Todd4State
05-16-2015, 05:30 PM
1. If we were a movie franchise, we would need to reboot the entire franchise. I'm glad to see this group of seniors gone. They were good followers, but they were not good leaders. Too many goofballs like Ross- and simply put they just weren't tough enough mentally to lead on or off the field. One of my favorite quotes was from Herb Brooks the coach of the 1980 USA hockey team that won gold in the Olympics about finding the "right" players rather than the "best". We had that with Frazier, Graveman, Pirtle, Slauter etc. And now we have to get back to that. Cohen HAS to do a better job of evaluating that in our players. The most successful MSU baseball teams had players that worked hard and did whatever it took to win. I'm pretty shocked that Cohen has allowed this to happen because of his personality as both a coach and a player- and I don't have an explanation for it. Cohen needs to go back to being himself- and recruit players that are OK with a competitive coach yelling at them in the name of trying to get the best out of them.
2. We need to make damn sure that our players are working out. This is to me the most egregious thing that Cohen has done all year. When you don't put the work in, you don't get the results you want. I think this is a BIG reason why we have had so many nagging injuries all year long minus a couple of exceptions like Britton with his knee and Collins with his hand. We had Reid Humphreys missing a game because of a "quad strain". Come on. Put some Vagisil on it and run your ass out to the field. Then we had Trevor Fitts sitting out the Ole Miss series- and possibly cost us the Saturday game, and then all of a sudden he is 100% the next week? Bullshit. Order number one for me would be to fire Brian Neal and hire a strength coach that will not let anyone slide.
3. Even with all the bullshit, our pitching is really the MAIN difference between us being in a regional and us having a losing record. If some of you aren't giving Cohen a pass for his first two years, then you need to look at the stats from his three losing seasons. The common theme is awful pitching. Does anyone here really think that we would have been worse off starting Sexton, Tatum, and Hudson as opposed to Laster, Preston Brown, and Sexton? I don't believe we would be, and then we would have three guys with a lot of SEC starting experience next year. Why are we constantly having to duct tape our pitching staff together? Why are players not consistently having the light come on until their junior year? Why didn't Dakota Hudson pitch more despite not pitching any worse than anyone else that got multiple chances to fail over and over and over again like Ross? The buck stops with Cohen, and he has plenty of faults, but this year is as much or more on Butch. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we would be much better off as a program having a pitching coach with a more biomechanical approach that develops power arms out of the guys that we do get. That way we wouldn't have to worry as much about MLB taking all of our natural power arms. It would also probably help prevent injuries as well. At the end of the day, we need more power arms to compete for championships. Right now Hudson, Sexton, and Houston are the only ones even in that realm on this team. Our goal as a program should be to have four guys that can go 6 IP every game and then turn it over to three guys with lights out stuff. I'm OK with a submarine/sidearm guy for long relief if someone is having a rough day like Caleb Reed or Chad Girodo. And to be honest, I actually like submarine/sidearm guys- but we've got way too many on the team right now and none of them are effective for us at the moment. But only one of them is a junior, so they haven't hit their year three all of a sudden they've figured it out year with Butch. I don't know that I would just fire Butch, but I would strongly encourage him to learn a more biomechanical approach to teaching our pitchers. Especially since I believe that this is going to be the new trend in pitching.
4. The biggest thing with hitting more than anything is we must get more power hitters. That in and of itself will reduce bunting by itself. There was an announcer this year that described our lineup as a bunch of number two hitters- and he's right. When Cohen was at his best, he had power hitters both at Florida and at Kentucky. Our best offense had Renfroe, Rea, and then you had Pirtle and Frazier who both hit a lot of doubles. We NEED at least 4-5 power hitters. And what we need to do in recruiting is find more guys like Rooker that MLB isn't going to draft because otherwise we're going to end up like we did last year losing our top power guys like Vallot and then we aren't going to have anyone to fill the void. I'm totally fine with 3-4 guys like Robson that are good bunters and can use the bunt as a weapon to get on base because of their speed. And as all of you know- I like adding that dimension to our lineup because of the extra possibilities it opens up to us and how it can get the defense out of position because they have to defend it. But we don't need eight bunt/run guys in the lineup. Especially if they can't hit more than ten doubles on the year. Yes, Dudy-Noble is big and it's hard to hit balls out of there, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be hitting a ton of doubles and triples.
