Last night at Alex Box Stadium, the LSU baseball team was honored for all the hardware they racked up over the course of the season, and a packed house braved the searing late-June heat to explode in applause for the national champions, Dylan Crews’ Golden Spikes Award, Paul Skenes’ Dick Howser Trophy and head coach Jay Johnson’s National Coach of the Year award by Collegiate Baseball.
All of the players walked in one by one from center field to soak up applause from a full house…
For the final time in Alex Box Stadium — Outfielder, No. 3, Dylan Crews@__dc4__ | #ThePowerhouse pic.twitter.com/vzwecj1EYC
— LSU Baseball (@LSUbaseball) June 29, 2023
It was a cool celebration punctuated by one of the best fireworks displays we’ve ever seen…
What a fireworks show! @LSUbaseball #LSU pic.twitter.com/zMeN1v7Y3S
— Jacques Doucet (@JacquesDoucet) June 29, 2023
For others, baseball is a game, but for the Tigers of LSU, baseball is life. #ThePowerhouse pic.twitter.com/NbmweTxvhd
— LSU Baseball (@LSUbaseball) June 29, 2023
But there was a downside, something we could have all seen coming – because no sooner would there be individual or team achievement for the folks to celebrate, you had to know Louisiana’s sleazy politicians would trundle over to soak up a piece of unearned attention.
It always happens. We guess there isn’t much anybody can do to stop it, but it’s pretty clear it isn’t appreciated.
So when Baton Rouge’s nincompoop mayor-president Sharon Weston Broome decided that she would punctuate her announcement of giving Johnson the key to the city, which would be a legitimate purpose for taking the podium at the national championship celebration, by attempting to lead the crowd in “L-S-U” cheers, you had to know it wouldn’t go well.
And it didn’t. Probably not just because Broome, who has turned Baton Rouge into one of America’s most dangerous failed-city shooting galleries, isn’t too popular with LSU baseball fans, but also because she has no idea how the “L-S-U” chant is supposed to sound, and she proved it.
Oh, by the way – Louisiana’s failed governor John Bel Edwards was also booed, and rightly so. LSU fans remember Edwards’ unseemly glomming-on to the 2019 football national championship team, even going so far as to show up at Joe Burrow’s Heisman Trophy ceremony in New York and prominently figuring on the ESPN telecast of that.
When he decided to do the same thing with this baseball team, that didn’t go so well, either…
Edwards at least was smart enough to talk quickly, though his speech went on and on as the crowd marinated in the sweltering heat of the evening.
Social media was divided on the crowd’s reaction to Broome and Edwards, as there were people horrified at the “disrespect” which somehow marred the ceremony. If that’s true, it wasn’t in evidence on the stage; LSU’s players seemed highly amused at the, er, tepid reaction the politicians received.
Most of the reaction, though, came along the lines of the boos being just desserts for a pair of quite unsuccessful leaders trying to latch on to the success of others for whom they bear very little credit.
And that, we’d agree with. Particularly in this day and age when too much is politicized in our society.
LSU is going to win another national championship in something pretty soon – like the next sports year. Maybe football, quite likely again in women’s basketball, and maybe even a repeat in baseball. Louisiana will have a new governor when it’s time to celebrate. And if so, what we’re hoping is the political participation in the festivities will be a bit more tasteful and reserved so the attention can be focused where it belongs.