BASEBALL PREVIEW: Mainieri Profile

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Year 3 continued amazing run

By Carl Dubois
Tiger Rag Associate Editor

The humbling, inescapable truth about baseball is its consistently and seemingly random insistence upon teaching its participants how to handle failure. A Hall of Fame hitter fails nearly seven times for every 10 at-bats, although hitting streaks and 0-for-whatever streaks temporarily obscure the rule.

Since late April 2008, baseball has taught the LSU Tigers its lessons about failure at an exceedingly lazy pace. Dating to the last two months of Paul Mainieri’s second season as LSU coach and through all of his third, the Tigers have been on an extraordinary run.

One of the lowest points of Mainieri’s time in Baton Rouge was prelude to one of the most breathtaking story arcs in SEC history, and it came under the direction of this coach who arrived at LSU after 12 seasons of cold-climate baseball at Notre Dame.

Mainieri’s first season as coach of the Tigers went nowhere after the 30-game SEC schedule. LSU failed to qualify for the conference tournament and wasn’t invited to the NCAA postseason.

More than a few fans voiced their doubts in the second half of Mainieri’s second season.

LSU and Georgia played a Sunday series finale April 20, 2008, and the SEC travel-day curfew left them and fans at the old Alex Box Stadium to contend with a 10-10 score after 12 innings. The Tigers had more to wrestle, having lost the first two games to Georgia and then blowing a 10-3 seventh-inning lead in the third game.

“It felt like a win to us,” Georgia coach David Perno said.

“It feels like a loss,” LSU right fielder Derek Helenihi said.

The Tigers left the ballpark with a 23-16-1 record and fifth in the six-team SEC Western Division at 6-11-1. That record put them 11th overall among 12 teams in the conference.

Since that day, LSU is 82-20. During that stretch, the Tigers have one losing streak. It lasted all of two games, and it came in the final two games of the home series against Tennessee last season.

The 23-game winning streak in 2008 helped propel LSU to the College World Series in Mainieri’s second season. A 14-game winning streak ended one victory shy of a national championship a year later, and the Tigers went out the next day and defeated Texas for LSU’s sixth CWS title.

Mainieri received Coach of the Year awards in both seasons.

He won 40 games or more 11 times at Notre Dame, a feat that earned him attention in a college baseball world where schools in winter wonderlands on Opening Day constantly struggle to get outside enough to develop their players and their programs.

Despite that obstacle and others, Mainieri had some things in his favor at South Bend. Stanford was the nation’s premier program two decades ago, having won national championships in 1987 and 1988 before returning to the College World Series four times in the 1990s.

Stanford was the destination for ballplayers with serious academic ambitions and enough affluence to patiently wait out their dreams of a professional baseball career.

Stanford didn’t have room on its roster for every such player.

Notre Dame was an attractive option, especially for Catholics. Then, things began exploding around the country, fueled by the success of such schools - as fate would have it - as LSU and its SEC brethren.

Colleges put more emphasis on the sport and replaced quaint ballparks with shiny new stadiums.

Such schools as Rice, Vanderbilt, North Carolina and others began building around the type of players Stanford and Notre Dame (and USC before its downturn) were accustomed to having. Notre Dame didn’t pump new money into its facilities like other schools were.

The prospect of a program on the verge of decline seemed real inside and outside South Bend.

In a way, it mirrored what was going on at LSU. Its SEC rivals built expensive stadiums and indoor practice facilities and got LSU’s attention. A commitment to a new Alex Box Stadium was made.

When Skip Bertman called Mainieri in June 2006, that commitment and more was attractive enough for Mainieri to accept the job.

Old-guard SEC coaches were skeptical. Mainieri doesn’t understand the SEC, some of them said. He and his staff aren’t ready. The 2007 season, Mainieri’s first as LSU’s coach, and the first half of 2008 seemed to validate the critics.

Now, as he moves into his fourth season with the Tigers, Mainieri has momentum on his side and a national championship ring on his finger, something none of them can say.

Read more from the 2010 Baseball Preview:

DUBOIS COLUMN: Turning the page fun for us, essential for Tigers

Carl Dubois is Tiger Rag’s lead LSU baseball writer. Contact him at carl@tigerrag.com.