LSU Baseball Gearing Up For Start of Fall Practice in Late September, Coach Paul Mainieri Previews Team
It's a summer tradition for the media to gather inside the Alex Box club lounge for Paul Mainieri's annual preview of the upcoming season. It's usually an hour of back and forth questions about every player on the roster and early thoughts about the talent and hopes of a return to Omaha.
This year, the meeting was held virtually, just like everything else in this COVID-19 world we're living in. It's the craziest time of Mainieri's life, a sentiment he shared nearly five months ago when the 2020 season was officially shut down in mid March.
"I never even knew the word Zoom until March," Mainieri said. "Now everybody's an expert on how to use Zoom except I don't know how to unmute myself."
Though the times have changed, as of now, the 2021 baseball season remains on course to start in February. LSU returns 23 veterans and welcomes 17 new players to the roster next season and Mainieri couldn't be more excited about the start of fall practice.
Not much has changed for the players as most of the position players were able to scramble and play in some sort of summer league to stay fresh. The team started shuffling in at the beginning of August and have spent the better part of the last two weeks quarantining according to Mainieri.
Mainieri did reveal that six players contracted COVID-19 over the summer while at home, further pointing to the significance of having the players on campus where the medical staff and coaches can better control what the players are doing.
"It just goes to show that when they live at home and they're doing the normal things that they do, they're coming into contact with people that potentially are carriers," Mainieri said. "While we have them here at school, we can control a lot of the things that they're doing. We're going to an extreme in monitoring heartbeats and things like that while they're actively on the field. I feel very confident that they're getting the very best medical attention."
Of the six players that did catch the virus, most of them were either asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms according to Mainieri. The team started quarantining at home on Aug. 2, with the returning players arriving on campus Aug. 9. Of the returning players that have gone through physicals, Mainieri said there were zero positive tests which was encouraging. The new players will be undergoing physicals on Friday.
The plan for fall practice will be a little different than past years. After a six week acclimation period that the NCAA set up for fall practice purposes, LSU will begin on Sept. 20 and have six weeks of practices that will conclude on Oct. 30. The emphasis in those practices will be more focused on the scrimmages than actual fundamentals.
Mainieri wants to see how his pitchers, particularly Jaden Hill, will react to five inning outings in the fall as opposed to previous years where the coaches would cap those outings at three innings.
"When you play more innings, the pitchers will have more innings, the hitters will have more at bats, there'll be more plays to be made in the field," Mainieri said. "We'll have two nine man teams to play against each other, we're going to play as much like a regulation game as we possibly can so we'll get a better look at everybody."
There will be plenty of precautions the team will take once practice does start up. There will be no high fives, no spitting, players will be required to keep their gaiter masks on when around other teammates and the squad will be separated into two dugouts during scrimmages.
"Pitchers who are not participating in games will be sitting in the stands and spaced out. We've done some crazy things that you just don't think about every day," Mainieri said. "The way we've assigned locker rooms; we used to have all of the pitchers on one half of the locker room and the position players on the other half. Now we alternate pitcher, position player for the simple reason that I can send the pitchers home early from practice and then when the 18 position players finish the scrimmage, only those 18 players plus the two pitchers that finished the game will be in the locker room. So we'll be more spread out."
As far as scheduling is concerned, no programs have called Mainieri and cancelled any scheduled series for the 2021 season. Opening weekend for example, Notre Dame, Army and Air Force visit Baton Rouge. In Army and the Air Force's case, each conference has cancelled fall sports, including football, since Mainieri last talked to those coaches.
Illinois is also scheduled to make a trip to Alex Box in 2021 but with the Big Ten also electing to shut down fall sports, Mainieri isn't sure how that series could be potentially impacted.
"I don't know if that's going to impact things," Mainieri said. "Are they going to be cutting back on their spring sports, travel schedules? I have no reason to say this but I don't know if the SEC is going to allow us to play non-conference games. I've checked in with all of the coaches and they tell me they're still planning to come to LSU. Until somebody tells me they're not coming or we're told by our conference something different, we're going to keep the schedule in place."
Mainieri is as optimistic about each season as anyone but even he doesn't know what tomorrow will bring, much less what the world will look like six months from now. While he's excited about the team and the potential of this roster, he's focused on what he can control, which at the moment is getting his players back on the field for fall practice.
"I feel very optimistic about it and of course my optimism is based on the hopes that there's a vaccine that's going to be developed," Mainieri said. "In the baseball program, we're going to operate each day like we're going to have a season in the spring."