The 2012 LSU baseball team promises it’s a closer-knit bunch than in years past, something they believe will help them crawl back into the national championship hunt. (Credit: Adam Pitts)

LSU Baseball Head Coach Paul Mainieri isn’t from Baton Rouge, but six years into the job, he might as well be.

He’s certainly got the dialect down.

“Y’all excited for baseball season?” he asked attendees at last week’s media day, his voice just tinged with a learned drawl.

The local language isn’t the only thing Mainieri has mastered during his tenure in Baton Rouge. Even more familiar are the expectations attached to managing arguably the most successful baseball program in modern college baseball.

“There’s always pressure here [at LSU],” he said. “The expectations are great, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

But since Mainieri led LSU to its sixth national championship in 2009, expectations have been left unfulfilled as the Tigers failed to escape regional play in 2010, and didn’t even qualify for the NCAA tournament last year. Despite entering both seasons as preseason favorites for a trip to the College World Series in Omaha, LSU has only packed its bags to head home come season’s end two years running.

Even with a resume boasting over 1,000 wins, with the aforementioned national championship, and a strong grasp of conversational Cajun, 2011 could be the season by which Mainieri’s time in Baton Rouge is defined.

Successive failures

That 2012 bears such huge implications for Mainieri is as much a product of his successes as his perceived failures.

Coming from Notre Dame to take over for the disappointing Smoke Laval in 2006, Mainieri picked up the ball Laval had dropped from legendary five-time national champion Skip Bertman and subsequently knocked it out of the park. It only took Mainieri one rebuilding season before bringing the Tigers back to Omaha in 2008 – thanks in no small part to a record-breaking 23-game winning streak – before winning it all in 2009.

Since then, the Tigers’ struggles are well documented.

“The past few years have unfortunately been pretty bad for LSU baseball,” said senior third baseman Tyler Hanover, who started as a freshman on the 2009 title-winning team.

But while 2010 ended in its own sort of ignominy – elimination away from Alex Box in the regional rounds – 2011 was all the worse again, as much because of its successes as its failures.

A hot 16-1 start to the season and a 12-3 finish sandwiched an 8-17 midseason slump, ultimately finding the Tigers 36-20 with an RPI of 25. Most seasons, that resume would lend itself to a certain NCAA Tournament berth; 2011 was not most seasons. Despite ending the season as one of the hottest teams in the country, LSU failed to earn the favor of the NCAA selection committee, missing out on postseason play for the first time since Mainieri’s inaugural campaign.

“Had we been given the opportunity, we could have made some noise and possibly made it back to Omaha,” Mainieri said. “I still feel that we would have.”

Close calls

Perhaps the most frustrating facet of LSU’s narrow exclusion from postseason play was just how narrow that exclusion was. Most college baseball pundits had the Tigers pegged for a berth, and the shock at their denial was almost ubiquitous.

Still, it was a fitting end to a season defined by slim margins. In conference play alone, LSU dropped seven games by a single run, another pair by two. Even worse were the three SEC games in which LSU held 9th-inning leads, only to end up on the wrong end of the scoreline.

“I tell our team every year that your season will be defined by how you do in those one and two-run games,” Mainieri said. “Unfortunately last year that definition was not a good one.”

Mainieri’s words ring true in the cruelest way. Had LSU won just three of those close games, the Tigers would have won the SEC West and, in all likelihood, hosted a regional. Instead, they watched from home as an SEC rival claimed the conference’s first back-to-back titles since LSU in 1996 and 1997.

“We were so close,” said senior shortstop Austin Nola. “But when you don’t win the close games, you can’t play in the postseason.”

“It was a great fall from what could have been to what happened,” said Mainieri.

Hungry for Omaha

The 2012 squad has not forgotten that great fall, disappointing as it was. Rather than letting in fade from their memories, this year’s team has kept the burn fresh in their minds as motivation.

“Last year didn’t end the way we wanted to, but we’re going to use that and learn from it,” said junior DH/LF Raph Rhymes.

In particular, the Tigers said experiencing the losing side of close games should help them learn not to repeat their mistakes a second go-round. That’s improvement number one from a year ago: experience.

“We can always grow on those experiences,” said Hanover. “This year, now that we lost those one-run games in the ninth, as a team we are going to know how to win those games this year.”

Nola, meanwhile, offered a simple recipe for the Tigers’ tight-contest woes.

“Clutch hitting, clutch pitching, and clutch defense,” he said, “that’s the biggest part of winning close games.”

He also added a second area where the Tigers have made great bounds in the last year: focus.

“We’ve got to pay more attention to detail, especially in the first and second inning, so we don’t always have to get in tight situations late in games,” he said. “We’re going to play every pitch like it’s our last one.”

Most importantly, the 2012 squad has made a third change from a year ago: they’re better friends. The adversity of last season has only forged the bonds between the remaining few.

“We have come together as a team,” said Hanover.

“We’re a lot closer as a team,” added sophomore pitcher Kevin Guasman. “We all came together this fall, and we have good team chemistry. We’re all locked in and ready for a good season.”

For Mainieri, a good season is exactly what he needs. And like the thousands of LSU baseball fans chomping at the bit ahead of a promising year, it’s what he and his players expect.

“We’ve got to get back to Omaha; we’re going to get back,” said Nola. “We’ve focused our attention from the last day of the season, and we’re 10 times better than where we were last year at this time. We’re hungry, not getting to Omaha the last two years is really eating at us.”

“This is our year.”