re: Don't look now, but Paxton Kling is above the Mendoza line...

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Forgotten the Southern game already?

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I don't think Southern was missing six players to injury like McNeese.

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It's crazy what reps can do.

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Kling has had plenty of game reps this year--that's not an excuse for his terrible stretch. He was pulling off everything and leaving himself vulnerable to fastballs on the outer half and anything off-speed from a RHP with the slightest glove-side run. He had a hard time just keeping his balance. And even with his hard hit balls last week, he was still heavily pull-side happy, mostly taking advantage of mistakes that were left up and caught too much of the plate on the inner half. But the fact that he was barreling mistakes was still encouraging, because he'd been missing them, and it was clear he was in his head.

That's why his double off the right-center wall last night was fricking awesome. It was up and out over the outer 3rd, close to the black. He had to recognize it, let it travel, stay back and balanced, keep his hands above the ball, and barreled it up. I said as soon as he hit it that that swing was the most important thing that had and would happen for the entire game. Jones had a great game, obviously, Anderson didn't walk anybody, Cam and Moffett both looked good, but that swing by Kling could have the biggest impact on the success of the team moving forward. Assuming he builds off of it.

But that came from hundreds (maybe thousands) of extra off-the-field reps, work in the cage, drills off the tee. Which leads me to this ridiculous and contradictory quote of yours:

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People want to attribute losing to this intangible buzzword called "leadership". Losing cause there is not enough "leadership"...

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I don't think anybody would trade talent for leadership, however it's defined. And I don't think anybody--or anybody we should take seriously--thinks a lack of leadership is the ONLY problem this team has or even one of the BIGGER problems this team has. But it doesn't take Sherlock fricking Holmes to see that it is A problem at the very least. Or at least to see that Jay thinks it is. We've heard more talk from him about consequences for and disappointment in lack of effort, focus, preparation, etc...in the past 2 weeks than we have the rest of the 2 and a half years he's been here combined.

He's taken cell phones, called guys out in the media (maybe not by name, but more aggressively than previously), and has literally benched the entrenched starters at the 3 most important defensive positions on a baseball team (Kling, Neal, Braswell). He's held guys he expected to count on from pitching, played about 10 different outfielders, used I think everybody by now on the roster that wasn't 100% redshirting, and run out a different lineup in probably 90% of our games. That's not just due to production, it screams that he either dislikes, or doesn't like enough, how some of these guys are going about their business every day.

Because he knows how talented they are, and he thinks if they prepare the right way, the production should come.(let me put a pen in this and circle back around to it) But more than that, the mental and physical "effort" mistakes won't show up as much. And "leadership" doesn't have to come from some huge pre-game "Rudy" speech. You don't need player's only meetings or a bunch of "rah rah" helmet slapping in-between innings to have leadership. But how many times in the past 2 years did Jay talk about Dylan Crews and how he prepares. Same with Paul and Bregman. When those 2 dudes are the 1st at the park and the last to leave, how can anybody else on the team do any less?

That's the kind of leadership this team needs. Maybe somebody to fire them up or keep them loose depending on the situation wouldn't hurt, but they need more guys to step up their effort and focus and how they come to prepare at the park. Not just some of the time, or most of the time, but all of the time. That is the LSU standard. We obviously don't see what goes on behind the scenes, but Jay has been not-so-subtly alluding to this being an issue that needs correcting.

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No, sorry. Just not enough production top to bottom.

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Wait, I thought you were a "process guy," Lessie? You know, do the right things and the production will take care of itself? Apparently some of their processes in preparation is preventing them from getting the opportunities to produce in games. And you DO care about the processes, right, Lessie? That's the kind of guy you are, no?

Just been hard to tell with how all over the place you are with Braswell, completely contradicting your "process guy" philosophy by excusing his terrible defense last weekend, because a few of the 4 plays that got him benched in the middle of Saturday's game--and kept him there last night--didn't result in official errors. The same exact plays were (not) made, no matter what they were scored. The process, exactly the same. But you've been hiding behind the result, judged by some nerd official scorer with mostly arbitrary criteria.

And I eagerly await you passive aggressively playing the race card by comparing Braswell to Milazzo. Maybe you'll have the balls to actually fricking say it this time, instead of dropping subtle little hints like a bitch. As if it's some wild-arse hot take to hold the LSU starting fricking short-stop to a higher standard than the 3rd-string catcher. All to create a straw man in order hide your silly hatred of Milazzo that you just can't seem to quit. Gotta keep shoehorning it in, even though he's basically a non-factor. Can't just not mention. You're like ell with Jobert or Gio. Just won't come off your original stance or allow yourself to simply let it go.

