Baseball Thoughts- My turn!
Al and Cadaver both had good thoughts.
Alabama is not great- but they are improving and they are better than they were. This is a team that smashed a pretty good Samford team on the road earlier this week. And with their schedule they have all high RPI teams- if they get to 30 wins or so- which is very doable as the have four OOC games left that they could win to get them to 26-27 if they perform decently in the SEC and get 3-4 more wins I could see them being a three seed in the postseason. They look to be a bubble team to me. But we absolutely dominated them in pretty much every single phase of the game. We basically put on a clinic and it looks like we are starting to come together. It probably would have been worse for them if JT was at 100% because they probably would have gotten shut out again. But I'm not going to complain about anything especially with how we performed. Here's some food for thought- Alabama's pitching numbers were better than ours coming into the weekend and better than ours in SEC play coming into the weekend.
Small was special on Friday. I still think he has a chance to sneak into the first round. Definitely no worse than second. I'm not worried about him going deep into games because of our bullpen and it's demoralizing for a team to be shut down like that for six innings. Peyton Plumlee has really stepped up. His ERA is 1.84 in SEC starts- and that would be better if he would have made sure that the umpire heard him call time. It was good to see JT back. It will be interesting to see if we start him Saturday since we have a short week or how we handle that. When those three are at full strength in a couple of weeks we may have the best rotation in the SEC. And then we have Keegan midweek- and he is as good or better than most SEC three's. That will play up for us in the regionals.
Leibelt has really stepped up lately. He's up to 7 IP in a row now. Colby White has also stepped up and I feel like we are trying to transition him into a more traditional closer role. He has pithed three scoreless innings in a row. Keegan I thought was good and his run was allowed after Barlow uncharacteristically gave up a hit for the only run on Saturday. Barlow was good as usual and is a consistent one inning guy that can get LH hitters out and give you a clean inning. Riley Self on the other hand is good against RH hitters and I thought his K today in relief of Gordon was big because it snuffed out any chance Alabama had of getting back into the game. And then he gave us another IP on top of that. Cole is a good relief pitcher and even though the results were spotty today I like him as a 2-3 IP long relief option. Yes, he does allow runs sometimes but he also does his job even if it isn't striking out the side on 10 pitches. He pitched actually OK today I thought and it was more about him getting overextended a little bit because we knew that we were going to have to limit Ginn and also because I think we had the opportunity to experiment with him to see what his limits are. Yes, he gave up the home run but then shut Alabama down for 2.3 IP after that and then just ran out of gas. I think he is also better in a pressure situation as well. We didn't even have to use Jack Eagan and we got Brandon Smith some SEC experience.
Like we all thought in the preseason Dustin Skelton would have more home runs than Jordan Westburg.** Good to see him pimping on Alabama and then throwing runners out before they even have a chance to get into the slide- and on a curveball no less. They are going to have nightmares about Tanner Allen. He's hitting a lot better. Foscue and Gilbert has stabilized the infield defense and Gilbert is a better hitter than Halter. Foscue is on a 9 game hitting streak. Gilbert had a couple of home runs and he made some really nice plays at third. I keep waiting for Westburg to have that weekend where he hits 3-4 home runs and it's probably coming. He is on a five game hitting streak and did get one out this weekend. He's playing a little better at SS as well.
Rowdey has our lowest BA of our starters and he's hitting .273. That's really good. He had 5 RBI's and almost hit .500 for the weekend. Jake struggled this weekend and is now only around .400.******** He's currently on a 17 game hitting streak and is coming after Eddy Furniss pretty quickly. MacNamee had a good weekend- he had a home run and RBI's in every game and was very consistent. And we're coming up on the time of year where he typically starts to heat up. DH we have some options and they're mostly pretty good. I like Cumbest the best because I think he is the most versatile because he gives you speed, power- I think it's a matter of time before he hits a home run, he's hitting for average and if needed he can play the OF and be effective. Hatcher has done a good job too and is a better player than he was last year. Both will start for us next year.
At the midpoint in SEC play we are in first place and we're going to start our title push and it looks like we are starting to take shape for postseason and a run at the SEC championship. Our RPI last time I checked was 10. So we're good there. And the rest of our schedule is top 100 RPI games except for Texas Southern- we just can't pull a LSU and lose to them. Memphis is right at 100 so they may or may not fall below that quadrant. We're also probably going to add La Tech to the schedule to replace Nebraska and their RPI is currently 33. With what we have left on the schedule I think as few as 5 SEC wins may be good enough to host. I'd say 16 and go ahead and book your hotel room. 17-18 probably puts us in the National Seed category as long as we take care of business against Texas Southern. If we do- it will basically be impossible for us to have any bad losses on the year. The second half of our SEC schedule is tough- but not any tougher than anything this team has already gone through. As clich? as it is we need to take it one series and one midweek game at a time and we have set ourselves up for a nice postseason run. Enjoy this team my friends!
Hail State!
