BATON ROUGE – Just in time for No. 1 Florida and an all-important regular season ending series with huge, NCAA Regional host implications, LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri has a new quarterback.
He is junior college transfer right-hander Riley Smith out of San Jacinto Junior College and Hudson High in Lufkin, Texas, who was struck with shoulder tendinitis just as the season was starting in February. He has spent most of the season trying to get over the injury.
“It’s like we got a new pitcher just before the trade deadline in pro ball,” LSU pitching coach Alan Dunn, a former pro pitching coach, said a week ago Wednesday after Smith shut out Notre Dame on four hits through six innings with four strikeouts for his first victory of the season in his first start. His longest outing before that game was two innings.
Without the shoulder injury, Smith may have been LSU’s No. 3 weekend starter all season. Instead, senior left-hander John Valek III got that job before being replaced by freshman Caleb Gilbert two weeks ago. Now Smith has Gilbert’s spot.
LSU sophomore ace right-hander Alex Lange (7-3, 3.76 ERA) will start Thursday’s 6:30 p.m. series opener on ESPNU against Florida ace Logan Shore (10-0, 2.29 ERA), a junior right-hander, at Alex Box Stadium. Smith will start the 6 p.m. Friday game on the SEC Network against Florida’s 6-foot-7 junior left-hander A.J. Puk (2-3, 2.88 ERA), who is expected to be a high first-round pick in June. LSU junior left-hander Jared Poche (4-3, 4.89 ERA) will start the series finale at 3:30 p.m. Saturday on ESPNU against sophomore right-hander Alex Faedo (10-1, 3.59 ERA).
A junior college All-American last year who was picked in the 31st round of the Major League Baseball Draft last June by Pittsburgh, Smith (6-foot-2, 188 pounds) was one of the reasons why LSU’s 2016 recruiting class was ranked No. 5 by the Perfect Game website. He displayed a fastball in the low 90s with very effective off-speed pitches at Notre Dame. He is only 1-0 on the season with a 7.36 earned run average. But before Notre Dame, that ERA was 12.46, and it was 37.80 after allowing seven runs on four hits in his first appearance on February 24 at Lamar.
“I was in a lot of pain after that Lamar game and they sat me down,” he said Wednesday. “Then I’d pitch again. There was pain after, and I’d have to sit again.”
Smith has pitched just 14 and 2/3s innings on the season – two in February against Lamar and Sacramento State, one in March against Fordham, three and two-thirds in April against McNeese State, Southeastern Louisiana and Ole Miss and two in May against Arkansas before the Notre Dame start.
He did not go painless after pitching until that Ole Miss appearance on April 30 when he allowed three hits and a run. He felt stronger during and after one-hitting and shutting out Arkansas in the eighth and ninth on May 7 with two strikeouts, enabling LSU – along with that possum - to come back and win, 10-9, in 10 innings.
“I’m 100 percent now,” Smith said. “I’m ready for this. This is a very big series for us.”
Should No. 8 LSU (37-16, 17-10 Southeastern Conference) win two of three against the top-ranked Gators (43-9, 18-8 SEC), it could earn a national top eight seed for the NCAA postseason. That would mean the Tigers, who are up to No. 10 in the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) to Florida’s No. 1, would host a NCAA Regional June 3-5 at Alex Box. If they were to win that, they would host the Super Regional round June 10-13.
“If we win this series and win a couple of games in the SEC Tournament (May 24-29 in Hoover, Alabama), I would think we would get the host sites,” Mainieri said. “I don’t know if we can clinch a national seed this weekend. We need to win it to have a shot at it.”
After Lange, who has won his last three starts and reached at least the eighth in each one, it will be up to Smith to either win the series or even it.
“I didn’t come to LSU to throw in games that didn’t matter,” Smith said. “That was the plan – to be hot for this weekend. Everybody’s idea is to have the mindset to strike anybody out or get anybody out or whatever needs to be done. That was my job in the beginning – to be ready to pitch in whatever came to me. I was battling an injury the first half of the season. It took getting used to. It felt good to get out there at Notre Dame and get in a lot of innings. It felt good to get hot and fresh again.”
He could not have picked a better time to be healthy and hot.
“What a shot in the arm he could be for us,” Mainieri said. “The way Riley threw at Notre Dame - that was the Riley Smith we recruited. That was the Riley we were expecting to have all year. He hadn’t shown that up to then. But he hadn’t been healthy. Now all of a sudden, he’s feeling good. He’s feeling more confident. It’s time to stand up and show what you’re made of.”
That could be said for LSU as a team as well after winning nine straight against teams not in the top 30 of the RPI entering this series.
“Florida is the number one team in the nation,” first baseman Greg Deichmann said. “That’s just added motivation for us because that’s where we want to be at the end of the season. There’s a lot at stake. We’re going to go at it for three games. It’s going to be a lot of fun because the fans are going to make it an electric weekend.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “To me, Alonso, he’s a dude. He can really hit. He’s a guy that strikes fear in you as a coach. You take that out of anybody’s lineup, and that’s going to hurt you. But Florida’s Florida.”
---LSU coach Paul Mainieri on Florida being without leading hitter Pete Alonso, a junior first baseman who leads the team in batting average (.352), home runs (nine), RBIs (47) and doubles (14). Alonso is not expected back until the NCAA Regional or Super Regional rounds after getting hit in the hand by a pitch against Vanderbilt last week.