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Milazzo is what he is at this point. He doesn’t need reps to prove anything

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His defense isn't what it used to be. But he also isn't getting any consistent playing time which could be contributing to that. Neal looks pretty bad behind the plate and he hasn't been hitting well enough to justify his defense. At this point, I'd be fine with any of the three catchers being a regular back there. I'm not a fan of the 3 headed monster. Some consistency there might help the pitching.

Todd Walker, Mahtook, and Jared Mitchell in the past week have all said they could see how it affects players to be shuffling the lineup. Some of these players are probably pressing b/c they think if they don't have a great day, they may get benched. Or in some cases, they have a good game and still get benched. Kling looked really good Thursday and wasn't in the lineup on Friday. I know Jay likes to play matchups. But if someone like Kling is getting warmed up, he should stay in the lineup.

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Kling has had plenty of game reps this year--that's not an excuse for his terrible stretch.

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It’s both interesting & funny you read that to be an “excuse”.

I don’t care to make excuses for anyone. Somethings however can be explained through observation. When you have the upside that Kling & Neal have, and show those glimpses on occasion, you have to stick with it. That isn’t an excuse lmao.


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Or at least to see that Jay thinks it is. We've heard more talk from him about consequences for and disappointment in lack of effort, focus, preparation, etc...in the past 2 weeks than we have the rest of the 2 and a half years he's been here combined.

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Jay made the roster. He picked the pitching coach. So if you are short on leaders, why is that the players fault?

If he is trying to get them to play the right way, that is another thing. Something that takes time & teaching & reps.

What I see is a prideful man both trying to motivate, and cover his own errors in roster & game management.

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Wait, I thought you were a "process guy," Lessie? You know, do the right things and the production will take care of itself?

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I am a process guy. Which is why I have hope for this team. Not sure what this has to do with what you quoted, or was it just your chance to bring up Braswell again? I can’t really deal with your shite takes regarding him anymore. If you think that is all they have, great, leave it at that. He isn’t coming out.

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The process, exactly the same. But you've been hiding behind the result, judged by some nerd official scorer with mostly arbitrary criteria.

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No, the process would be he was playing deep in the hole at double play depth, making those plays impossible to make with fast runners on slow choppers.

A wild throw on a play where the runner was safe AND didn’t advance has zero relevance. The process would then be: who gives a frick. because it’s meaningless.


Is it racial? Eh, probably some of it. People love to confirm their biases one way or another. Just another avenue to tickle that bias from a guy not welcomed from the start.

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Sounds like some spin coming from you. Needing reps is not limited to younger players

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You can't expect any rational thoughts when it comes to Neal and Milazzo from Lester Earl. Every good thing Milazzo does is minimized, and every bad thing about Neal is justified as not being as bad as it seems.

You don't think some of Skip's gorilla ball teams won some games as soon as they stepped off the bus? Or during batting practice? Or when the opponent simply saw "LSU" on their schedule? Take a super talented team and give them the right amount of "don't give a frick," some "we don't even acknowledge your existence, we're all juiced up and swinging drop 5s and are gonna bang out like 2,500 feet of bombs no matter who you throw at us" swag, and that team is just about unbeatable when they turn it on.

So, it's not an "either/or." You don't have to choose between "swag" or "passing the eye test" and talent. If you don't have the latter, you can't have the former. Not the genuine kind that actually plays. Talent will always come 1st. And it's a prerequisite to anything else. But the right attitude can elevate talent. The wrong attitude can bring it down. But we're talking about the extremes. This LSU team hasn't earned the right to even think about having that kind of swag.

However, there can be a little "fake it till you make it" effect. Some guys put on that "LSU" and it's like a superhero cape. It can give them a certain level of pride or confidence that maybe their talent doesn't completely warrant, and they can play better than what they actually are. Which can lead to them having more confidence, which can lead to playing better...

I think the people you're accusing of "loving to throw stupid, meaningless buzzwords around" are just wishing that some of these guys would have a little more pride when they put on those uniforms and carry themselves with a little more confidence that could lead to being more competitive. These guys sometimes seem too easy to roll over at adversity, especially during Game 3s. And that's not the LSU standard.

But the standard starts with preparation, and Jay apparently doesn't think they're fully living up to it. And I'm not sure that's a switch that can just be flipped this deep into a season. You can put in the work and it not pay off early due to some bad luck that eventually changes or guys develop in-season and you can go on a run. But I don't think you can all of a sudden start taking preparation more seriously and hope to turn your season around. At this point I think you are who you are as far as that goes.

Carl, what do you call it when you play the right way & lose?

Fans like you love to cope with unmet expectations by blaming problems on things you cannot see.

“Oh, they aren’t playing as well as I thought they would. Maybe they just got off the bus wrong”.


You realize how dumb you sound?


Stick with what you can see. If you can’t comprehend what you are seeing, don’t default into these stupid intangible things like intimidation or “give a frick”. Just don’t say anything

Too little too late. This team has torpedoed itself

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It’s both interesting & funny you read that to be an “excuse”.

