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The story of LSU baseball’s eighth national championship

GREAT EIGHT

On the cover

LSU celebrates on the field after defeating Coastal Carolina in a two-game sweep of the College World Series finals in Omaha, Neb., June 22, 2025. The final game, a 5-3 victory, was sealed with a double play.

HILARY SCHEINUK / THE ADVOCATE

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This book is an unofficial account of the LSU Tigers baseball team’s 2025 season and is not endorsed by the NCAA or LSU.

Published by Pediment Publishing, a division of The Pediment Group, Inc. • www.pediment.com

Printed in Canada.

If greatness is measured in CWS titles at LSU, these Tigers measure up

BY SCOTT RABALAIS | JUNE 28, 2025

OMAHA, Neb. — Raise another flag in Championship Plaza.

Add another monument in the circle there, too.

Update The Intimidator billboard while you’re at it.

The Tigers are heading home with their eighth College World Series title, clinched Sunday with a 5-3 victory over Coastal Carolina.

Check my math because I’m a writer, but five plus three equals eight, right?

How fitting.

It also equals one other thing: GRE8TNESS.

These are the kings of college baseball, once again and for all time. Sure, the Tigers are still chasing Southern California and its 12 titles, but LSU is the best program ever. Eight championships won since 1991, in a much more competitive era than when the Trojans won most of theirs, is testament to that.

Making it here to the College World Series is the minimum.

Winning it all is the expectation.

“This,” LSU starting and winning pitcher Anthony Eyanson said, “is what I dreamed of.”

Murray State could depart Omaha 0-2 still having lived the dream of its greatest season ever.

For LSU, an 0-2 trip here is an abject failure. On some message boards it would qualify as treason against LSU, grounds enough to fire the coach.

When you get here and accomplish this much, naturally there is a hierarchy of greatness. This LSU baseball team will forever draw comparisons to the 2023 CWS champions, a star-studded squad led by the top two picks in that year’s MLB draft — Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews — plus gold chain-bedecked slugger Tommy White. That team got pounded in the second game of the CWS final 24-4 by Florida but came back to do some pounding of its own in Game 3, 18-4.

More success brings more pressure, too. When you go to LSU to play baseball, everyone knows the standard.

It probably would have taken the 2025 LSU team an entire seven-game College World Series to score 18 runs off of the talented Coastal Carolina pitching staff. This LSU team did it differently: great pitching, superb defense and just enough timely hitting (six runs in these two games) to clinch the crown.

If greatness is the standard, this team more than measures up.

One of LSU coach Jay Johnson’s favorite coaching axioms is to control what you can control. That theory was tested when craziness broke out in the bottom of the first inning.

Coastal Carolina coach Kevin Schnall and first-base coach Matt Schilling both were ejected for extended arguing. Schnall charged out of the dugout waving three fingers at home plate umpire Angel Campos, indicating that he already had missed the correct call on three pitches.

The controversy will probably never die over whether Campos should have run Schnall or shown more patience in such an important game.

OPPOSITE: LSU designated hitter Ethan Frey wears a backpack with his two Omaha patches while signing autographs during the Tigers’ return from winning the national championship on June 23, 2025, at Alex Box Stadium in Baton Rouge. MICHAEL JOHNSON / THE ADVOCATE

ABOVE: LSU head coach Jay Johnson thanks the fans during national championship celebration on June 25, 2025, at Alex Box Stadium in Baton Rouge.

MICHAEL JOHNSON / THE ADVOCATE

But every baseball coach knows you can’t argue balls and strikes.

What’s true in every sport definitely was true Sunday for Schnall and Coastal: If you put yourself in position to get shafted by the officials, that’s exactly what might happen. Fair or not, he should

LSU quickly tied it in the third on an RBI double by Ethan Frey, then poured on four more runs in the fourth inning capped by a two-run single from Derek Curiel that put the Tigers up 5-1.

Coastal, to its credit, wouldn’t go away. LSU chased formerly unbeaten Chanticleers ace Jacob Morrison in the fourth inning, after he allowed his most runs this season, but the bullpen held the Tigers scoreless the rest of the way.

That left it up to Eyanson and LSU’s one reliever, Chase Shores. He left contrails between the mound and home plate as he pumped one 100 mph pitch after another to record the last eight outs.

The game ended on a double play grounder hit to second baseman Daniel Dickinson, who Johnson revealed had been playing with a broken hamate bone since the start of the Baton Rouge regional.

“Yep,” Dickinson said as the Tigers second-lined out of Charles Schwab Field. “Left hand. Having surgery on Tuesday.”

