Pucker up and Kiss it Good Bye (Week)

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This blog will be less a series recap and more an SEC Tournament preview, but to quickly recap the Georgia series, LSU finally won another SEC series after dropping the previous two. LSU is now 7-2-1 in SEC series, 19-10 in SEC games, and 42-13 overall. LSU offense went off this past weekend scoring 21 runs over 3 games (averaging 7 runs per game), 14 of those runs came off of 11 homeruns. In other news, pitchers not names Paul Skenes continue to blow. Not everyone else had a bad weekend, but no one else besides Nate Ackenhausen who didn't pitch has an ERA below 3.00. Riley Cooper surprisingly did not allow a single run... he also did not record a single out in 2 appearances either, but I'm more of a glass half full kinda guy. Gavin Guidry and Griffin Herring were the only two pitcher to go at least 1 full inning and not allow a run. I won't go through all the stats, but the series MVP is believe it or not Josh Pearson. He hit a very clutch homerun in game 1 to take the lead in the 12th inning and drove in 3 runs in game 2, brining his RBI total for the weekend to 5. It is definitely not Thatcher Hurd. "bUt He KePt Us In ThE gAmE." Sure, but he's the only reason we even went to extra innings after he gave up back to back jacks allowing Georgia to tie the game. I don't care how well he pitched in extra innings; cleaning up his own mess is the least he could do. 

South Carolina man handled Georgia in the 1st round of the SEC Tournament which means #3 LSU will face South Carolina in the 2nd round tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM in Hoover, Alabama. I was really hoping that Georgia could get lucky and squeeze past South Carolina since we just took 2 out of 3 from them, but now we have to face the team we split a series with. I believe that this round will be the hardest round for LSU if we win. LSU can probably handle everyone else, especially considering it's double elimination. The only question is who will start game 1 versus South Carolina? The obvious answer should be Paul Skenes- we pitch our best pitcher versus the best SEC offense (besides LSU), but the only problem is that he just pitched Thursday, so he will be on a shortened rest. Not only did he just pitch, but he just threw 116 pitches. This time the situation was a bit different. Usually he throws 100+ pitches, it's in a game where LSU is throttling the opponent, but this time, it was a tied game when he came out, so we kinda needed our best pitcher. I still don't agree with having our best pitcher throw 116 pitches in a meaningless game. We weren't go to move up or down in the SEC standings regardless of the outcome of this one game. Skenes should have been limited to 60 pitches give or take to save him for the tournament. I didn't agree much with how Paul Mainieri managed the rotation and bullpen in his last year, but one this I do agree with in hindsight is that he took out Landon Marceaux, out best pitcher that year, extremely early to allow him to rest in preparation for the SEC Tournament. We didn't need this one game; we need to win the SEC Tournament and that probably won't happen if we lose our very first game.

The remaining SEC teams in the tournament are LSU and South Carolina, Texas A&M will match up with Arkansas, Alabama will face off against Florida, and Vanderbilt with go against I'm assuming Auburn. The only other teams that would give us trouble would be Florida, depending on what game Paul Skenes pitches in. We won the series versus Texas A&M, Arkansas, and Alabama. The only teams we did not beat is South Carolina who we split with, Auburn who we lost 2 out of 3, Florida and Vanderbilt who we didn't play. I can't imagine if Auburn somehow gets past Vanderbilt, they can get past us too. Then again, have you seen our pitchers? We literally only have Skenes. Ty Floyd is a hit or a miss, Javen Coleman can't have a quality start to save his life, and anyone else who started on Sunday was taken out of the rotation, ie, Christian Little, Thatcher Hurd, and Griffin Herring. At this point, all we can hope for is that LSU makes a deep enough run to be ranked in the top 4 in the nation so we can host not only a Regionals, but a Super Regionals. We need the postseason to run though the Box. 
Dayne is a senior psychology major at Louisiana State University. He is originally from New Orleans and attended high school at Holy Cross. Other teams he likes are the Red Sox, Saints, Patriots, Bruins, Pelicans, and Celtics. He also has a career .500 batting average.

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