By RON HIGGINS, Journal Sports
BATON ROUGE – It wasn’t long ago that Jay Johnson was placed on the mountaintop of head baseball coaches.
And it wasn’t just at LSU after the Tigers’ diamond boss won the school’s eighth national title last June.
It was all across college baseball where he became the first coach to win two national championships in his first four seasons on the job.
Last year, when all the magic fell in place, with a starting pitching rotation featuring the nation’s No. 1 and No. 2 strikeout leaders, with a lethal batting rotation one through nine, with flawless fielding at every position, the Tigers went 10-1 in the NCAA Tournament. They won five straight College World Series games for another national title.
The buzz from the LSU fan base was that the 48-year-old Johnson was young enough to surpass the five national championships won by legendary former LSU head coach Skip Bertman.
Now, just more than a month of the 2026 season in the books, nobody is talking about Johnson’s legacy. They’d just like LSU to master baseball fundamentals and win an SEC series.
The preseason No. 1-ranked Tigers (16-9, 2-4 SEC) have lost eight of their last 13 games, including their first two league series at Vanderbilt eight days ago and this past weekend at home vs. No. 8 Oklahoma.
“There are things that this group (the 2026 team) doesn’t do as well as that group (the 2025 squad) clearly,” Johnson said. “I’ve tried to subscribe when you’re playing great, like last year’s 17-game winning streak and the 16-game winning streak between the end of last year and the start of this year, that things aren’t always as good as they seem. That’s why we always keep it about the play.”
Which hasn’t been acceptable the last three weeks by a program that refers to itself as “The Powerhouse of College Baseball.”
Terrible pitching (an 11.07 earned run average) plagued LSU vs. Vanderbilt. Against Oklahoma, LSU’s hitting totally disappeared with a .202 batting average.
“Baseball is hard, especially hitting,” Tigers’ senior left fielder Chris Stanfield said after Saturday’s loss.
He had one of the team’s few consistent shining lights, hitting .333 in SEC games, including six runs scored. He had a homer and double in Saturday afternoon’s 4-3 Game 3 loss in the series finale after LSU won Thursday night’s contest 7-1 and lost 4-2 in Friday night’s game.
The only other Tiger who could hold his head high was sophomore Casan Evans.
Five days after the worst pitching performance of his college career, giving up five hits and five runs with five walks in just three innings as the Tigers’ starter in the series 13-12 opening loss at Vanderbilt, he struck out a career-high 15 batters and allowed no earned runs in 7.2 innings in Thursday’s opener against Oklahoma.
“Last week, I just had a slow tempo on the mound,” Evans said. “I don’t really know (why). I’ve always pitched with the fast tempo since high school. Same tempo, same wind up, same everything pretty much.
“I really think that was the reason why last week did not go the way I wanted. We sped up the tempo this week. I wanted the ball back right after I struck somebody out. Just got myself in the right headspace and went after the next batter.”
Evans was LSU’s lone highlight reel because most of the Tigers’ bats were ice cold.
Right fielder Jake Brown’s team-leading .400 batting average dropped almost 20 points to .381. He was 1 for 7, despite drawing six walks.
Returning national title team starters Brown, shortstop Steven Milam and centerfielder Derek Curiel batted a combined 4 for 29 (.138) with one RBI.
Once again, LSU’s defense was shaky. After committing four errors vs. Vanderbilt, the Tigers had five against the Sooners.
The most damaging was freshman second baseman Jack Ruckert bobbling a potential ground ball in the top of the eighth in Saturday’s game that would have allowed LSU reliever Devin Sheerin to escape the mess created by previous reliever Gavin Guidry.
Instead, OU tied the game at 2-2 on Ruckert’s error before Sooners’ catcher Brendan Brock’s sacrifice fly immediately scored what proved to be the winning run.
The worst news of the weekend was that LSU’s second-best starting pitcher Cooper Moore is sidelined for two to three weeks with swelling in his pitching arm.
“There’s nothing structurally wrong, but there is some swelling that we need to get down,” said Johnson, who pulled Moore after he uncharacteristically threw his first pitch of the fifth inning in the dirt in Friday’s loss. “The only way to do that is to give him some time.”
The OU series was part of a nine-game homestand for the Tigers, who host Louisiana Tech (15-9) on Tuesday night at 6:30, followed by a three-game SEC series vs. No. 15 Kentucky (19-4, 4-2) starting at 6:30 on Friday night.
Here’s the series recap:
GAME 1: LSU 7, OKLAHOMA 1 – The 15 strikeouts by Evans in Thursday’s opener were the most by an LSU pitcher in an SEC regular-season game since May 5, 2023, when Paul Skenes recorded 15 strikeouts at Auburn.
The Tigers expanded their 1-0 first-inning lead to 5-0 in the second. They took advantage of three Oklahoma errors, and LSU third baseman John Pearson stroked an RBI single.
GAME 2: OKLAHOMA 4, LSU 2 – OU starting pitcher LJ Mercurius allowed two runs on four hits in 5.1 innings with two walks and seven strikeouts on Friday.
Pearson’s lead-off home run in the second gave LSU a 1-0 edge and Tigers’ catcher Omar Serna Jr. hit a run-scoring single in the seventh. The Sooners scored a run each in the third, fourth, fifth and ninth innings.
GAME 3: OKLAHOMA 4, LSU 3 – Powered by Serna’s two-run homer in the first inning and Stanfield’s solo blast in the fifth, the Tigers built a 3-1 lead in Saturday’s finale.
They couldn’t hold on. OU scored three eighth-inning runs, capitalizing on two Tigers’ errors.
Sooners second baseman Kyle Branch had an RBI single, third baseman Camden Johnson contributed a game-tying run-scoring groundout and Brock launched a game-winning RBI sacrifice fly.
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com
Continue your article here…