Holy Warren Morris, Batman.

This was a team that Johnson had to piece together after LSU returned only 12 players from its 2024 squad. He was on the phone incessantly, with a hard to beat pitch for transfer portal guys such as center fielder Chris Stanfield, who put the Tigers ahead in the fourth with a two-run single.

“In June, we were on the phone and he told me: ‘Do you want to come play for the best program in the country?’” said Stanfield, who transferred from Auburn.

“That was a no-brainer.”

not have lost his cool and put his team in such a compromising position.

The ejections were also a disruption for the Tigers, who fell behind the Chanticleers 1-0 in the second as a home run by Dean Mihos rode the wind and just cleared the fence in the left-field corner. But

LSU loses a bunch of big-time players for next year, guys such as Eyanson, slugger Jared Jones and pitcher Kade Anderson, named the Most Outstanding Player of the CWS after giving up one run in two brilliant starts here.

Nothing changes, though. That’s what high standards are all about.

“I’m sure next year it’ll be number nine,” Anderson said.

Right now, it’s hard to argue.

LEFT: LSU head coach Jay Johnson pumps his fists while walking from the dugout during introductions for the national championship celebration.

MICHAEL JOHNSON / THE ADVOCATE

LSU’s Jared Jones passed on the draft — twice. Now he wants ‘another shot’ at Omaha

BY KOKI RILEY | FEB. 14, 2025

Jared Jones still remembers the conversation.

It was his freshman year, and the LSU first baseman was hitting off of a tee the morning after a rough day at the plate. He was in the starting lineup but struggling. He needed to clear his head.

Paul Skenes walked into the room.

“Why are you hitting off a tee?” Skenes asked.

“I don’t know, just trying to get my mind off things,” Jones replied.

“You remind me a lot of myself,” Skenes said.

Skenes, LSU’s ace that season, went on to start the MLB All-Star Game and win the National League Rookie of the Year award less than two years later. But in this moment, he proceeded to ask a question: “Do you know who I played my first college game against?”

Jones knew the answer. It was LSU. Skenes began his collegiate career as a two-way player at Air Force and primarily was a hitter. His debut was nearly four years before LSU’s season opener on Friday against Purdue Fort Wayne.

“You know what my stat line was that weekend?” Skenes asked Jones.

“No,” Jones replied.

“0 for 11, nine Ks,” Skenes said. (He actually went 0 for 8 with five strikeouts.)

“Yeah, not a good weekend,” Jones said.

“No, not a good weekend,” Skenes agreed.

The rest of the year didn’t go swimmingly for Jones. He lost his starting job by the time the postseason came around, mostly watching from the bench as LSU went on to win its seventh national championship on the backs of Skenes, Dylan Crews, Tommy White, Tre’ Morgan, Cade Beloso and Gavin Dugas, among others.

Jones learned from all of them.

“The senior leadership kind of helped mold (Jared) to understand the standard at LSU, along with the coaches,” Jones’ father, George, said.

“Even through the struggles of his freshman year, he leaned heavily on the seniors for emotional and performance support. And they embraced him.”

After hitting 28 home runs the next season and turning down Major League Baseball for a second time, Jones — aka “Bear” — returns to LSU for

his junior year as the face of the program. He enters this season as the No. 1 first baseman in the nation, according to D1Baseball. As Skenes once was for him, he’ll be the man his new teammates look up to as the Tigers bring back only 12 players who played in a game for them a year ago.

But what led Jones to this moment — becoming the star power hitter and centerpiece of a consensus top-5 team in the country — was more than just one conversation with Skenes.

“He has matured mentally and emotionally beyond what I could have imagined he would,” Michelle Jones, Jared’s mother, said.

AN EXTRA YEAR

Michelle wishes they’d done it with their older son. Her and her husband had gone through it four times before, having three daughters and a son enter high school at a young age and graduate before turning 18. But the chaos of raising so many children didn’t give them the time to think about whether they should let their kids attend school with legal adults.

LSU fans tailgate with 13.5-foot high Mike the Tiger in Omaha for College World Series

BY JOY HOLDEN | JUNE 12, 2025

A13.5-foot-high, 31-foot-long fiberglass

Mike the Tiger float is on its way to Omaha, Nebraska. The Kern Studios float debuted Wednesday morning as more than 100 fans gathered at Alex Box Stadium to send off the LSU baseball team on its way to Omaha for the College World Series.