5. If we're going to recruit speed, we need to find a coach that is good at teaching base-running. We have been pretty good at bunting- we probably set a school record for bunt singles this year. But we need to have at least a couple of guys swiping a minimum of 20 bags a year. Base-running and speed are not mutually exclusive. You can be fast and not be a good base-runner. But interestingly enough you can be very dangerous if you have above average/decent speed but are a very smart base-runner. See Larry Walker. If you have a guy that has speed and is a good base-runner- you have someone that is elite like a Rickey Henderson, Lou Brock, or Maury Wills. You can change a game with speed in a lot of different ways- stealing a base or maybe even taking an extra base. It makes a lot of sense for us to exploit that skill. I'd get rid of Zach Dillon and hire someone that was really good in this area.
6. I would get rid of Mingione. Not only because of the hitting- but actually mainly because of the recruiting and the fact that he initially misjudged the character of many of the players that we currently have. I don't really care if Cohen totally gives up hitting duties or not- I would prefer that he did. But at any rate, I think he is stretched thin and doesn't have the help he needs. And I think it hurts everyone. I talked about bringing in a guy to coach baserunning to replace Dillon- bring in a hitting coach that has a focus on power hitting to help balance things out a little bit to replace Mingione.
7. And as far as defense- just to touch on it- for the most part, we were OK. I do think that we need to get more athletic and that will help us be even better and that goes back to the point about working out.
And then there are the misc. items- ditch the Adidas bats and stick with traditional MSU baseball uniforms. I prefer the Will Clark era uniforms, the 2013 CWS pinstripe uniforms, and then I'm OK with the early 90's uniforms that we had this year. The rest are kaka.
For those that don't want to read everything- I think the best way to sum it up is, let's build a more conventional baseball team. More power arms, more power hitters, speed guys at the top and bottom. If we were MSU-Rolling Fork I could understand us having a glut of bunters, JUCO's and sidearmers/junkballers. But we're ****ing Mississippi State. Let's bring in some elite talent like the class that is about to come in and let's just go out and kick everyone's ass and not be cute about it.
2. We need to make damn sure that our players are working out. This is to me the most egregious thing that Cohen has done all year. When you don't put the work in, you don't get the results you want. I think this is a BIG reason why we have had so many nagging injuries all year long minus a couple of exceptions like Britton with his knee and Collins with his hand. We had Reid Humphreys missing a game because of a "quad strain". Come on. Put some Vagisil on it and run your ass out to the field. Then we had Trevor Fitts sitting out the Ole Miss series- and possibly cost us the Saturday game, and then all of a sudden he is 100% the next week? Bullshit. Order number one for me would be to fire Brian Neal and hire a strength coach that will not let anyone slide.
3. Even with all the bullshit, our pitching is really the MAIN difference between us being in a regional and us having a losing record. If some of you aren't giving Cohen a pass for his first two years, then you need to look at the stats from his three losing seasons. The common theme is awful pitching. Does anyone here really think that we would have been worse off starting Sexton, Tatum, and Hudson as opposed to Laster, Preston Brown, and Sexton? I don't believe we would be, and then we would have three guys with a lot of SEC starting experience next year. Why are we constantly having to duct tape our pitching staff together? Why are players not consistently having the light come on until their junior year? Why didn't Dakota Hudson pitch more despite not pitching any worse than anyone else that got multiple chances to fail over and over and over again like Ross? The buck stops with Cohen, and he has plenty of faults, but this year is as much or more on Butch. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we would be much better off as a program having a pitching coach with a more biomechanical approach that develops power arms out of the guys that we do get. That way we wouldn't have to worry as much about MLB taking all of our natural power arms. It would also probably help prevent injuries as well. At the end of the day, we need more power arms to compete for championships. Right now Hudson, Sexton, and Houston are the only ones even in that realm on this team. Our goal as a program should be to have four guys that can go 6 IP every game and then turn it over to three guys with lights out stuff. I'm OK with a submarine/sidearm guy for long relief if someone is having a rough day like Caleb Reed or Chad Girodo. And to be honest, I actually like submarine/sidearm guys- but we've got way too many on the team right now and none of them are effective for us at the moment. But only one of them is a junior, so they haven't hit their year three all of a sudden they've figured it out year with Butch. I don't know that I would just fire Butch, but I would strongly encourage him to learn a more biomechanical approach to teaching our pitchers. Especially since I believe that this is going to be the new trend in pitching.
