Jay Johnson previews College World Series

LSU Baseball coach Jay Johnson spoke with the media on Thursday ahead of the College World Series matchup against Tennessee on Saturday. Here’s what he had to say.

Q. It’s been a few years since this program has been back here. How much does it speak to the expectations in Baton Rouge for this program, that though it’s been a few years, it’s talked about like it’s been ages since you have been back here?

JAY JOHNSON: I never really thought of it in terms of how long it’s been for LSU. This is my favorite place in the world, and this program has had as good a history as any program in college baseball of being here.

I think in accepting the job I really wanted this group of players to play here. The guy sitting to my left, he was part of me deciding to come here, to get an opportunity to coach him at LSU for two years.

They’ve done everything that we’ve asked them to do for 700-plus days. When we took the field last weekend, there was a really solid peace of mind that these guys were going to do it. To see the fans get behind them, they’re going to get behind LSU no matter what, but this is a really easy group to get behind, how hard they play, how much they care, how invested they are in the program.

That’s kind of more where my thoughts were.

Q. I think last week you said you can’t control your performance unless you control yourself. I wonder how much that applies to you because your players say that you are not a shouter and a screamer when you coach them. You are pretty much level with them.

JAY JOHNSON: I think in leadership you can talk about it the way you want them to do it or you can talk about it and try to show them. Certainly not perfect in that regard. Like I’ll use Thatcher as an example. His competitiveness is his best quality. A lot of our conversations are never turning your best quality against you.

And that’s one I can relate to. As a younger coach maybe getting a little more overly intense, for lack of a better word. As I’ve grown in this role and leadership, I’ve always believed it’s better to show them the way than to tell them the way, and you get more buy-in when you tell them if you show it to them.

Q. When you were growing up, when did baseball really hook you, and when did you become just so in love with the sport? And do you have any humorous thoughts, your family, friends: Hey, Jay, let’s go do this. Oh, he is watching baseball.

JAY JOHNSON: Yeah, I mean, relative to Omaha and the College World Series, I grew up in a small town, and playing Major League Baseball might as well have been going to the moon. You know what I mean?

When you watch the College World Series, whether it was LSU, Texas, Stanford, that kind of seemed like a realistic goal. And so that was probably the first thought. Football was my first love. No question about that. But I realized really quickly very good high school player; there wasn’t many 5’7″, 165-pound running backs running around the SEC or the Pac-12 or that sort of thing.

This was the way it was going to be. I got to play college baseball. Then becoming a coach was really the only option. I’m addicted to winning. I’m addicted to developing programs and helping players achieve their goals. It was just the route that it was going to be.

It’s really awesome to be able to do it at LSU. I view our university, our program, as the pinnacle of the sport.

Q. When you’re recruiting Paul — or he is in the transfer portal and coming from Air Force, his fastball is 93, 94 miles an hour when he was there against Mountain West competition. How did his fastball jump the way that it did, 5 miles an hour upward, and how has he been able to be even better against better competition this year?

JAY JOHNSON: That’s a great question. I think there’s a lot of value in simplicity, I think, and he’s a great two-way player. This dude was launching home runs in fall baseball. I mean, as impressive as it gets.

He definitely could make an impact. Had I just made him a position player, he would have 20 home runs right now and potentially be hitting fifth or sixth for our team.

Well, we had a really deliberate plan on the pitching side of it. We got him started right when he got to campus with Coach Wes Johnson to develop his slider. There were some things that we needed to do.

So we started to do that early. We shut him down earlier in the fall to give him more ramp-up time for the season. Then it wasn’t intentional, but I think kind of removing the two-way player thing, I started to see his ability to recover physically better. You’re minimizing the rotations because the rotation of a pitching delivery, rotation of a hitting swing, he is right-handed in both, it’s very similar.

I feel like last year he was catching. He was swinging a bat. He was running the bases. He was potentially playing first base at times. Then, also, you know, going six or seven innings in a league that’s not very easy to pitch in. I know that firsthand.

