LSU fights fire with fire, wins seventh national title

The first game of the College World Series final was as close as you could imagine. Two powerhouse baseball programs deadlocked in a duel, goes into extra innings, needing a walk off home run by LSU to decide the outcome.

Florida then responded in Game 2 by handing LSU a humiliating 24-4 loss that set up a decisive final game for all the marbles. Everyone wondered, how will LSU respond? Is Florida a waking beast that can’t be tamed? Is this a sign of things to come?

In the first inning of Game 3, the Gators jumped out to a 2-0 lead, doing nothing to quiet the nerves of the Tiger faithful. But then LSU answered back, quietly, drip by drip, working long counts and relying on walks, hit-by-pitches, and singles to do the heavy lifting.

Dylan Crews, the LSU Tigers’ star outfielder, tipped by many to go first overall in the draft, said, “We got punched in the mouth yesterday. That’s the beauty of baseball. You wake up in the morning and do it all over again. We woke up today and you could see on everybody’s faces that we were ready to go. Nobody in the country was going to beat us today.”

Team mate Cade Beloso agrees. “You can’t let baseball get to you. The game is brutal sometimes. You have to show up and play the next day.”

At the end of the second, the Tigers had found six runs, and they kept working the seam that they had mined, adding run after run, until they were up by 14 runs, the largest ever margin in a College World Series final game.

To the surprise of most, the Tigers chose to work without the help of ace Paul Skenes. Although he stretched in the seventh, giving the impression that they were considering using him in a mop up role, in the end, they were able to effectively shut the Gators down with the arms of starter Thatcher Hurd and relievers Riley Cooper and Gavin Guidry. Florida’s four runs came on two home runs, Wyatt Langford’s two-run shot in the first and another by Ty Evans in the seventh, to mark the record fifth home run by Evans in the CWS.

This is now the seventh national title for the LSU Tigers, the second-most by any school behind that dominant run in the 1970s by USC. The SEC has now provided the last four national champions, with LSU following Vanderbilt, Mississippi State, and Ole Miss.