How LSU baseball put together a national championship-caliber roster, one flight at a time

BATON ROUGE – When the 2022 College World Series began, LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson was on a plane.

First, it was a trip to Colorado Springs to meet with a pitcher/catcher from Air Force (Paul Skenes). Then it was a flight to California to see another pitcher, this one at UCLA (Thatcher Hurd).

Johnson made two more visits after that: one to Missouri to link up with a Vanderbilt pitcher (Christian Little) and another to Tampa the next week to meet with a third baseman from NC State (Tommy White).

"They all came on campus except for Skenes," Johnson said. "We had to wait for Team USA to be over. Called Paul every day of the summer."

With Dylan Crews, Tre Morgan and Jordan Thompson coming back for 2023, LSU had the building blocks of a championship roster. But that core wasn't enough after the Tigers' 2022 season ended at the hands of Southern Miss in the Hattiesburg Regional.

It's why Johnson needed to make those four trips, especially with Skenes, Hurd and White, to finish the championship puzzle.

Four players and one year later, the Tigers are national champions. LSU demolished Florida, 18-4, in Game 3 of the 2023 College World Series final – after playing eight games in 10 days – to capture its seventh national championship in program history and first under Johnson.

Here's how the Tigers became a national championship-caliber team.

"So much of the team were kids that we, me and my staff and I had recruited. And they had gone through so many trials and tribulations that had hardened them. It made them more confident because of the experiences they had gone through," Johnson's predecessor, former LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri, said. "And then Jay obviously added some very critical transfers, specifically Skenes, Hurd and White.

"I thought they had a chance to be the very best team in the country."

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Johnson sat down at the podium with his arms crossed and a solemn stare on his face. LSU's 2022 season had just come to a close with the Tigers losing the last two games of the Hattiesburg Regional.

It was not the way he expected his first year at LSU to end. But why it ended was obvious.

LSU's pitching staff was not good enough. The Tigers didn't have enough talent on the mound to consistently get the job done, surrendering 31 earned runs and walking 15 batters in four games in Hattiesburg.

"Thank God Ma'Khail Hilliard came back to school and flipped 70-mile-an-hour curveballs in there (so) we were able to win enough games to have a 40-win season," Johnson said on Monday after clinching the national title.

Johnson, still mulling over the demise of his first season at LSU, was asked by The Advertiser what it would take to close the gap, pitching-wise, between LSU and Southern Miss' prolific staff. He respectfully declined to answer the question.

"I'm not going to answer that right now," Johnson said.

But he knew the answer all along. It was adding Skenes, Hurd and Little from the transfer portal, and Nate Ackenhausen from the junior college ranks. It was making sure Griffin Herring, Gavin Guidry and Chase Shores went to school and not MLB. And it was developing returning pitchers Riley Cooper, Ty Floyd, Javen Coleman and Garrett Edwards into championship-caliber arms.

"The position-player group was a national championship team last year. Very similar (to this year), to be honest with you," Johnson said. "But we had to get better on the mound. And we did."

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Developing LSU's returning players

Skenes, White, Hurd and LSU's No. 1-ranked freshmen class were the headline additions, but they weren't the only reasons behind the Tigers' ascension this year.

LSU's returning players got better.

Floyd went from a second-half-of-the-season addition to the starting rotation in 2022, to striking out 17 batters in Game 1 of the 2023 College World Series final. Morgan and Thompson improved defensively. Brayden Jobert took his batting average in conference play from .215 in 2022 to .305 in 2023, while Cade Beloso hit a career-high 16 home runs after missing almost the entire 2022 season.

Even Crews, the reigning Co-SEC Player of the Year, got better. The expected No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 MLB Draft rose his on-base percentage from .464 to .567 and improved his slugging percentage en route to winning the Golden Spikes Award.

"Dylan is the best player in college baseball history, in my opinion," Johnson said.

But having the best player isn't the same as having the best team. LSU needed to get better around its superstar in 2023.

Johnson knew that so he went to work, one flight at a time.

"Knowing that we were pairing all of those (transfers) with the strides that some of these (returning) guys had made in one year's time, we felt pretty good about what this (season) was going to be," Johnson said.

Koki Riley covers LSU sports for The Daily Advertiser. Email him at kriley@theadvertiser.com and follow him on Twitter at @KokiRiley

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: LSU baseball: How national championship roster came together