I think kind of the simplicity of it, and then you take someone that is so driven, that says so disciplined, and get them on track with one thing. What does Friday to Friday look like? Then he has absolutely mastered that.

When you are talking about recovery, when you are talking about development, velocity improvement, improving his secondary pitches, he has been able to go all-in on those things. I think that’s probably the reasoning.

Q. This is kind of more an off-the-field question, but this team has a lot of goofiness to it, like the Hayden Travinski shirt, the Jobu statue. As a coach, what’s it like to see these fun things that kind of bring your team together? I was talking to Hayden. He said he thinks more successful teams have goofy clubhouses.

JAY JOHNSON: Yeah, I won’t take any credit for the goofiness. That’s for sure.

No, I really want players to be themselves, but to become a team. I think that’s been a big part of why I think this has worked, is there was talented players here that were going to be coming into their own; that we tried to give them a development template, but for them to develop, they have to be at the field. For them to develop as a team, they have to be together.

So part of that they have to take ownership in. So if you let them be themselves, obviously within reason, with class and character and all those types of things, I’ve always just found the buy-in goes up tremendously.

Yeah, as far as Travinski T-shirt and all that, we’re good. They can — as long as it’s appropriate, I’m good with it.

Q. I’m wondering if you can expand on, when I asked Dylan earlier, just about your team being able to kind of adapt different roles. Gavin Guidry was probably looking at infield and then certainly was a pitcher. Tre’ was in left field a good part of the year. Can you just speak on that mentality as a whole from the players, and then is there a particular player that maybe at the beginning of the year you thought had a role and then he has kind of evolved into a different one for you guys that you are really proud of?

JAY JOHNSON: Yeah, I’m very proud of all of that. I mean, we have a saying that I will always place the needs of the team above my own.

Going into August when they were all going to show up, a lot was made of the returning players, and rightfully so. Dylan is coming back. Tre’ Morgan is coming back. Jordan Thompson is coming back.

So we had a nice core to start out with that had some successful playing experience. They won 40 games and finished in the top four in the SEC last year.

Then you had this high school recruiting class, number one class in the country: Paxton Kling, Chase Shores, Jared Jones, Brady Neal, Gavin Guidry. All these guys that are going to carry the torch of this thing after this year is over.

Well, then you go in the transfer portal, and it’s Paul Skenes, Tommy White, Christian Little, Thatcher Hurd, Ben Nippolt.

So that’s an amazing collection of talent, but in the first meeting I said that doesn’t make us a team. Developing them as people, developing them as teammates, not just accepting their role, but embracing it, and communicating it might look different in game 1 than game 10, it might look different in game 20, game 50, and then in Omaha.

That’s been the case. There are so many good examples of that. Cade Beloso was probably in line to get a bunch more at-bats early, but Tommy hurt his shoulder, so he couldn’t play defense for a number of games. That really pinched him into the DH role. Cade got pushed out a little bit.

Hayden Travinski didn’t have a lot of at-bats the first 25, 30 games of the year. There’s not a better hitter in college baseball right now than him.

Josh Pearson was a starter all year last year. Kind of got beat out at the beginning of the year. Yet, when it’s been winning time, that’s the guy I want in the box.

So they’ve all been ready to make their contribution because they made it about the team rather than themselves. I can’t speak higher than that because I think it’s incredibly uncommon nowadays.

Q. You talked before, of course, about Paul Skenes’ impact on this team. The way that younger players have been able to now watch him over the last year, do you think, even though he was only here for 11 months or so, that there is going to be a lasting effect on this program because he was in it at some point?

JAY JOHNSON: Yes, and I would say the exact same thing for Dylan. This happened within a week’s time.

I had both of them in my office about different things. The comment came up from both of them, hey, what can we help you do to keep pushing this forward? Like, what’s happening right now.

