Jay Johnson takes accountability for LSU baseball's rough patch

LSU lost its second game in a row and its third game in the last nine days, falling to UL-Lafayette 7-2 on Wednesday night on the road and moving to 11-3 on the season. The Tigers fell behind 3-0 in the first inning then again 6-2 in the fifth inning and were unable to find their bats, struggling with strikeouts and once against struggling defensively with three errors.

The reigning champs knew this would not be an easy schedule to navigate in the non-conference, but now with conference play on the horizon, LSU head coach Jay Johnson has taken a level of accountability for the scheduling and stacking so many quality games on top of one another. With several new faces and young talent, there was always going to be adversity and a learning curve, but now his team is searching for answers just eight days before the Tigers head to Vanderbilt to start conference.

LSU will host Sacramento State this weekend, starting on Friday at 6:30 p.m., looking to get things back on track.

Here’s everything Jay Johnson said to local media after LSU’s loss and what his outlook is moving forward.

What’s your message to the team?

“We’re going to stick with it and just play cleaner baseball. Tough to have some lessons in losses, but sometimes it grabs the team’s attention. I’m ready to get into a routine now. We can practice tomorrow. I’ve got it all laid out, ready to go. I don’t think I set the team up for success with this schedule how I had it laid out. I do believe we have enough to be successful in it, but I’m going to own that part of it, learn from it, adjust it in future years, but I do think we will gain value. That’s clearly a top 25 team in my opinion, Northeastern will roll the CAA. I’m glad that we’re exposing some things both baseball wise that we need and will do better and then some personnel things and getting clarity. A little bit of a speed bump and I’ll use that to make this team better.”

What do you think is missing from the way that y’all are playing right now?

“We want to score more runs. I’m going to try to keep it simple. We have to stay out of the big inning and that is going to be the biggest predictor in winning and losing. Those are usually created by free bases. We’re not getting enough of those on offense right now. We need to look at our hallmark of plate discipline or approach to create those and we’ve created a bunch of them in our time here when we’ve been really successful. You suppress big innings by not giving them them. The second three-run inning obviously the bunt got thrown down the line, but it started with I think it was LaSalla, just staying inside the ball with two strikes and hit the ball hard this way. They played really good offensive baseball tonight.”

On LSU’s defensive struggles…

“I think you look at each play situation in that play. I wouldn’t give it a collective statement. I wouldn’t say that that’s the case. We clearly had some difficulty at first base in the game the other night. That personnel decision that I got to do a good job with. Tonight they’re going to force you to play fast catch. They do it as good as anybody that I’ve seen. I was very reckless offensive approach and coach early in my career. I’ve coached against Matt forever. You know what you’re going to get. They executed perfectly.”

Getting over the mental hump with this schedule…

“They all want to play professional baseball. So this is a training ground for that and that’s a lot more difficult than this is. I don’t want that to be an excuse for a game that we didn’t play as well as we wanted to or losing a game. That’s not at all what I’m saying. It’s just something I will evaluate in the future to make sure we can get prepared to be the best team that we possibly can be while putting ourselves in position to be successful. I believe I said it before we won or lost any game that this is a good schedule. This year you’re taking perennial, it’s kind of like and I don’t even know if we need to do it because the SEC is so strong from an RPI standpoint, but they will win a lot of games.”

On the hitting approach right now…

“I think it’s a guy by guy deal. Working mindset, last Sunday they know what I feel about what needs to be there from a mindset standpoint and it certainly still can be better but I do think it was better tonight. I think that will be fine. We need to hit mistakes better and we need to create more free bases and we need to sustain more consecutive quality at bats. When somebody has a quality at bat — we put three in a row there — Trent has the homer. Derek I think it was an infield single but he uses his speed. Jake hits one through the right side. We’re first and third. That one more quality at bat right there changes the game. We’re not getting that right now. When you win, you’re getting two or three in a row. We need to get some sustained quality at bats. It doesn’t even have to mean hit after hit after hit, but we need to create more free bases and we need to hit some mistakes.”