College baseball preview: Can new-look LSU repeat as CWS champ?

The LSU baseball team was a consensus preseason No. 1 pick a year ago.

The Tigers endured a few bumps along the way before winding up where they were expected to wind up – in the infield at TD Ameritrade Park dog-piling after winning their 7th national championship.

Then Paul Skenes was the No. 1 overall pick overall in the MLB Draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates and Dylan Crews was the No. 2 overall pick by the Washington Nationals. Tre Morgan and Ty Floyd also headed to the pros.

LSU, which opens the season with a home game against VMI on Friday, Feb. 16, is not a consensus preseason No. 1 in 2024, but with several key players from last year’s champions and highly-rated transfer and recruiting classes forming another extremely talented roster, it’s pretty much a consensus Top 5 pick.

Good morning. The Tigers play baseball this week.

That is all. pic.twitter.com/96sEVWmct4

— LSU Baseball (@LSUbaseball) February 12, 2024

In other words, the Tigers are capable of winning another national championship, but this season won’t be played out in the context of “national championship or bust” as last season was. Louisiana sports betting sites have the Tigers’ preseason odds at +750 to win the College World Series.

Though LSU will be routinely referred to as defending national champion, third-year head coach Jay Johnson has a different theme for this season.

“There’s no thought of defending anything,” Johnson said. “It’s about attacking a new opportunity.”

That opportunity, of course, is for a different collection of players to write their own story and try to win their own championship. But it’s also an opportunity for Johnson to further validate his selection as custodian of one of the elite programs in college baseball.

He wasn’t hired by Scott Woodward to win 1 national championship, though that was the first item on an ambitious checklist.

Johnson wasn’t brought in with the expectation that he would win a national championship every season, though some of the more whimsical followers of the program might have that in mind.

Realistically, Johnson was hired to periodically win national championships, make regular trips to Omaha and rebuild the program to a level where a trip to the CWS is a realistic goal each season.

His ultimate task is to establish a program in which everyone takes care of business on a daily basis in a manner reminiscent of Skip Bertman’s Tigers program from 1984-2001.

This Tigers team appears to have the talent to return to Omaha and perhaps dog-pile there again. The next step is for Johnson is to get this team to approach each day the same way that last year’s team approached every day.

Ultimately it wasn’t just the extremely talented roster, which also included Tommy White (who’s back), that enabled LSU to win the championship last season. It also was the ability to overcome adversity.

“They weren’t normal people,” Johnson said.

The path to the title wasn’t as smooth as the lofty preseason expectations might have suggested.

The Tigers went 8-9 down the stretch of the regular season and 1-2 in the SEC tournament as concerns about the quality of pitching depth behind Skenes started to look like it might be a fatal flaw.

But things changed during the NCAA Tournament. LSU swept through the Baton Rouge regional and the Baton Rouge Super Regional to return to its home away from home in Omaha.

Skenes shut down Tennessee in the CWS opener, but that was followed by a 1-run loss to Wake Forest that dropped the Tigers into the losers’ bracket.

That meant LSU had to beat the Volunteers a second time and win 2 games in a row against Wake Forest to set up its title series matchup against Florida. The Tigers won Game 1 in 11 innings, but concerns about the pitching depth resurfaced in a 24-4 loss in Game 2 on Sunday.

Johnson recently reminded a group of supporters of the mood outside the team after that embarrassing score.

“You all were losing your minds,” he said with a grin. “You remember that and I remember that.”

But the “not normal people” shook off the beating and turned the tables on the Gators in the winner-take-all Game 3, rolling to an 18-4 victory.

Johnson was matter of fact about the dramatic turnaround from Game 2 to Game 3, or more to the point, from Game 70 to Game 71.

“In Game 71 there was no way the stakes were ever going to change,” Johnson said, “because every game that team played, it mattered as much to them as it possibly could.”

And that’s the mission for the 2024 Tigers: to maintain “the focus and competitive nature” that the 2023 team had from Game 1 to the last game – no matter what number it winds up being or where it winds up being played.

That mindset requires the recognition, Johnson said, that “it’s not an automatic right that you’re in the NCAA Tournament because you play at LSU.”

But a trip the NCAA Tournament – and a deep run into it – seems like a foregone conclusion for this year’s team, which returns White (whom Johnson called “the best hitter in the country”) and No. 1 starter Thatcher Hurd, among others.

The Tigers added most notably No. 2 starter Gage Jump (UCLA transfer), No. 3 starter Luke Holman (Alabama transfer), outfielder Mac Bingham (Arizona transfer), shortstop Michael Braswell (South Carolina) as well as highly touted freshmen in left-hander Cameron Johnson and outfielder Jake Brown.

This year’s team appears to be shaped differently than last year’s with the starting pitching and overall pitching depth supplanting the hitting as the top strength, though it should be another well-rounded team.

The goal is “to do common things in an uncommon way,” which basically means being fundamentally sound and doing so in a spectacular way when necessary.

Johnson has a very long way to go to match Bertman’s 5 national championships, but he can join Bertman as the only Tigers coaches to win consecutive national championships (1996-97).

Whether Johnson can establish himself as the only LSU coach other than Bertman to win multiple championships (Paul Mainieri won his only title in 2009) in 2024 is secondary.

The main thing is for the Tigers to daily compete to the standard that last year’s team did. The rest will take care of itself.

Les East

Les East is a New Orleans-based football writer who covers LSU for SaturdayDownSouth.com. Follow him on Twitter @Les_East.