4. The biggest thing with hitting more than anything is we must get more power hitters. That in and of itself will reduce bunting by itself. There was an announcer this year that described our lineup as a bunch of number two hitters- and he's right. When Cohen was at his best, he had power hitters both at Florida and at Kentucky. Our best offense had Renfroe, Rea, and then you had Pirtle and Frazier who both hit a lot of doubles. We NEED at least 4-5 power hitters. And what we need to do in recruiting is find more guys like Rooker that MLB isn't going to draft because otherwise we're going to end up like we did last year losing our top power guys like Vallot and then we aren't going to have anyone to fill the void. I'm totally fine with 3-4 guys like Robson that are good bunters and can use the bunt as a weapon to get on base because of their speed. And as all of you know- I like adding that dimension to our lineup because of the extra possibilities it opens up to us and how it can get the defense out of position because they have to defend it. But we don't need eight bunt/run guys in the lineup. Especially if they can't hit more than ten doubles on the year. Yes, Dudy-Noble is big and it's hard to hit balls out of there, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be hitting a ton of doubles and triples.
5. If we're going to recruit speed, we need to find a coach that is good at teaching base-running. We have been pretty good at bunting- we probably set a school record for bunt singles this year. But we need to have at least a couple of guys swiping a minimum of 20 bags a year. Base-running and speed are not mutually exclusive. You can be fast and not be a good base-runner. But interestingly enough you can be very dangerous if you have above average/decent speed but are a very smart base-runner. See Larry Walker. If you have a guy that has speed and is a good base-runner- you have someone that is elite like a Rickey Henderson, Lou Brock, or Maury Wills. You can change a game with speed in a lot of different ways- stealing a base or maybe even taking an extra base. It makes a lot of sense for us to exploit that skill. I'd get rid of Zach Dillon and hire someone that was really good in this area.
6. I would get rid of Mingione. Not only because of the hitting- but actually mainly because of the recruiting and the fact that he initially misjudged the character of many of the players that we currently have. I don't really care if Cohen totally gives up hitting duties or not- I would prefer that he did. But at any rate, I think he is stretched thin and doesn't have the help he needs. And I think it hurts everyone. I talked about bringing in a guy to coach baserunning to replace Dillon- bring in a hitting coach that has a focus on power hitting to help balance things out a little bit to replace Mingione.
7. And as far as defense- just to touch on it- for the most part, we were OK. I do think that we need to get more athletic and that will help us be even better and that goes back to the point about working out.
And then there are the misc. items- ditch the Adidas bats and stick with traditional MSU baseball uniforms. I prefer the Will Clark era uniforms, the 2013 CWS pinstripe uniforms, and then I'm OK with the early 90's uniforms that we had this year. The rest are kaka.
For those that don't want to read everything- I think the best way to sum it up is, let's build a more conventional baseball team. More power arms, more power hitters, speed guys at the top and bottom. If we were MSU-Rolling Fork I could understand us having a glut of bunters, JUCO's and sidearmers/junkballers. But we're ****ing Mississippi State. Let's bring in some elite talent like the class that is about to come in and let's just go out and kick everyone's ass and not be cute about it.