Jay Johnson provides LSU's mindset on postseason pitching rotation

The SEC baseball tournament is underway, and the LSU Tigers enter this year’s tournament as a three-seed. This year’s tourney will be held in Hoover, AL, from May 23- 28. With the tournament scheduled to be played in under a week’s time, teams must have some sort of balance when it comes to their pitching rotation. And LSU skipper Jay Johnson knows this all too well.

During an interview on Wednesday, Johnson provided an inside look at LSU’s mindset on their pitching rotation for the tournament.

“Yeah, we have a plan going into it what we’re going to do,” said Johnson. “Wes and I met Monday and talked about how we want to line it up. We feel good about that plan. You want to win every game that you play. I feel like the competitive element is how Coach Bertman built the program, and there’s bigger games that are coming than the ones that we’re playing here. But we’re going to focus on this for right now and do it in a way that’s going to benefit us in the NCAA tournament.

“But yeah, it is what it is. This is the best event in amateur baseball outside the NCAA tournament, and we want to play well, want to pitch well. I’ll be the one that will be kind of mindful of what we need to do, how we need to do it, pitch counts, what days guys pitch, all those sorts of things, and we feel like we have a really good plan.”

LSU appears to have a solid pitching rotation setup for the tournament, which was on full display in their opening matchup against South Carolina. The Tigers’ starting pitcher, Thatcher Hurd, and relief pitcher Nate Ackenhausen were lights out on the mound on Wednesday. Hurd faced 22 pitchers and 5.1 innings worth of work. He allowed three earned runs on four hits with one home run. Hurd also had four strikeouts to go along with two walks.

Ackenhausen would face 15 batters in 3.2 innings allowing just one hit and no earned runs. He would finish the game with three walks and six strikeouts. The duo’s 10 strikeouts nearly doubled South Carolina’s total of six.

LSU took a 2-0 lead into the fifth inning where South Carolina drew closer, scoring one run in the top of the fifth. When it was the Tigers’ turn at bat in the bottom of the inning, their bats came alive, scoring four runs, giving LSU a 6-1 lead heading into the top of the sixth.

South Carolina battled back once again, adding two runs to their score, but that was as close as they would get. LSU would tack on two more runs in the bottom of the sixth and seventh innings, giving the Tigers the 10-3 victory as they advanced to the next round of the tournament.