In anticipation of the big National Championship matchup between Texas and LSU, we exchanged questions with Richard Pittman of the Tigers' SBN blog And The Valley Shook. His answers to our four questions are below, and our answers to his questions for us are appearing over at ATVS. Richard gave us some great thoughts about LSU and how they match up with Texas. Enjoy!

AO: LSU's Achilles heel all season has been left-handed pitching. Aside from a couple of bullpen guys, Texas' top hurlers are righties. On the other hand, Texas has excellent righties. Who are the best right-handed pitchers the Tigers have faced this year, and how have they fared?

RP: LSU's problems with left-handed pitching are well-documented.  We are only a little above .500 when facing a left-handed starter.  And keep in mind that towards the end of the season and in the postseason, teams have gone out of their way to start lefties against us.  As it turns out, we've gotten better against lefties along the way, but if we're just over .500 against lefties, and we're 54-16 overall, imagine what we've done to righties.  We've only lost 3 games against a right-handed starter all year.

To answer your question though, the best right-handed pitchers we faced this year were probably Austin Hyatt for Bama, and the tandem of Mike Ojala and Ryan Berry of Rice, who we faced in the Supers.  Back on April 10, Austin Hyatt did pretty well against us.  He went 7.2 innings against us and allowed 4 runs, 3 earned.  He left the game with the lead, but we ended up beating the bullpen.  Ojala and Berry of Rice both sported ERAs below 3.0.  Ojala's was below 2.0.  We roughed up both of them.  Ojala gave up 5 runs in 5 innings and Berry gave up 4 runs in 4 innings.  This is a very different team than the one Austin Hyatt had success against.  We were struggling (comparatively) at the time and we were in a bit of a funk.  Since then, and especially since the last week of the regular season, we have hit our stride.

It's not a coincidence that we do so well against righties.  Four of our 5 best power hitters are left-handed, and another of our good hitters is a switch hitter.  Our best right handed hitters are Mikie Mahtook and DJ Lemahieu.  Mahtook's a freshman and Lemahieu is a good contact hitter but does not hit for much power. 

Blake Dean and Ryan Schimpf are lefties who hit righties really well, but the real key is Jared Mitchell.  Mitchell plays every day, and there probably isn't a hitter in the CWS who is better against right handed pitching than Mitchell is.  He hits the ball hard and is a tremendous home run threat against right-handed pitching. The contrast with how he performs against lefties is striking.  Against a left-handed pitcher, Mitchell strikes out a lot, has a difficult time pulling the trigger on a swing, has a hard time finding the ball, and when he manages to hit the ball he has almost no extra-base power.  Whan a lefty is on the mound, Mitchell is the worst hitter in our lineup.  When a righthander is on the mound, he is our best.

Catch the rest of the LSU preview after the jump.

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"The loser is always at fault."

-Vasilii Nicolaevich Panov, Russian author.

Perhaps someone could inform Arizona State baseball coach Pat Murphy of that little nugget of truth. It all started on Thursday with Murphy's declaration that pitcher Mike Leake has "probably serious tendinitis" and that his star pitcher could be done for the year. Reportedly a common tactic by Murphy, it turned out to be as much of a waste of breath as anything could be coming from a certifiable blowhard. Whether it was a petty bit of gamesmanship or "insanely irresponsible," as 40AS sports termed it, the end result was that Murphy came out of the whole thing either looking Bush League for his bit of amatuerish deception or like a Bill Belichick clone, take your pick. But that was only the beginning.

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Photo courtesy of Texassports.com

Prodigious: excessive in size or quantity

Clout: strike hard, especially with the fist

Prodigious Clout: Cameron Rupp's 9th inning homer off Mitchell Lambson.

Add Craig Way to the list of folks that stepped up last night with the game on the line. Then there was Connor Rowe's homer, which can only be defined as a "walk off" shot, the first in Omaha since Chance Wheeless went yard in 2005.

Some other great quotes from last night:

Cameron Rupp: "I knew it right away."

Connor Rowe: "That's the best moment of my life I can remember. Maybe being born was better, but I can't remember that."

Austin Wood: "I've never seen a ball hit that far. Never. Not even close."

Augie Garrido: "I think LSU has played the best baseball in this tournament all around. They've been the most consistent team in the tournament. If it's about drama, we've got that."

And finally, Garrido again:

[Update]: Here's the video of the Rupp home run and the Rowe home run. Watch them. Again and again and again. Tip of the hat to utexasclan for posting them and bassale47 for finding them.

(Friday Evening Update): LSU beats Arkansas 14-5, Texas-ASU scheduled to begin roughly at 8:40 PM EST (7:40 PM CST)

A win tonight and Texas will advance to its fourth championship match/series this decade. Standing in their way is a really, really good Arizona State team that you may remember can pitch, hit and play defense. ASU could throw Mike Leake (remember him?) on 3 days rest, but we doubt it considering there was already talk that his arm was overworked. Josh Spence is almost certainly done unless ASU wins the next two. ASU Sunday starter Seth Blair (7-2, 3.39 ERA) will probably go but he was hit hard by the Horns on Tuesday. That leaves Jason Franzblau as the next most experienced ASU starter available (6 starts on the year, 3-2, 2.32 ERA), but he hasn't pitched since May 29th.

