Needed two wins, got two wins
After losing in hideous fashion Thursday night, the LSU baseball team redeemed itself in a big way by winning games two and three of its regular season finale against South Carolina by scores of 8-1 and 7-3.
The Tigers purposely pitched off Thursday, electing instead to save its dominant 1-2 punch of Kade Anderson and Anthony Eyanson for Friday and Saturday’s games. As they have so many times this season, Anderson and Eyanson led the way for LSU.
Anderson threw 6.2 innings and 106 pitches in total. He struck out nine and limited Carolina to just four hits and one run. Most importantly, he seemed to be fully recovered from whatever bothered him in last week’s start against Arkansas, in which he left the game feeling some kind of discomfort in his arm.
“Kade was awesome tonight,” Johnson said, “probably the best pitcher in the country. He’s closest to the big leagues, I would say, of any pitcher in college. He did what he always does again.”
LSU never trailed in Friday’s game. The Tigers put up three runs in the third thanks to home runs from the Bash Brothers: Jared Jones and Ethan Frey. Jones hit a solo shot to right to get LSU on the board, and Frey hit a two-run blast that scored Daniel Dickinson.
Jones would have a massive weekend against the Gamecocks, homering three times over the final two games. Jones went 4-8 with three home runs, two walks and, most importantly, no strikeouts.
“It was a good night for Jared, obviously,” Johnson said after Friday’s game. “Jared has not only met expectations, he has exceeded all expectations during his career at LSU. His growth as a player is what I’m most proud of, and the leadership he brings to our team is tremendous. He’s been a very important person to me in my life, and it was great to see him have that game tonight.”
With those three homers, Jones now has 61 for career and passed Trey McClure and Dylan Crews in program history. He now has the third most homers of any LSU Tiger.
While LSU led wire-to-wire Friday night, Saturday was a tad more back and forth. Carolina jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the second inning and led 2-1 through four, but LSU responded with three in the fifth, and pushed a run across in the final three innings of the game.
Eyanson got touched up a bit more than Anderson did, but seven innings of two-run ball from your No. 2 starter is going to win you a lot more games than not.
If Bear Jones going deep three times is a welcome sight, it’s nothing compared to what is—hopefully—a return to form by Derek Curiel and Steven Milam. Curiel went 3-5, while Milam went 2-4 with a walk.
Things were real uncomfortable around Baton Rouge after the Tigers gave away Thursday’s game, but LSU responded exactly the way you would expect from the team sitting No. 1 across the polls. In the grand scheme of things, that Thursday night loss didn’t really cost LSU anything, aside from seeding for the upcoming SEC Tournament. Instead of being the 2-seed in Hoover, LSU will be the 3-seed but that’s largely inconsequential: LSU needed two wins this weekend to get to 19 SEC wins and to clinch the double-bye and they took care of business. Even better, when you take LSU’s 19 SEC wins plus it’s top-10 RPI, it adds up to the Tigers having almost certainly clinched a top-8 seed for the NCAA Tournament.
As the No. 3 seed for the SEC Tournament, LSU won’t play again until Friday and will either play Auburn, Mississippi State, or Texas A&M in the quarterfinal round. The start time for Friday night’s game is TBD, but they’ll be in the last game of the night. The first 14 games of the tournament will be televised on SEC Network, but Sunday’s championship game will be on ESPN2.