Baseball: Robichaux explains pitching decisions in UL’s final game

Tim Buckley, The Advertiser, May 31, 2017

On the same day UL learned it would not be making a fifth straight NCAA Tournament appearance, Tony Robichaux mostly looked forward.

   But the Ragin’ Cajuns baseball coach also took time to look back, including offering – with virtually no prompting – an explanation for some of the major pitching decisions he made in UL’s final game of the season.

   The Cajuns used six arms in last Friday night’s opening-game 7-6 Sun Belt Conference Tournament loss in 11 innings to tourney-host Georgia Southern, a game that wound up being their last after they failed to secure an at-large bid when the NCAA unveiled its 64-team tourney field Monday morning.

   Ace Gunner Leger left after throwing 84 pitches over 7.0 innings against the Eagles, and with UL leading 5-1 after he struck out seven and allowed just six hits.

   Robichaux called the outing, and Leger’s efforts all season, “phenomenal.”

   The junior finished the year 10-2 with a 1.97 ERA, and with 84 strikeouts over 91.1 innings in 15 appearances.

   “He went out there (Friday), and he didn’t feel the greatest,” the Cajun coach said of the Sun Belt Pitcher of the Year. “But he settled in, and loosened up a little bit.”

   Leger was dealing tightness in his back, something that bothered him on and off throughout the latter half of the season.

   “I told him to make sure that – you know, ‘I never want to win a game over somebody being injured; make sure you communicate to me throughout the game,’ ” Robichaux said Monday. “I had our trainer communicating throughout the game with him.

   “After he came out in the seventh, he said, ‘You know, I think that’s enough.’ So we said, ‘No problem.’ ”

   With Leger out, All-Sun Belt reliever Wyatt Marks worked a scoreless eighth inning in which he used 20 pitches and struck out three of the four batters he faced.

   Before the NCAA Tournament gets under way Thursday with LSU as the No. 4 seed and South Alabama as the only Sun Belt team in the field, Marks stands as the nation’s leader in strikeouts in nine innings with an average of 15.17 off a total of 100 over 59.1 innings.

   Marks, who finished the season 2-1 with seven saves and a 2.28 ERA, also leads the country in hits allowed per nine innings at just 4.40.

   But rather than have the junior from St. Thomas More High work the ninth, Robichaux – looking hopefully ahead to potential further action in the Sun Belt tourney, which had been reduced by rain from double-elimination to single-elimination – made a change.  

   Marks gave way to closer Dylan Moore, the Sun Belt’s career saves leader with 38 and team leader with 11 this season.

 “Because it was a single-elimination tournament,” said Robichaux, who doubles as UL’s pitching coach, “we were trying to keep Wyatt’s (Marks’) slider fresh for the next day.

   “He threw right at 20 pitches. Eighteen of those were sliders. So what you have to watch out for is if you throw him back-to-back innings, (and) if you want to lose him the next day, the slider’s not always as sharp.

   “We had a four-run lead,” Robichaux added. “We came in with DMo (Moore) so that (the next day) he (Marks) would be just as sharp.”

   Had it been a double-elimination tournament with a day off in-between games, Robichaux suggested he probably could have used Marks for another inning.

   “But with a single-elimination tournament,” he said, “we were trying to trim 20 potential pitches off of him.”

   Robichaux and the Cajuns figured Moore could protect the four-run lead, keeping them alive in the conference tourney and their NCAA tourney hopes alive as well.

   That plan, however, backfired as the game turned fast on the Cajuns.

   Moore recently was named to the NCBWA’s Stopper of the Year award national midseason watch list.

   But the junior also struggled at times this season and wound up with a 3.96 ERA – far off his 0.91 with 14 saves from last season and even his 1.60 with 13 saves as a freshman in 2015.

   Never, perhaps, were Moore’s 2017 struggles more evident than Friday, when he walked a man, allowed a single, walked another man and gave up an RBI single before exiting without having recorded an out.

   He was relieved by usual No. 2 starter Colten Schmidt, who allowed Logan Baldwin a grand slam that put Georgia Southern up 6-5.

   UL tied it in the bottom of the ninth, and after a scoreless 10th Evan Guillory – who followed Schmidt on the mound with one out in the ninth – got into trouble in the 11th.

   Guillory (who took the loss, making him 4-3 on the year with a 3.57 ERA) left with the bases loaded.

   After he did, Jordan Wren delivered an RBI double off of reliever Jevin Huval that stood up as the game-winner.

   With that, the 35-21-1 Cajuns – and ultimately their season – were finished.

   “We had our chances,” Robichaux said. “We didn’t get it done.

   “You hate ending on something you had a lead, and knowing that you were three outs from moving to the next day. But it didn’t happen.”

   LAGNIAPPE: Robichaux’s son, ex-Cajuns pitcher Austin Robichaux, got his second emergency call-up of the year from the advanced-A Inland Empire 66ers to the injury-challenged AAA Salt Lake Bees over the weekend. Robichaux went 4.2 innings for the Los Angeles Angels’ affiliate Sunday, giving up eight hits, four walks and four runs in a no-decision. … Ex-UL second baseman Jace Conrad, released in April by the Tampa Bay Rays organization that selected him in the 13th round of the 2014 MLB Draft, announced his retirement last week, Tony Robichaux said. Conrad had been playing in Pennsylvania for the independent Frontier League’s Washington Wild Things. The Lafayette High product made it to as high as the Florida State League’s Advanced-A Charlotte Stone Crabs. … Two other ex-Cajuns from local high schools also are no longer playing pro ball. Infielder Ryan Leonards (Notre Dame High) played on three teams in the Chicago White Sox organization, including four games at the AAA level last year, then was released last December after spending three seasons in the minors. Catcher Michael Strentz (Comeaux High) voluntarily retired in February after spending three years in the Angels organization, including four games last season at the AA level.