To counter, Texas has a string of talented pitchers who are about as rested as can be expected at this point. The offseason is littered with stories of teams who had "no doubt they would win it all" but failed. Still, this team's greatest strength at this point may be the simple fact that there are no situations they have faced and failed to emerge victorious.

Game starts at 6 PM on ESPN2.

(Friday Afternoon Update): It'll be Cole Green for the Horns -- as the home team -- going against Blair for ASU, as Leake might be done for the year. Finally, LSU-Arkansas was delayed, expect a first pitch of the Texas game around 8:30 - 9:00 PM, or 50 minutes after LSU wraps this up. Hope you don't have plans for your Friday night.

This will serve as your LSU-Arkansas open thread. Here are some other thoughts/musings to talk about while we wait for the ballgames to start today:

• Is it better to be a fan of a team like Carolina, with yearly Omaha futility, or a team like Texas Tech which never even sniffs getting to Rosenblatt? Is it more frustrating to be near the mountain-top year after year only to consistently fall short, or to just never be in the mix?
• The two teams with a major advantage today are Texas and LSU, and both could be said to have displayed the elusive trait of "it." We have never before been able to pinpoint what exactly "it" is--that's why it's just called "it." But seeing two very different teams display something that can be called "it" has gotten us thinking more clearly about this idea: it seems that "it" comes in (at least) two forms: magic and swagger. Magic "it" obviously follows this Texas team wherever it goes, as the Longhorns have found remarkable, astonishing ways to win throughout the NCAA Tournament. Swagger "it" seems to have found a comfortable spot in the LSU dugout, as the Tigers always expect to win and have simply overpowered opponents in winning 12 straight games since losing the opener of the SEC Tournament. A lot of teams claim to have swagger (see Ohio State football every year), but the ones who really have it don't have to talk about it. In any case, if the Texas-LSU matchup were indeed to happen on Monday, which kind of "it" will prevail?
• A Texas win today or tomorrow will extend baseball season at least to Tuesday. Hopefully Texas fans will have a national championship to celebrate for a little while after the CWS ends. But once that euphoria subsides, the long summer days start counting down to opening kickoff. There are two points to be made here:
  • The baseball Longhorns deserve our gratitude, because unlike the previous two years they have reduces our in-between-sports season to essentially last only 2 months--the end of June to the end of August.
  • What will you do with your July and part of August? Make up new Aggie jokes? Memorize the entire football roster? Purchase and watch a 2009 College World Series DVD (if we get the outcome we want)? Consider BON your support group.
    
    
    

It's Arizona State versus UNC tonight at 6 PM on ESPN2. We'll probably see a rematch of the ASU Aussie versus UNC's White with the winner needing to win three games in three days in order to advance and the loser going home. Should be fun.

Augie called it the miracle victory. There are games you watch where the victory--the happiness you feel after the game has been won--is the reward. Then there are other games where the experience of watching the game, either in person or on television, almost surpasses the feeling you get from your team having been victorious. For us, the 2009 Fiesta Bowl was the former, the 2006 Rose Bowl was the latter.

Last night's game ended anti-climactically, with Texas grabbing a four run lead and Taylor Jungmann mowing through the Sun Devil lineup . By the 9th inning it was all over but the shoutin' (that is, most observers had to see a victory as inevitable). What made last night special was the rollercoaster of emotion for the three hours that preceded the final calm hour or so. Just as we all remember the 2006 Rose Bowl based on our own individual experience of the game, we imagine many of you went through a similar ride that took you from the pits of despair through three innings to the top of the mountaintop we currently occupy.

So while it may be a bit self-indulgent, and it may be a bit confusing, we thought the best way to sum up Tuesady's amazing roller-coaster win over Arizona State would be to recount the text conversation between the two of us that played out during the game. A couple of notes that will help some of it make sense:

1. AO grew up an enormous LSU fan because his dad went there. The Tigers are still a very close second team.

2. We were pessimistic way before most of you were, apparently, kind of expecting a blow out.

3. We've edited for language with asterisks; still not sure you should read it with kids looking over your shoulder.

4. JA is a Red Sox fan as well as a Nats fan

5. AO is at summer camp

OK, that's pretty much all you need to know.

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You can call it magic. The fickle Baseball Gods smiling benevolently down upon the Longhorns. Maybe it's just pure moxie. Perhaps simple, blind luck. Whatever the case, it's becoming increasingly apparent that this Longhorn baseball team has "it." True, there are still games to win before the Longhorns would have an opportunity for a rare second dogpile -- if you choose to count the inpromptu falling over after Preston Clark's grand slam -- and the magic very well could leave.

But that isn't the point. The point is that there is a critical mass each sports team has to reach before fans begin to buy wholeheartedly into the belief that this team has what it takes to become a champion. Buying in before that critical mass sets a fan up for the type of heart-crushing, monumental disappointment from which it is difficult to recover. Buying in after that critical mass and there is little time to truly enjoy the moment, to savor in the deep, abiding belief that champions deserve. For this Longhorn fan, the largest comeback of the season during the most critical game was the moment when this team reached critical mass. I'm a believer.

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