The Diamond Deck Blog

#1 ranked LSU finally gets an SEC series sweep and brings their SEC series record to 5-0-1, SEC record to 12-5, and overall record to 32-7. Dylan Crews has given evidence that he is the next coming of Christ as he went 7-for-13 slashing .538/.600/1.154 for an OPS of 1.754 this series. I would usually do the series MVP at the end of the blog, but it's pretty obvious who it is. Not that no one else did well, but Crews was just on a completely different level. In fact, there were a lot of good performances this weekend.  I'm not going give a play by play of every game this time, I just have some notes I would like to share. The first note is that are we running Paul Skenes into the ground? No matter what his line is, he is always pitching 6 innings, except for the South Carolina rain delay, which isn't a high number of innings, but in those 6 innings, he's always throwing around 100 pitches. In a full game, his pitch count has ranged from as low as 80 to as high as 117, wh...

Not only was it showering homers, but it was showering hits, walks, and runs. This was a very high scoring, offensive series for better or worse. There was a combined 58 runs in this series; 19.33 per game and 9.67 per team per game.  There was also a total of 9 home runs by both teams, LSU hitting 8 of them. Game 1 made us think that this series would be smooth sailing against the #12 team in the nation, but it was anything but that. We started RED HOT scoring 14 runs in the first 3 innings. What was crazy was that Kentucky had 1 out with a runner on and they decide to intentionally walk Dylan Crews... in the first inning! They thought it would be easier to face Tommy White I guess, which statistically they would be correct, Dylan Crews leads Tommy White in every offensive statistic. That decision came back to bite them as  Tommy White scorches a 2-RBI double to score Gavin Dugas and Crews. Now they have a runner on second and 1 out and of course Cade Beloso gets hit by pitch...

I don't have much to say about this series, so this won't be a long blog. It was a pretty anticlimactic series only playing 2 games due to weather. The weather played a bigger part in this series than just cancelling game 3; it caused game 1 to go into a weather delay which doesn't sound too impactful, but it caused our best pitcher and South Carolina's worst pitcher to hit the showers early after just 3 innings. Heading into the delay we were down 3-1 which is not an insurmountable deficit by any means. South Carolina's starter came into the game with a 5.17 ERA and 1.34 WHIP so it was only a matter of time before we starting hitting him. Alas we entered a rain delay which forced both starters out of the game making us put in Sam Dutton for some reason and South Carolina to put in James Hicks who has a sub 3.00 ERA and sub 1.00 WHIP. I'm not even sure why we put in Sam Dutton in a 2 run game, but we did and he didn't even do that bad. It was the next pitche...

Last year during the Super Regionals, Tennessee's mantra was "who's your daddy?" implying that they owned/would own anyone who got in their way during the tournament. Alas, it turned out that Notre Dame was their daddy as they took down the 1 seed Volunteers. At the time, it was hard for us to talk trash since we lost in regionals to Southern Miss, Kennesaw State, and Army. Over the weekend, LSU adopted Tennessee from Notre Dame officially becoming Tennessee's daddy, taking 2 out of 3, winning the series.  Once again, I got there too late to get a spot in the student section, so I had to go back to standing room only. I didn't even leave late, I left an hour before game time, but I sat in bumper to bumper traffic for almost 30 minutes. But you didn't even need to see the field to know what was going on; you could hear it and feel it in the stadium. Paul Skenes proved once again why he is an ace in the SEC as if he even needed to do it again. He went 7 full...