The float will travel the 15 hours from Baton Rouge to Omaha on highways and interstates — along with the LSU baseball faithful who will have a chance to tailgate with Mardi Gras Mike at Charles Schwab Field. Throughout the College World Series, Mardi Gras Mike’s tenders also plan for the giant tiger to show up around Omaha wherever LSU fans gather.

Imagined six months ago by Barry Kern, CEO and president of Kern Studios and Mardi Gras World, and his sons, the float took three months to design and plan and three more months to build.

“This is really something cool that kind of

integrates what we do from Mardi Gras with the spirit of LSU and LSU Tiger fans,” Kern said.

“Why don’t we do something that will just bring all this together in one fell swoop? And that’s how we came up with Mardi Gras Mike.”

Mardi Gras Mike meets the height requirements, 13.5 feet high and 8.5 feet wide, to be street legal on highways. The goal is to take the tiger float wherever LSU goes — big games, parades and other LSU events.

Kern, the third generation of Kern Studios, had the idea after attending the Tiger Walk before the LSU vs. Ole Miss football game last year.

“There was something like 70,000 people there,” Kern said, “but we could even help it be more exciting. So my dream was that one day, Mardi Gras Mike would come down and go wherever LSU fans are.”

Mardi Gras Mike roars and plays the fight song with giant speakers, and in true Mardi Gras World

fashion, lights up with LED lights at night. People can stand in the tiger and throw beads, so he is ready for future championship parades.

Patrick Kern, the fourth generation of Kern Studios and director of operations, said it was a great feeling to see Mardi Gras Mike outside of the warehouse and ready to go to Omaha.

“Getting to see our work come to fruition and bring joy to so many people is surreal,” Patrick Kern said.

The float will follow a white truck with Mardi Gras Mike signage that reads, “Geauxing Back to Omaha,” as well as Kern Studios and Mardi Gras World decals.

“(LSU) certainly will be the only team in Omaha that has its own Mardi Gras float and its own Mardi Gras Mike,” Barry Kern said.

LSU’s first game at the 2025 College World Series will be against No. 3 Arkansas at 6 p.m. on Saturday at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha.

OPPOSITE: Rolfe McCollister, an LSU alumnus, climbs atop a giant Mike the Tiger Mardi Gras–style float by Kern Studios outside of Alex Box Stadium during a sendoff for the LSU baseball team before they leave to the College World Series in Omaha on June 11, 2025. The float will travel to Omaha before LSU’s opening game. JAVIER GALLEGOS / THE ADVOCATE

How a backyard batting cage helped LSU baseball’s Derek Curiel guide the Tigers to Omaha

BY KOKI RILEY | JUNE 14, 2025

OMAHA, Neb. — Still plotted in the backyard of the Curiel house in West Covina, California, is a batting cage.

The apparatus is impossible to miss. The 55-footlong structure sits over 75 feet of turf. Twelve feet of netting separates the roof from its floor, and the width of the cage — 18 feet — provides plenty of room for hitters to swing away without slashing into the mesh.

Eight poles drilled 3½ feet into the ground keep the enclosure standing.

“The net was super, super heavy,” LSU freshman outfielder Derek Curiel said, recalling the construction of the cage, “and my brother and my dad mainly did all the work because they were older.”

With his brother Donovyn already off playing junior-college baseball — eight years before Derek’s collegiate career would begin in Baton Rouge — the Curiel cage was constructed mainly to hone the skills of a baseball-obsessed Derek.

At least five days a week, for no less than two hours each day, Derek’s father, Rick, would throw

batting practice to his youngest son. Their work was so frequent that they tore up the grass in the cage, prompting Rick, with the help of a friend, to implement a turf base.

“The first two months, it was just our regular grass,” Rick said. “And it got torn up. It honestly became dirt because it had a nice yard. It was like an eyesore.”

All of those hours in the cage have led to Saturday night when LSU faces Arkansas to kick off its run at the 2025 College World Series.

“We’re just so happy and blessed that he’s at LSU,” Rick said, “and I just can’t believe my son’s going to the College World Series.”

Derek is a fixture in the LSU lineup. He’s spent the majority of this season as the leadoff hitter, entering Omaha with a team-best .473 on-base percentage, a 1.004 on-base plus slugging percentage and 19 doubles.

As the team leader in walks, his patience at the plate has earned LSU coach Jay Johnson’s full trust.

“He’s the engine of this offense,” Johnson said,

“and how he plays inspires the team.”

Fine-tuning that engine required hours of practice and a routine Derek developed with his father in the cage.

Before Rick would start throwing, Derek would begin each hitting session by taking swings off of a tee. Once Derek had practiced hitting the ball to the opposite field and up the middle off of the tee, they’d progress to Rick soft tossing balls to him.

“Initially, when he was younger, I would do side flips from the side, like soft toss,” Rick said. “But as he started getting a little bit older, I started doing the front flips in the front with the L screen right in front of me.”

Rick would move back to 32 feet and start throwing batting practice once Derek properly had warmed up. Derek would choke up on the bat and perform one-handed swings with each hand before taking two-handed swings with a weighted bat.

“I put that 55-ounce bat in his hand,” Rick said. “We’d swing that quite a bit because once he got his game bat in his hand, I wanted it to feel super

OPPOSITE: LSU left fielder Derek Curiel (6) celebrates the three-run home run against West Virginia in the fourth inning of Game 1 of the Super Regional on June 7, 2025, at Alex Box Stadium in Baton Rouge. MICHAEL JOHNSON / THE ADVOCATE

Tigers get the big CWS win versus Arkansas they simply had to have

BY SCOTT RABALAIS | JUNE 15, 2025

OMAHA, Neb. — By College World Series standards, this was like the Thrilla in Manila, the Yankees and Dodgers in the big-league World Series, LSU versus Clemson in football in August.

Let’s not go there just yet.

This is college baseball’s time on sports’ center stage, and this was about as good as this venerable event could offer in the opening round: The two highest-seeded teams remaining, No. 3 Arkansas against No. 6 LSU. The only two Southeastern Conference teams still standing. The two favorites among this year’s elite eight.

Now there is one favorite, LSU, as the Tigers toppled the mighty Razorbacks 4-1 in as dramatic of a Saturday night as you could have between these two border rivals in any sport.

Not that Arkansas is done, but Arkansas has to battle out of the loser’s bracket while the Tigers cruise into the next crucial game at 6 p.m. Monday against UCLA. The Bruins beat upstart Murray State 6-4 Saturday afternoon, the team the Razorbacks must now play to survive.

Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn downplayed the fix his team is in.

“You just can’t get all uptight about it,” Van Horn said. “These guys, they’ve come back and won games. They’ve done some great things this year.”

LSU coach Jay Johnson downplayed how much benefit this win gave to his Tigers.

“A lot’s made of it, especially when you’re playing such a great team,” Johnson said. “I didn’t feel like (losing the opener) was a death sentence. They call it a double-elimination tournament for a reason.”

True enough, but the fact is winning the opener is huge. Front page. Bold type. Twenty-two of the past 25 CWS champions have won their opener. All seven of LSU’s national champions have won their first game.

It isn’t a guarantee, but it is a great start. And even in a double-elimination format, you must have a great start.

This was perhaps LSU’s biggest showdown in a CWS opener since 1997, when the Tigers beat Rice and Lance Berkman 5-4 on Brandon Larson’s eighth-inning home run. That LSU team also couldn’t afford to fall into the loser’s bracket. Instead, it went on to beat Alabama for the title.

The Tigers couldn’t have asked for a much better start in this one. After a scoreless first inning with

each team’s ace — LSU’s Kade Anderson and Arkansas’ Zach Root — settling in, the game took a totally unexpected left turn in the second. LSU chased Root, a pitcher Johnson still laments about not signing, before the second inning was over. The Tigers scored three runs as six straight batters reached base with one out: Luis Hernandez and Derek Curiel on walks, Daniel Dickinson on a cunning bunt single, Chris Stanfield on an RBI single to left, Michael Braswell on a hit by pitch and Josh Pearson on an RBI fielder’s choice. Suddenly, it was 3-0 Tigers and Root was done. Why didn’t Van Horn leave his ace in to work through what looked like some survivable control issues in the second?

“Really it boiled down to Anderson,” Van Horn said. “He didn’t give us anything. He’s 11-1 because he’s really good. That’s all I’ve got.”

Anderson scuffled through a rather rocky showing in the super regional against West Virginia, when he surrendered six earned runs in seven innings of work. At the postgame news conference at Alex Box Stadium, Anderson looked like he could bite a steel bolt in half he was so irritated with himself.

OPPOSITE: From left, left fielder Derek Curiel (6), center fielder Chris Stanfield (1), third baseman Michael Braswell III (10), shortstop Steven Milam (4), first baseman Jared Jones (22), right fielder Josh Pearson (11) and second baseman Daniel Dickinson (14) celebrate in the outfield as the Tigers defeat the Razorbacks 4-1 in Game 4 of the College World Series, June 14, 2025, at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Neb. HILARY SCHEINUK / THE ADVOCATE