It Was Fun While It Lasted

Weapons check…complete.

The numbers are absurd: 16-1, 13-0 at home, 6 run rules, 11 games won by 10 or more runs. a differential of 157, a team batting average of .338.

Dylan Crews is batting. 519/.926/.653. Paul Skenes has a .75 ERA in 24 innings with a K/BB of 12.00.

It’s been fun watching LSU toy with their opponents, but unfortunately playtime is over. Hope you had fun.

LSU opens the SEC portion of their schedule on Friday night against #15 Texas A&M, 13-4 Texas A&M. And that’s the easiest out due up for LSU, as LSU then draws Arkansas, and then Tennessee.

#7 and 13-2 Arkansas. #2 and 14-3 Tennessee.

Western Michigan, Southern, Kansas State, Iowa, Sam Houston State, Texas, Butler, Central Connecticut State, Lamar, Samford, New Orleans. All unranked.

I hope you enjoyed LSU seeing how few innings they can play via run rule in the first month of the season, because those are coming to an end soon. Take a picture of Dylan Crews’s statline and say bon voyage to Skenes’ ERA, because the former is going to go down and the letter will go up.

This is the tax we pay for playing in the SEC, hands down the deepest conference in college baseball. And it’s one I’ll pay willingly. Like I said before Opening Day, I want to see this team challenged. I want to see them put through the ringer, because that’s how we enter into June with confidence. That’s the only way we enter June with confidence.

Pressure is a privilege, and in college baseball the SEC is the biggest privilege there is. If you come out on top, you have everything before you. The hard part is coming out on top.

And I’m glad we had the first month we did, because now at least we know what we are capable of. We’re not likely to be unloading 35 runs a weekend moving forward because of the conditions we’re facing, but we know that we can.

Dabo Swinney is a man of many faults, but one thing I’ll credit him with is getting his team to perform at a high level when it matters most because he breaks up the season into phases and challenges his team to perform as well as they can in each other them, the next more intense and demanding than the last.

Phase one for LSU baseball is complete. The weapons test has concluded. Now it’s weapons free. The dogfight is about to begin.