There’s a lot that has been holding this year’s LSU baseball team back from looking like the championship teams from past years.
Battery-related issues are one of the main issues so far. Pickoff errors, passed balls, and wild pitches have all seemed to come at the worst times and in clumps.
“Sometimes it’s cost us a run or two,” pitcher William Schmidt said about pickoff issues. “Here or there, where the runner wouldn’t have been on second like after a hit happened that scored him.”
The Tigers’ pitching staff has made 10 errors so far this season. Against Bethune-Cookman on April 7, a pickoff error cost the Tigers a run in the fifth inning when Santiago Garcia’s errant throw allowed the baserunner to get to second. He would score on a hit during that at-bat.
It also happened on Tuesday against Northwestern State. Reagan Ricken threw a ball away on a pickoff, and the runner got to second. He would advance to third and home on two different groundouts, meaning he probably wouldn’t have scored without the error.
The issues haven’t been made easier with the switches at first base, but Mason Braun, who has gotten each of the last five starts at first, is confident in his abilities. He said he’s getting more comfortable with each rep.
“There’s been some struggles with that,” Braun said. “It’s just working at it. You’re gonna have some balls get away. It’s just the game of baseball … failures happen, just trying to limit those failures as much as possible.”
The failures have begun to stack up and it’s hurting the team when it needs to stack up wins the most.
“I think hitters, pitchers [and] defense just made a couple crucial errors, and that cost us,” centerfielder Derek Curiel said after the Bethune-Cookman game. “We gotta play tight baseball to beat teams who are going to make the tournament.”
Those behind the dish are having similar issues.
LSU has played 39 games this year and has 12 passed balls. It’s the same mark last year’s team had in 68 games. The 2023 championship team had 16 passed balls over 71 games played. An outlier was the 2024 season, which saw only seven.
While LSU leads the country in strikeouts, it is giving those free bases away. In the finale of the Ole Miss series, it took a physical and athletic play from Deven Sheerin to get the third out at home after a wild pitch got past Omar Serna.
Wild pitches have also continually hurt the team, with 55 this year. That number is actually the exact same as LSU’s opponents, but with how the season has gone defensively, each one feels like a knife twisting.
The team’s wild pitch per game played is significantly higher than any other year under Jay Johnson. The team is throwing 1.41 wild pitches per game, while the median of the other four years is 0.97. The numbers aren’t really close.
Another wild pitch allowed a runner to score in LSU’s non-competitive loss to Texas A&M on Friday. After the team had what Johnson called the team’s “best pitched game in a while” on Tuesday against Northwestern State, it has fallen back to its rough ways.