I don’t care to make excuses for anyone. Somethings however can be explained through observation. When you have the upside that Kling & Neal have, and show those glimpses on occasion, you have to stick with it. That isn’t an excuse lmao.

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What's funny is that you and I agree on almost everything. It's your thinking you're the final authority always that's so obnoxious. But I've been saying for weeks that Jay needs to just pick some guys and let it ride. I'd have Neal in there because he's left-handed and has the ability to run into one at any moment. (As an aside, it's weird to me that he hasn't done it more often. He seems so close so often).

I wasn't as sold on Kling. One, I don't think the gap between his defense and say, Brown's, is wide enough to justify running him out there every day when he's in the middle of a 1-25 streak or whatever he was. And what was so frustrating with him was that what he was doing wrong was so obvious, but we didn't see any attempt to change anything. He was doing the exact same thing that he was last year when SEC pitchers were carving him up. But his swing on that double to right center was really encouraging. The team can't reach their ceiling if Kling doesn't get close to his. At this point, I'd write him in there every day and let him ride.

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Jay made the roster. He picked the pitching coach. So if you are short on leaders, why is that the players fault?

If he is trying to get them to play the right way, that is another thing. Something that takes time & teaching & reps.

What I see is a prideful man both trying to motivate, and cover his own errors in roster & game management.

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I agree with all that. I think Jay mismanaged putting together this roster. He gambled on too many young guys to take big jumps probably a year too early. And I think he mis-evaluated Jump, Holman, and Braswell in the portal. Or at least how he communicated their value to the fans. Make no mistake, I think Jump and Holman are both really good and were automatic takes. And I absolutely love watching Holman pitch. But Jay literally said he would make a 4-game difference in our SEC record. Which was absurd. Even if he hadn't had 2 relatively (for him) subpar outings. And then he said Jump was THE most important get in the entire portal. Not for LSU, not in the SEC, not just pitcher, THE most important PLAYER gotten from the portal. In the nation. Which was also absurd considering he didn't pitch last year, and he had already said that Holman was a 4-game conference difference.

And I don't think it was just coach speak--I think he actually believed it. Which is fine. It's not realistic to expect to win the NC after what we lost from last year. I still think Jay is the perfect coach for LSU right now, and I wouldn't trade him for anybody. But he's still a young HC and relatively new to the SEC. And everybody's new to this new era of NIL and the portal. He's still learning. I have zero doubt that he'll figure it out and probably faster than everybody else. And we'll be back in Omaha next year and will probably be hoisting another CWS trophy in the next 3-4 years.

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I am a process guy. Which is why I have hope for this team. Not sure what this has to do with what you quoted, or was it just your chance to bring up Braswell again? I can’t really deal with your shite takes regarding him anymore. If you think that is all they have, great, leave it at that. He isn’t coming out.

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This is such a "you" post. Play dumb when you know goddamn good and well how I I linked it to Braswell and waving off my takes on him as completely unrelated and unsupported "shite," anointing yourself as the undisputed final arbiter of what is and what is not a good take.

1st of all, I like Braswell. And thank God we have him, because I do think he's all we've got, and he's not coming out. I played SS. It's hard. Really fricking hard the higher you go, and guys are hitting it harder to him and running a lot faster to 1st than they were on me. It's why I took up for Thompson so much last year when he got constantly shite on. I was simply bringing up your takes on him to point out your blatant inconsistency and intellectual dishonesty. You know he played like shite last weekend. And as someone who champions themself as a "process guy," whether he was charged with an error or not shouldn't matter. He let a candy-arse, built-in-a-lab 6-4-3 roll right between his legs. That was called an error though. And he threw one to 1st that would have landed in the 27th row if there wasn't a screen there. And he wasn't that far back, and it wasn't that slow of a roller. Even the official scorer went back and forth (along with Ronnie and Lyn) on whether or not he'd have been safe with a good throw. But again, if you're being consistent, that shouldn't matter. It was a shite throw at a time in the game where we really didn't need our 3rd year SEC SS to make a shite throw. Some of those wound up not mattering, but that is the exact opposite of being process oriented. It is 100% results oriented. If a guy pops one straight up the chute and walks back to the dugout and Milam just totally whiffs on it, bounces in and out of his glove, picks it up and throws it straight into the dirt and scoots past Jones, but Neal is there to back it up and tosses it to Jones for the out because the hitter didn't bother to run it out, that doesn't mean Milam didn't make a shitty play.

So you're not being consistent with your Braswell takes if your'e truly a process guy. You should have just said, "yeah, short-stops get a lot more balls than anybody else on the field, they're gonna make some errors. Bras made a couple too many too close together there. Glad they didn't hurt too bad." And we could have moved on. But you feel like you need to protect him because YOUR confirmation bias suggests that people "didn't like him from the start" because he was black. Which is bullshite.