Jim Mashek

LSU RADIO MAN DOUG THOMPSON: ‘IT’s SIMPLE; YOU’VE GOT TO GET BACK TO PAUL SKENES’

The LSU baseball team’s pursuit of an seventh national championship is at the proverbial crossroads.

LSU has come out of the losers’ bracket to reach the semifinals of the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Tigers still need two victories over No. 1 seed and No. 1-ranked Wake Forest to get back to the national championship series starting on Saturday night.

It’s a tall order, a tall order indeed.

Wake Forest erased a 2-0 deficit in the late innings and slipped past the Tigahs, 3-2, in the critical winners’ bracket game on Monday night, when the Demon Deacons capitalized on their late opportunities to move within a single victory of a berth in the best-of-three championship series.

LSU, not surprisingly, came back with a vengeance.

On Tuesday night, LSU junior left-hander Nate Auckenhausen, making his first-ever start as a major college pitcher, guided the Tigers to a clutch 5-0 victory over SEC rival Tennessee in the spacious digs of Omaha’s Charles Schwab Stadium, where fly balls go to die and only occasionally clear the fence for momentum changing home runs.

Auckenhausen gave the Tigers six-plus innings of shutout pitching before yielding to fellow left-hander Riley Cooper, who finished the task at hand, giving LSU its second victory over the Vols in just four days. LSU radio analyst Doug Thompson, a former Tigers All-America pitcher himself, believes Auckenhausen’s outing will go down as one of the program’s premier pitching performances over the years.

Particularly if LSU can buck the odds and twice defeat Wake Forest to get another shot at a national championship.

“I’m gonna put that start right up there with some of LSU’s greatest Omaha moments,” Thompson said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon. “It was the first start of his career, at LSU. He’d been used exclusively out of the ‘pen. Nate’s a JUCO kid, from Oklahoma, and I think he’d pitched once, for maybe an inning or two, since the SEC Tournament (in the final few days of May in Hoover, Alabama).

“To do it, six shutout innings, in those circumstances … Yeah, it was heroic.”

Jay Johnson is trying to get the Tigers to the finish line in his second season as the LSU head coach. His predecessor, Paul Mainieri, won a single national championship — the 2009 LSU squad — in his 15 years at the Tigers’ helm.

Mainieri’s overall success, however, proved to be a sore spot with the Tigers’ fan base, after the legendary Skip Bertman produced five national championship teams in a 10-year span (1991-2000). Bertman created a monster in his 18 years as the LSU head coach, earning 11 berths in the College World Series while winning 74.4 percent of his games overall.

We’re talking 870-330-3, with Bertman bowing out after an NCAA Super Regional defeat in three games against Tulane in 2001.

Doug Thompson played a major part in the Tigers’ national championship in 1997, and he was on the mound when LSU closed out SEC rival Alabama 13-7 in a single-game championship matchup at the since-demolished Rosenblatt Stadium.

That was more of a hitters’ park, particularly compared to the current College World Series setting, and Thompson and the Tigers returned to Omaha in 1998, only to finish 2-2 and tie for third place with Long Beach State.

I was fortunate enough to cover those two College World Series, for my employer at the time, the Biloxi-Gulfport newspaper. I’d gotten to know Thompson from his splendid career at Biloxi High School and Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, and I wasn’t at all surprised when he went onto stardom in the SEC.

In most situations, Skenes would give the Tigers a significant advantage over Wake Forest, but Monday night’s performance clearly showed that the Demon Deacons have plenty of pitching themselves. They also have a flair for the dramatic, using a tough defensive play to cut down a potential go-ahead run, on a grounder to third base with one out in the top of the eighth.

Thompson knows Jay Johnson has a major decision to make, whether to pitch All-America right-hander Paul Skenes on three days’ rest, or try to piece together a winning effort to have Skenes available for a possible winner-take-all game on Thursday night against Wake Forest.

Win that game, of course, and LSU would face SEC rival Florida in the best-of-three championship series starting Saturday night. It would be a repeat of the 2017 title series, when the Gators won in two memorable games.

The 6-foot-7, 250-pound Skenes routinely hits 100 mph with his fastball, and he was the winning pitcher in last week’s 6-3 victory over Tennessee, as well as the Tigers’ 14-0 victory over Kentucky in Game One of the NCAA super regional in Baton Rouge.

Skenes has compiled a 12-2 record with a 1.81 ERA. He’s on the verge of breaking Ben McDonald’s record for single-season strikeouts, with 200 strikeouts and just 19 walks in 114 2/3 innings pitched. Skenes is an overpowering pitcher, and is expected to be one of the first four or five players chosen later this month in the MLB Draft.

“It’s simple,” Thompson said. “You’ve got to get back to No. 20.”

No. 20, of course, is Paul Skenes.

Skenes could only watch from the LSU dugout when Wake Forest made the decisive defensive play in Monday night’s 3-2 victory over the Tigers.

That’s when Wake’s Brock Wilken fielded a chopper from the bat of LSU’s Cade Beloso, just inside the third-base line, before retiring the Tigers’ Tre Morgan at home plate on the fielder’s choice. It was a close play but LSU’s challenge of the call failed, and the Demon Deacons clearly had the momentum.

They put up a single run in the bottom of the eighth themselves, and then turned to closer Cam Minacci to finish the task at hand.

“It was a miraculous play, really,” Thompson said. “Every national championship team has a moment like that. In the 2000 LSU team’s case, it was Ray Wright making that catch at the fence, at Rosenblatt.

“You can almost sense it when it happens.”

Which brings us to the fundamental question.

Does Jay Johnson give the ball to Paul Skenes, or try to get it done with another starting pitcher?

“Paul Skenes is already going to go down as one of the greatest pitchers in college baseball history,” Thompson said. “In a perfect world, Paul would go to Coach Johnson and say, ‘Give me the ball,’ but he’s got a lot to think about. Jay Johnson has a lot to think about.

“I think Skip Bertman would start Skenes (on Wednesday night). If you hold him until Thursday, he might not be available for the championship series. If you make it there, too.

“I think Jay Johnson will make the right call.”

Plenty of intrigue. Even more at stake. Stay tuned.