Rosetta: Everything fits well for '09 Tigers

• By RANDY ROSETTA
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jun 26, 2009

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Symmetry fits pretty well in sports, baseball maybe more than any other.

Batters start at home with the idea of getting back there.

Nine positions on the diamond in a game played for nine innings.

The college baseball program of the 1990s starts the first new decade of the millennium with a national championship and closes it out with yet another, signaling the clear-cut transition into a promising new era of rekindled dominance.

Sons follow their fathers, and fathers are there to share big moments with sons later on.

And for LSU in a magical 2009 season, Louis Coleman on the mound at the beginning and Louis Coleman there at the finish.

That’s how this season played and that’s just about as perfect as can be imagined.

Rewind and consider the variables.

Coleman makes the decision to come back for his senior season. LSU opens a shiny, brand-new stadium with a promising new era on center stage for the Tigers. Coleman takes the mound and throws the first pitch at the new Alex Box Stadium and records the first victory.

Anchored by Coleman’s SEC Pitcher of the Year season, LSU goes back to the College World Series for a second straight year. And in the final dramatic chapter, Coleman throws the final pitch to put a bow on LSU’s sixth national championship.

There he was in the center of the ESPN camera’s eye, flinging his glove out of sight as catcher Micah Gibbs lumbered out for a form-perfect tackle that triggered a dogpile Coleman and his teammates yearned for from the time every one of them stepped on LSU’s campus.

Afterward, there was a consensus among his younger teammates that watched and learned so much from Coleman that the dogpile had to start with him and finish with him getting up off the ground after everyone else.

When the massive championship flag appeared on the field at Rosenblatt Stadium, there was Coleman snatching it and circling the field again. He got the chance for an encore Thursday when he was the last player introduced at the Tigers celebration at the Box, and he had that flag in his hands once more.