Tigers struggling to find pitching in season’s stretch

With LSU buried in a seven-game losing streak, Tigers coach Paul Mainieri summoned his team to a meeting room at Alex Box Stadium.

The gathering was just hours after Florida hitters battered LSU pitching for the third-straight game, and just minutes after the team’s plane touched down in the Baton Rouge Airport.

The Tigers are usually off from Sunday night to Tuesday morning following road trips. But the coach decided this meeting couldn’t wait.

“I told everybody in the bus to put their luggage in the back room and we’re going to have a team meeting right now,” Mainieri said. “So at 8 o’clock that night, in Alex Box Stadium, we met.”

The subject of the meeting was the Tigers’ recent skid.

The Tigers started the season 32-6 and appeared to be virtual shoe-ins to host both a Regional and Super Regional when postseason play begins in the summer.

But the wheels have since fallen off the wagon for the defending national champions and the coach said he called the special meeting to tell his team to refocus and take “a few steps back” heading toward the final month of the regular season.

“I basically wrote out the standings on the bulletin board and showed the kids who everyone has to play and how much baseball is left,” the coach said. “All of a sudden things looked very doable to our kids. They just had to see it in writing.”

Fresh out of the special meeting, the Tigers responded in their first game back on the diamond and snapped their losing streak in a 9-5 win against Southeastern Louisiana – a team who had swept Mississippi State earlier this season.

“We’re going to bounce back and we’re going to reward all of those who have believed in us,” Mainieri said. “We’re not going to quit and we’re going to keep battling hard to get this thing turned around.”

The root of the Tigers’ problems this season has been starting pitching.

LSU boasts the Southeastern Conference’s No. 3 offense in both batting average and runs scored.

But the Tigers are scoring plenty of runs just to stay above water because of the team’s 6.58 ERA in SEC games, which is No. 8 in the conference and worst among teams with a winning record in the league.

“We’ve struggled,” Mainieri said. “There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. We’ve hit a skid that not many of us have experienced very frequently in our lives.”

With junior Anthony Ranaudo, the team’s ace, still trying to get back to 100 percent following an early-season elbow injury, the Tigers have struggled to find pitching depth and have been pummeled by conference foe.

“When your Friday night starter doesn’t make it through two innings, it puts your team in a bind,” Mainieri said.

But Ranaudo threw a shutout inning against Southeastern out of the bullpen and the coach said the big, lanky right-hander is still a big part of the team’s plans going forward.

“We sometimes think as coaches, as fans, as supporters, think of these kids as robots almost,” he said. “We say this is what he did last year, so this is what he’s going to do this year and so on. But the game is so hard to play and Anthony had a lot of pressure on him this year … We need to get him back going [again]. That’s going to be critical. The more he gets out to the mound, I think the better he’ll feel.”

What worked against the Tigers in late April was a brutal schedule. LSU made consecutive weekend road trips to Ole Miss and Florida, both teams who have seen time in the Top 5 in the national rankings this year.

But LSU will close the season with a lighter schedule and will play Kentucky and Mississippi State to close the year.

Neither of those teams figure to make the SEC Tournament, which Mainieri hopes will jumpstart his team – something the Tigers didn’t need last year when they never lost consecutive games.

“It’s not a matter of whether or not you’re going to get knocked down during a year because everyone does,” he said. “Last year was such an unusual season. To never lose more than two games in a row, that’s just unheard of in a 56-game baseball season. Everybody gets knocked on their backside. It’s what you do when you get knocked down that matters.

“All of our dreams and hopes are still ahead of us.”

LSU junior pitcher Austin Ross unleashes a pitch in a game earlier this season. Ross is one of LSU’s most consistent pitchers this year in a pitching staff that is struggling in the Southeastern Conference.” * Photo courtesy of LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY