Tuesday, May 10
May 10, 2011Thursday, May 12
May 12, 2011
LSU sophomore outfielder Mason Katz extended his arms and stretched his glove out as he dove for the baseball.
When he landed, his 190-pound frame came down squarely on his right hand, breaking it.
Doctors said he would be out three-to-four weeks, if not for the remainder of the season.
Just 12 days later, Katz was back, saving LSU’s season.
With LSU mired in last place in the Southeastern Conference, Katz returned to face Kentucky and provided his team with some much-needed inspiration, going 8-for-11 at the plate for the weekend with 6 RBIs to propel the Tigers to their first SEC sweep of the season.
Alas, the Tigers seemed to catch the lightening in the bottle they’ve been lacking all season.
“Boy was he hot?” LSU coach Paul Mainieri said. “He had an unbelievable weekend. It seemed like every time he swung the bat, he hit a double.”
“I don’t really know [how to explain this],” Katz added of his performance. “I can’t.”
Katz’s return to the LSU lineup caught Mainieri and the rest of the Tigers by surprise.
The sophomore injured his hand during the Tigers’ April 16 loss to Auburn.
He didn’t make the team’s road trip the following weekend to Vanderbilt, because he was unavailable to play.
When the team returned home, Mainieri received a visit from a team trainer and got some unexpected news.
“Our trainer comes to me and says, ‘Katz might be available for you by the weekend,'” Mainieri said. “I looked at him like he was crazy. I said, ‘The guy’s got a broken hand. He’s going to be out three weeks at a minimum.’ He said, ‘He’s telling everybody it’s not sore. The doctor looked at it. It’s a non-displaced fracture. If he can do it. He can go.'”
Still erring on the side of caution, Mainieri sat Katz out of the team’s game last Tuesday with Nicholls State.
The following day, the coach allowed him to test the hand in batting practice.
“I asked him, ‘Is your hand really feeling OK?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I went down and I did some hitting drills and it’s not bothering me,'” Mainieri said. “Hitting drills are one thing, but facing a guy with a 90- mile-per-hour fastball is another thing. So on Wednesday, we had him face some pitchers in a simulated game. He had six at-bats. His first five at-bats, he popped up or struck out looking real bad. But his sixth at-bat, he hit a home run deep over the left-centerfield. That kind of made me perk up a little bit.”
When LSU returned to the diamond last Thursday, Mainieri again opted to sit Katz, this time because Kentucky threw a right-handed pitcher, Alex Meyer.
Katz platoons in the outfield and at first-base, usually giving way to left-handed hitters like Tri-parish native Grant Dozar when opponents throw a righty.
But when Meyer left the game and LSU needed a pinch hitter in a close game during the bottom of the eighth inning, the Tigers’ coach knew who to turn to.
“I’m looking down the dugout to see where Katz is and he’s staring a hole through me,” Mainieri said with a laugh. “I don’t even say a word and he starts walking toward me. And I said, ‘You want to go up there?’ And he says, ‘Absolutely.'”
Katz ripped a two-run single to spark an eight-run LSU eighth that pushed the team from 5-1 down to a 9-5 victory, the start of Katz’s best weekend of his Tigers career.
“Coming off an injury I just wanted to do anything to help my team,” Katz said. “I worked real hard with my injury and did everything I could do to make sure when I came back my swing would be as good as possible.”
The Kentucky series was what appears to be a turnaround for LSU. The Tigers have won six of their past eight games and four of their past 6 SEC games.
That rally took the team from the dumps of the SEC back into the chase for a spot in the SEC Tournament – an event LSU has won three years in a row.
“That got us right back in the hunt in the SEC West,” Mainieri said.
To keep their recent turnaround going, Mainieri said LSU needs to do a few things.
The first is to put the ball in play.
The Tigers strike out more than six times per game, a number that is in the bottom-half of the conference.
With the newly-instituted watered down bats, putting the baseball in play is a must if you hope to score runs.
“We just hit so few home runs nowadays across the country that clutch hitting and putting the ball in play are magnified,” Mainieri said. “Then you get some breaks and put the pressure on the other team and maybe they’ll make a few mistakes.”
But the coach also knows the Tigers need to get hot, too.
From digging such a deep hole for themselves, LSU needs to win two out of three games in virtually every series with a few sweeps mixed in to make up some ground.
Mainieri knows more than anything that it’s possible, because three years ago the Tigers won 23-straight games to rise from the bottom of the conference all the way to the College World Series.
“If we can get [Katz] hot down the stretch; if Mikie Mahtook can get hot and Austin Nola can come out of it. If Tyler Hanover got hot and Raph Rhymes got hot. Am I dreaming here a little bit? Can we get this team going?” Mainieri said. “Can we get all of these guys swinging the bat well at the same time and also pitching well? …We’re wearing the gold jerseys. Anything is possible.”
