On July 2, 2024, Dylan Crews and Tre’ Morgan, two indispensable pillars of LSU’s 2023 national championship team, were named to Major League Baseball’s All-Star Futures event. Two years later, two pitchers have joined the club, with Kade Anderson and Anthony Eyanson, the co-aces of LSU’s 2025 national title team, named to the 2026 Futures Game.

There is something satisfying in the symmetry, even if only this writer sees it quite this way: One championship team sends its bats and gloves, the next sends its arms.

It is also a useful reminder, especially as Coach Jay Johnson has already begun shaping whatever LSU baseball is supposed to become next. Will it be the 2023 and 2025 versions, or the 2024 and 2026? The 2023 team was not supposed to be a one-off burst of greatness, and the 2025 title made sure it wasn’t.

The question now, especially with the 2027 team already sitting out there in the imagination of a rabid fan base that does not wait very patiently, is whether LSU can keep feeding professional baseball while still stoking its own championship standard in Baton Rouge.

Among a roster of stars, Crews was the headliner of the 2023 team, and not by a little. He hit .426 with 18 homers and 70 RBI, which would be enough to carry most college baseball résumés by itself. In Crews’ case, it was only the beginning of the list. He was the 2023 Golden Spikes Award winner, 2023 Bobby Bragan Collegiate Slugger Award winner, 2023 consensus First-Team All-American, 2023 College World Series All-Tournament Team selection, 2023 NCAA Regional All-Tournament Team selection, 2023 SEC Male Athlete of the Year, 2023 SEC Player of the Year, First-Team All-SEC selection, SEC All-Defensive Team selection, ABCA Gold Glove Team selection, SEC Academic Honor Roll member, SEC Community Service Team member, LSWA Louisiana Hitter of the Year, three-time SEC Player of the Week, and Collegiate Baseball National Player of the Week.

And that’s just in his third and final season at LSU. This entire article could have been about Dylan Crews’ ridiculous numbers and accolades at LSU. I literally had to pick and choose, which says enough by itself. Read here for more, just make sure you’re sitting down for a while. He is truly one of the greatest players in LSU sports history.

Morgan, meanwhile, was the kind of championship player box scores can almost underrate. Perhaps the play Tiger fans remember best, one that may have saved the day against Wake Forest in the College World Series, was his dive to field a bunt and toss out a runner barreling toward home plate. Had that play not been made, all things staying the same for the remainder of that game, the Demon Deacons would have been the ones playing Florida in the CWS Finals. Morgan played and started 194 games at LSU, hit .332 for his career, and finished with 256 hits, 49 doubles, nine triples, 20 homers, 149 RBI and 180 runs. In 2023, he hit .316 with 15 doubles, four triples, nine homers, 53 RBI and 66 runs. In Omaha, he hit .344 and made the College World Series All-Tournament Team, which fit the player LSU fans watched for three years: steady, tough, and usually right in the middle of whatever action defined the outcome.

Read more about Mr Morgan here.

After a disappointing 2024 season, the Tigers bounced back, led by aces Anderson and Eyanson. Anderson went 12-1 with a 3.18 ERA and 180 strikeouts in 119 innings, finished first in the nation in total strikeouts, and became the College World Series MVP. In Omaha, he went 2-0 with a 0.56 ERA, allowing one run over 16 innings, and threw only the second complete-game shutout in LSU’s College World Series history, a 1-0 victory over Coastal Carolina in the Finals. Eyanson was just as essential, going 12-2 with a 3.00 ERA, 152 strikeouts in 108 innings, and earning the win in the title-clinching game.

Read more about Anderson and Eyanson to get the full breadth of their statistical impact.

Now the professional side is beginning to confirm what LSU fans already saw. Anderson, in the Mariners’ system with Double-A Arkansas, is 8-0 with a 1.22 ERA, 99 strikeouts, only 10 walks and a 0.71 WHIP through 13 starts. Eyanson, in the Red Sox system, has a 1.07 ERA, 64 strikeouts and a 0.87 WHIP through 12 starts.

Crews is already in the majors with Washington, hitting .234 with five homers, 17 RBI and five steals in 2026, with a recent uptick over his last 15 games. Morgan is at Triple-A Durham in the Rays system, where injuries have slowed his 2026, though his minor league career line still sits at .297 with a .396 on-base percentage and .854 OPS.

So the larger story is not only that LSU won titles in 2023 and 2025. It is that the players who carried those titles are already showing up in professional baseball’s next wave.

And of course, who can forget Paul Skenes, who went No. 1 to the Pirates in that 2023 draft just ahead of Crews at No. 2. Skenes simply skipped the Futures Game stage altogether and went straight to starting the actual showcase—the MLB All-Star Game at Globe Life Field in Arlington.

That is what makes this worth remembering on July 2. Crews and Morgan helped bring Omaha back to Baton Rouge for the first time since 2009. Anderson and Eyanson did it again two years later, signaling a potential dynasty in the making, the 2026 disaster notwithstanding. Now all four are tied together by the Futures Game, which is less something new than a reminder of what LSU baseball can be when it is clicking on all cylinders.

The next question belongs to Coach Johnson and the next wave in 2027, what Tiger fans are already eyeing with a little superstition because of the odd-year line from 2023 to 2025, not unlike something similar LSU football fans experienced from 2001 to 2011. Most of the names once expected to carry that next version of LSU baseball have moved on, which is the nature of the sport now. Rosters turn over quickly, draft boards make a fan blink and realize that a freshman phenom is gone already, and midsummer confidence can look silly by week three of an SEC schedule. But Steven Milam’s surprising return gives LSU one familiar championship piece around which the next team can begin to take shape.

Of course, there are others that contributed to that scintillating 2025 run.

Casan Evans and William Schmidt give Johnson recognizable arms to build around, the kind of arms LSU can dream on without pretending every promising pitcher has to become Anderson or Eyanson by February. Behind the plate, Omar Serna Jr and Cade Arrambide give LSU real power and catching depth, with enough offensive ability to make the DH spot part of the rotation rather than the dreaded reality that one of your best bats at catcher might have to sit too much throughout the year—which in turn might spell trouble come transfer portal time.

Then there is, yes, the portal LSU can also capitalize on, where Johnson has already added Bino Watters from Notre Dame, considered the top bat available, and Landon Hood from Gonzaga, one of the top arms. So perhaps the next LSU team can bring the symmetry full circle. The 2023 champions sent bats and gloves. The 2025 champions sent arms. Maybe 2027 will send all three.

That is the machine, and maybe even the poetry, Johnson is trying to revive in 2027. LSU must be more than a talented roster, as everyone has learned through the years, even going back to the days of Skip Bertman. It must be more than a proud program with old trophies, more than a cool billboard in right field, and more than one nice trip to Omaha every few years. LSU is trying to recover its place among the USCs and Texases of the sport, where Omaha feels less like a miracle and more like an expectation, and where college baseball’s biggest moments become a championship stepping stone for young players who dream of starring in Major League Baseball one day.

Jay Johnson and the Tiger baseball program are not merely collecting championship memories. They are sending championship players forward, into the next level, where the rest of baseball gets a longer look at what Baton Rouge already knew.