TIGER RAG NEWS SERVICES
Former LSU baseball pitcher Ronnie Rantz, a college baseball analyst for various networks across the Southeast, saw the Tigers’ season from hell coming early in the 2026 season.
Maybe not the worst Southeastern Conference season in history at 9-21, but he saw signs in the Tigers’ SEC opening loss at Vanderbilt, 13-12 on March 13. And LSU ended up not making the NCAA postseason for the first time since 2011 and finishing 30-28 overall.
The morning after the Vanderbilt loss on his weekly radio show, Sports Shorts, on 104.5 FM in Baton Rouge (Saturdays 10 a.m. to Noon), Rantz predicted a bad season and that LSU would not win more than 14 league games.
“Well, I hated to be right,” Rantz said on Tiger Rag Radio Tuesday night. “The pitching really struggled. You can say that William Schmidt had a nice year, but I don’t think William Schmidt (5-4, 4.22 ERA) had the year he thought he would have. I think going into the season, William’s expectations were he thought he’d better. He had an okay, solid year, I think for a third starter, but not a Friday or Saturday night guy. And then everybody else was had a down year. Every single other pitcher had a down year – a year worse than they thought they would have, including Casan Evans.”
To listen to Ronnie’s entire segment on Tiger Rag Radio, including all the information on the upcoming Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in Natchitoches on June 25-27, hit the arrow below. Rantz is the executive director of the Hall:
Evans, a sophomore coming off a great freshman season, fell to 2-4 and a 5.93 ERA in 2026.
“Casan Evans had a couple of extremely great outings, but then he had a bunch that weren’t,” Rantz said. “He surely didn’t have a Friday ace type of year. Then you had a bunch of offensive guys that did not have good seasons. Every single one of your transfer portal guys on offense had a bad year. Every single one of them – not one good one. So, in this day and age, where you’re paying guys money in the transfer portal to plug and play, for them to come in and be starters and play right away, and they don’t do well, you’re not going to overcome that.”
But Rantz still made that call very early in the season.
“Well, because the the signs were there from a standpoint of they were walking too many guys, hitting too many guys, the catching was really bad at the beginning of the season,” Rantz said. “Now, the catching improved tremendously the second half of the year, and they started swinging the bat better. But the pitching never really got better as the season went on – too many walks, too many hit batters. And then defensively they were not good.
“If you remember, especially the first half of the year, they were one of the worst defensive teams in the SEC. So that combination really hurt. It was happening early on, and that was all you needed to know that the team was not headed in the right direction. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did.”
Rantz likes the new group of portal players that coach Jay Johnson is gathering, though.
“Well, I think the new crop’s more battle tested, and they’re also from bigger programs as well,” he said. “Last year’s group came from a lot of mid-major teams.”
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