It was right around the middle, beginning of the SEC. We just won at Texas A&M, just beaten Arkansas, just beaten Tennessee. Going through that meat grinder of a schedule.

I’m thinking about these guys have their entire life in front of them. They’re going to make a lot of money and play in the Major Leagues, be All-Stars, win batting titles, Cy Young, potential Hall of Famers. That’s what’s in front of them. Yet, their mind is wrapped up around this when they’re not going to be here. They are the best examples of that.

The fact that they even have the awareness to bring it up, there’s no question about it. I don’t think there’s another Paul Skenes in our locker room, and I don’t want anybody to try to be Paul Skenes, but I want them to take the things that he has shown and then emulate them the best way that they can to pay forward that contribution that they got from him.

I think that’s totally going to happen.

Q. Now with a whole year with the strength coach almost, Derek Groomer, how is his style of training different from maybe what this team had before, and what have you seen specifically out of him that has impacted the players this year?

JAY JOHNSON: He is very knowledgeable, and that created buy-in immediately. He is very detailed in the individual planning per player I think is the hook. It’s applicability to what we need them to do on the field. Whether it’s an infielder being able to play lower, is that a lower half strength issue or hip mobility issue? Hey, Derek, this is what we need this guy to be able to do. And then to write the program of what they’re doing in the weight room to get it and to get the player there, he is exceptional at that.

So I think his ability to get buy-in from the player and then execute a plan that’s going to translate on the field to baseball is where he has made the biggest impact.

Q. You had some bullpen issues in the middle of the season. Who has kind of stepped up for that role as tournament play has gone on?

JAY JOHNSON: Yeah, I think following the SEC tournament, the regional, the super regional, the last regular season weekend at Georgia, those guys have been outstanding. I think there’s a number of guys that have made a positive contribution to the point where I really don’t want to leave anybody out.

We had a lightning delay in Game 2 or the winner’s bracket game of the regional, and Thatcher came in and gave us five innings from the fourth to the eighth. You don’t necessarily look at him as a bullpen guy, but he closed out a couple of really big SEC wins and that five innings, 13 strike-out performance against Oregon State is as good as you can do.

Right behind him is Gavin Guidry, and for me he is the star of the show with that. He is a freshman. He was a two-way player, but his poise, his confidence, his ability to block out what’s going on around him and execute is second to none.

Then we’ve really, really leaned on Riley Cooper. Though he started Game 3 of the regional, he came in in a high-leverage situation in the super regional and got us three really good innings. I would guess in the last three years there’s not too many people with multiple super regional wins under their belt. Riley has done that.

Then Gavin came in to close it out again. There’s guys kind of just waiting in the wings that I think are in a really good spot too. Whether it be Javen Coleman, Blake Money got us an inning and a third in the super regional last week. Nate Ackenhausen, huge piece of our team. When he pitches, we win typically.

I think you could call it struggle. I would just call it, like, life in the SEC. Nobody played a schedule like we did, and it wasn’t going to be perfect no matter how good these guys are. I’m just proud of them for adjusting their preparation, getting through that difficulty, and just getting back to executing.

Q. The guys mentioned that post-SEC tournament meeting. Thematically, what would you say was the nugget that everybody got out of it pushing forward?

JAY JOHNSON: We just needed a little bit of a reset. I intentionally did not come down on them or crush them when we lost back-to-back series because I trusted the talent enough, I trusted the work enough, I trusted the approach enough.

I looked at it as Auburn is a national seed, and we’re on the road, and we were ahead in one of those games. If one inning goes a little bit different, we win that series too.

Then, you know, we had that tough loss against Mississippi State. Well, in Saturday of that game we were ahead in the eighth inning also. Obviously had the big bullpen lead.

It was a good time to reset, address, and it was a very simplistic message. Right head, right heart; we’re five wins away from the College World Series. Right head, right heart; we are five wins from there from a National Championship. We absolutely can do this. Let’s get back in the preparation. Let’s get back in character, and we’re going for it. It was just as simple as that.

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