Jay Johnson reflects on LSU's 2023 roster, putting the championship-winning roster together

The curtain has closed on LSU‘s national championship in baseball, the program’s seventh, but the party will go on for a long, long time. And many of the members of the Tigers’ historic run will go down as legends, even some who weren’t on the LSU roster just one year ago.

In fact, you could easily argue that if not for coach Jay Johnson‘s persistence convincing a handful of stars to transfer to LSU, the Tigers wouldn’t have won it all.

There was ace Paul Skenes from Air Force. Slugger Tommy White from NC State. Game 3 star on the mound Thatcher Hurd from UCLA and key bullpen guy Christian Little from Vanderbilt. Just a few of the additions that turned LSU from very good to great in 2023.

“Part of me will feel like this national championship is for 2022 also,” Johnson explained. “Like, we really had to dig our heels in. I mean, in the SEC, it happens fast. That was a ninth place team in 2021 in the SEC.

“I knew there were some good, young players, obviously. We worked really hard to develop those guys. We worked really hard to develop those guys, but we just didn’t have enough on the mound. Like, guys have been hurt.”

After falling to Southern Miss in NCAA Regional action in 2022, Johnson was determined to get the help he needed on the LSU roster.

“I just didn’t want to be in that position again,” Johnson said. “And felt like the pieces were here, with the position player group was a national championship team last year. Very similar, to be honest with you. But we had to get better on the mound. And we did.”

So after his team’s season ended, while other teams were preparing for Super Regionals and then Omaha and the College World Series, Johnson went to work.

First scouting, then recruiting. He honed in on a few key players to add to the LSU roster.

“I think back of the week the College World Series started last year, I flew to Colorado Springs and met with Paul,” Johnson said. “I flew from there to California and met with Thatcher. From there I flew to Missouri and met with Christian. I flew from there to Tampa and met with Tommy the next week.

“They all came on campus except for Paul. We had to wait for Team USA to be over. Called Paul every day of the summer.

“And then we got them on board. And knowing that we were pairing all of those guys with the strides that some of these guys had made in one year’s time we felt pretty good about what this was going to be. And they were very humble about it, too.”

Nothing about LSU’s national title was all that humble, though. After an embarrassing 24-4 loss in Game 2, LSU’s leaders simply refocused and went to work.

And when push came to shove in Game 3, it was the Tigers who did the whipping, blistering the Gators with an 18-4 result that sewed up the national title for good.

The vision that Johnson set out with one year ago when he built the LSU roster realized.

“This league’s a beast,” he said. “To beat Kentucky in the Super Regional, to beat Tennessee twice here, to beat Florida to win the national championship, that’s really meaningful, because it’s one thing to have the best writers in the country write about how great you are. It’s an entirely different thing to go do it on the field.”