantage – No. 1 Vanderbilt, No. 2 Texas, and No. 7 Georgia – which had seasons shockingly end by losing regionals they hosted.
Few people outside Nashville and Texas were upset to see the Commodores get grounded by a school named after the Wright Brothers (Wright State) and the Longhorns get left in the dust (Meep! Meep!) by a school whose nickname is Roadrunners (Texas-San Antonio).
Johnson was somewhat oblivious about the elimination of nine of the 13 SEC teams that received NCAA tournament bids. He was too busy resuscitating his squad after its stunning 10-4 loss to UALR on Sunday night in what was the Trojans’ third consecutive elimination game win.
He was thankful he was playing at home when things got hairy with UALR jumping hard on LSU early in Monday night’s game.
Cowan got yanked long before Johnson anticipated, and the Tigers had just left the bases loaded for the third time in the nine innings dating back to Sunday night’s bellyflop.
But the home crowd of 11,656 refused to let their team lose.
They booed the strike-ball calls of plate umpire Mike Morris, whose strike zone had shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. They let out collective sighs when UALR center fielder Zach Henry kept making ridiculous catches of balls driven almost to the wall.
“I don’t ever remember it (the crowd) like that,” Johnson said. “The thing I’m the most grateful for is maybe in those nervous moments, I felt like they really lifted the team.”
When the Tigers finally broke through with designated hitter Ethan Frey’s three-RBI triple to cut UALR’s lead to 5-4 in the bottom of the fourth, you could have heard the roar of relief down River Road to downtown Baton Rouge.
“We have the best fan base in the country playing at home,” Frey said. “It’s an advantage, whether people want to admit it or not, but it’s unbelievable.”
The Tigers scored at least one run in five of the last six innings, got airtight fielding, and rode the lockdown pitching of reliever Casan Evans, who struck out 12 of the 22 batters he faced.
It was the exact victory blueprint Johnson likes to follow.
Credit him for not remaining status quo on LSU’s batting order. Except for leadoff hitter Derek Curiel, he moved the remaining eight batters to new spots in the lineup.
He moved Frey from fifth to second in the order, shortstop Steven Milam from sixth to third, and struggling first baseman Jared Jones from second to sixth.
The result was that Frey went 4 for 4 with 4 RBI, Milam’s ground ball RBI scored Frey with a go-ahead run in the seventh, and a seemingly more relaxed Jones temporarily broke a massive slump with a 2 for 5 night that included a two-run homer in LSU’s three-run ninth.
“You take a risk when you have a lot to gain,” Johnson said of his lineup shuffling. “We had a chance to play a Super Regional at home, two wins to go to Omaha. Seven more to win a national championship, maybe eight.
“It was time to take a risk, and then you don’t just do it to do it. There’s never a decision in this program made just because I want to make a decision. I’ll walk you through the whole thing.
“Derek Curiel is the engine of this offense. That’s what he is. How he plays inspires the team. Right now, Ethan Frey is one of the best hitters in the country, and I wanted to get him up as much as we possibly could. Steven’s at-bats this weekend were his best as a player. He’ll play baseball a long time if he takes the caliber of at-bats that he has.”
Now, the Tigers face West Virginia in Saturday’s 1 p.m. Super Regional opener. Considering five of the top 11 national seeds were erased in the regionals (including the top two seeds for the second time in the 26-year history of the seeding system) and six teams who advanced to the Super Regionals weren’t ranked in the top 16 national seeds, LSU has good chances of making noise in the College World Series.
But first, it has to get there. And that’s not going to be easy from a team that often doesn’t make it easy on itself.
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