‘There’s power in that gold’

• By CARL DUBOIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 11, 2008 - Page: 8C - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Here’s another LSU baseball streak for you: The Tigers have played their last five games in sunflower-gold jerseys and plan to extend that to six today against Mississippi State.

That color was a favorite of the 1996 team, which won the national championship wearing sunflower-gold jerseys. That was the year Warren Morris hit the most famous home run in college baseball history to win the title game.

“I think with the exception of the Tulane game, the team has watched the ’96 highlight video before every ballgame of this streak,” LSU coach Paul Mainieri said Saturday after the Tigers stretched their winning streak to 11 games.

“I mean, on the bus, after batting practice — they go inside, they turn off the lights and they watch the highlight video that we have of the ’96 World Series team — and they’ve drawn great inspiration from that.”

Mainieri chose that color for the second game of the South Carolina series because he liked the way LSU played all year in those jerseys, which were usually reserved for Sundays. Because of the possibility of rain wiping out the third day of the South Carolina series, Mainieri picked the gold jerseys for the Saturday game that weekend.

“I told them we were going to pretend that day was Sunday,” Mainieri said.

LSU had a big comeback for an 11-10 victory that day, then won the next day for a sweep while wearing throwback uniforms in the style of the early 20th century.

The Tigers wore pinstripes in a 5-3 victory two days later against UL-Lafayette and have worn the gold tops ever since.

“I told the kids, ‘Man, there’s power in that gold, there’s magic in gold.’ We’ve got them believing that the colors of their uniform might have something to do with their success,” Mainieri said, “and then they started watching the ‘96 team, and hey, they were playing in the gold all the time.

“It’s kind of a nice little side story.”

There was no debate about what to wear today, Mainieri said.

“I just asked the kids, ‘Do you want to wear the old-timers uniforms for (today) on our last day, and they all said, ‘No, no, no. We want to wear the gold.’

“Whatever it takes to make them feel confident, I’m all for it.”