Todd4State's thoughts- Make MSU Baseball Great Again

[HSVDawg]

Todd - acceptance is the first stage of admitting you have a problem.....

I'm going to play asshole in this thread. Other than attendance/atmosphere, why do people think we should be some sort of dominant baseball power? I swear, we are as bad as the guys in Oxford pining for 1960. The fact is we have a very good history, but we never have been in the same league as the top powers over the years. We have never had a decade long run of making the NCAA post season. In the past 45 years, we have not won back to back SEC titles, or back to back SEC Tourneys. In the past 45 years, we have been to the NCAA post season 30 times, but have only made it to Omaha 9 times. That is one trip to Omaha every 5 years. That is not a team with some birthright place in NCAA lore. It is a solid baseball program that can put together a solid post season with a group of seasoned vets every few years. Our baseball program is the pride of the school because it is the only program with any type of consistent winning and national profile throughout our history. So, there is no FIX for returning MSU Baseball to some sort of mythical dominance. It never existed.

If we continue to make that mythical past our goal, our baseball program will suffer the same fate as the OM football team - consistent turnover because expectations are never met, shortcuts taken to return to glory without building a solid foundation (you can argue Cohen did this last year), and a continually angry fanbase.

I agree with you regarding the overall stature of our program. It's not healthy for our fans to assign some arbitrary assessement that we are a Top 10 / 15 / 20 program and then start naming all the reasons why we fall short of this ill-conceived standard. I don't see why our fans can't just recognize that we aren't where we want or need to be and then talk about what needs to be done to improve our status (as well as what has already been done or is planned to be done). There is no reason to talk in terms of acceptable / unacceptable or any other such nonsense. No matter where you are, there is always room for improvement. But our fans need to exercise more patience and understand our limitations a little bit better so they can actually take the time to recognize when those improvements have occurred. I knew way back in January that this board was going to border on unreadable before April when they had the prediction thread where 90% of posters predicted we'd be a 2-seed or better in the regionals. It's like everyone just went with the way of thinking that "we're a Top 10 program, we just won the SEC, it doesn't matter about all the injuries and draft losses because we have all this talent....blah blah blah". Almost nobody recognized the plainly obvious signs of a potentially disappointing season upcoming. And when it happens, everyone is just beside themselves in meltdown mode. Why?

I also agree with Todd on what needs to be done to improve it. Whether or not we were ever a dominant baseball power, we still need to evaluate signability better. Things like our scholarship situation where we don't have the aid of a lottery program or other assistance makes signability that much more important. That kid who is 50/50 on college vs pro is way more likely to lean pro if he's going to have to pay 50% of his tuition. So we certainly have to recognize those situations a little bit better.