By Sean Ryan
Co-Founder
CollegeBaseballInsider.com
Following in the footsteps of a legend seldom comes easy. Even tougher is when the legend is a longtime friend and mentor.
Although Paul Mainieri wasn’t the immediate successor to Skip Bertman, arguably one of the Mount Rushmores of college baseball coaches, he was tasked with regularly keeping LSU among the elites of the sport.
Bertman sought out Mainieri, who previously coached at Air Force before putting Notre Dame on the national map, to replace Smoke Laval, who guided the Tigers to two College World Series appearances in five seasons but couldn’t sustain the excellence desired, and expected, in Baton Rouge.
The hand-me-down shoes from Bertman to Laval to Mainieri, who announced his retirement Friday, remained huge.
Over the course of 15 seasons, Mainieri may not have filled those shoes with enough wins or national titles. But he regularly took his Tigers to national acclaim, winning one national title and making five trips to Omaha. What failures critics bemoaned, he countered with humility and class, emanating a genuine and gracious respect for opponents, rivals and the game itself.
And he won. A lot.
As the Tigers await the NCAA selection committee’s verdict for this year’s tournament, Mainieri’s ledger is impeccable. In addition to the 2009 national title and five College World Series trips, Mainieri’s Tigers won four SEC titles and six SEC tourney titles, matching Bertman and Alabama’s Jim Wells for tops in league history. He trails only Bertman as winning coaches at LSU, going 637-282-3 (.693), and trails only Bertman (.724) and South Carolina’s Ray Tanner (.700) in career winning percentage in SEC history. He did so in an SEC environment that has only gotten deeper and tougher since Bertman’s days.
“Paul Mainieri has made one of the greatest impacts over the past three decades,” said Brian O’Connor, the Virginia head coach who assisted Mainieri at Notre Dame and is one of his close friends.
Aside from the wins and championships, O’Connor said the players under his care became men, and that was the most important thing to him. And he treated his opponents with respect.
“For the game as a whole, you always need people like Paul Mainieri,” O’Connor said. “He did it the right way.”
With 1,501 career wins, Mainieri ranks seventh all-time for Division I wins. After getting his start at St. Thomas University in Florida, where he coached for six years, he spent six years at Air Force. In 12 years at Notre Dame, Mainieri guided the Fighting Irish to nine NCAA tourneys and a trip to Omaha in 2002, going 533-213-3 in South Bend.
“Paul has had an unbelievable career and won everywhere he has been, and he’s done it with dignity and class,” Georgia coach Scott Stricklin said. “College baseball will certainly miss him.”
From 2012-17, the Tigers averaged 50 – 50!!! – wins a season and with a break or two could have given Mainieri another national title or two. They finished in the top five nationally three times, including as national runner up to SEC foe Florida in 2017.
In 2012, LSU won a rain-delayed game that spanned two days against Stony Brook in the Super Regionals. The Seawolves shockingly won two straight games to stun the Tigers and advance to Omaha.
Stony Brook coach Matt Senk told New York Magazine after the upset: “There’s been a lot of things, but I think the one thing that stood out the most was – again, LSU coach [Paul] Mainieri is such as class act. Their entire operation down there – after going there, there is no surprise why they’re so successful in so many of their sports, why they’re considered an athletic program and a university that’s first class and playing for national championships.”
Mainieri and his staff attracted the likes of Alex Bregman, Aaron Nola and DJ LeMahieu, among others, and developed them into the college game’s brightest stars and into major league standouts. His teams regularly looked like a national title contender. And they piled up win after win after win.
“I have been the luckiest guy in the world to have lived out a childhood dream of becoming a college baseball coach,” Mainieri said at a press conference Friday afternoon.
College baseball fans have been the lucky ones.