Another view of LSU baseball

I covered Todd Oakes for several years when he was a pitching coach in the San Francisco Giants organization.

Oakes left the Giants to serve as pitching coach at the University of Minnesota 11 years ago. He's been to BatonRouge for a regional once before with the Gophers and he'll be at LSU this weekend.

So here are the thoughts of someone on the other side of the field in Baton Rouge:

"My goodness, what other place in the country are you going to go to that exemplifies a better college baseball environment,'' Oakes said. "Our director of operations got a call (Monday) a couple of hours before the (NCAA selection) show and it was an LSU fan looking for tickets. He said they were sold out and he was trying to get into the Minnesota allotment of tickets.

"That's all you need to know. There are probably RVs and campers pulling into Baton Rouge as we speak. It's going to be probably as good an environment as you can expose your kids to as far as college baseball.

"I still remember going down there and two days before the first game, there were campers and tailgating it was like a big party -- two days before the first game. It will be an eye opener for a lot of our guys. But it will be a good college baseball environment to expose our kids to.''