1/2 a season removed from a national title in baseball and now our head coach is Gene Chizik and a lucky Croom... get the F out of here.
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Player have to be held responsible just as much or more than Coaches.
I was sitting behind home yesterday. The ump was tight and terribly inconsistent. Yes we had 12 walks - UGA had 9 - to go with 18 combined K's. When was the last time you saw 21 walks in a game?? Let alone a game with that many K's, hits, and runs? Our pitching needs work, but that ump was trash.
There were multiple times all day where for either team everyone around me were saying "how is that not a strike?" I could actually hear the UGA play by play guy from above in the press box questioning ball calls for both teams.
As Jim said in pre-game - we know Stinnett can pitch like a national pitcher if the week, he's already done it!
We have talent. We have two almost surefire first round draft picks in Sims and Logan Tanner. Hunter Hines has a chance to be one in a couple of years. Cade Smith is very good. Stinnett was ranked a top 200 prospect by MLB.com as was Andrew Walling. Hancock, James, and Cumbest have a chance to hit over 10 home runs apiece and Hancock and James have done so in the past. Jess Davis won a gold glove for his play in CF. Kellum Clark is another player that will be an easy top five round draft pick depending on how he progresses but in his current for he is another 10 home run guy. Preston Johnson is one of the top pitchers in the SEC as far as strikeouts go and I think he is another potential MLB player. Jackson Fristoe made Team USA as a freshman.
It's not talent that's the issue. Our two "worst" using the term very loosely players are Leggett and Forsythe and one of those guys has one of the most clutch hits in MSU history and the other is pretty close to MLB caliber defensively. The issue is we aren't dominant like we would like to be. We're similar to Alabama football fans in that way. Which is good and bad- more good than bad IMO. Our fans want to play in preseason tournaments and win them, play big name opponents OOC and beat them, win the Governor's Cup, win the SEC, SEC Tournament, host as a National Seed and win the National Championship. And honestly- I think it's reasonable for MSU fans to have those expectations. We've done all of those things in the past. But very rarely do we ever have a team where we don't have a lot of things to figure out and have hiccups along the way. That leads to disappointing weekends here and there and throw in "that's baseball" which can happen to anyone any weekend. See MSU/Mizzou last year.
This team is good. Probably not National Seed good. Good enough to make a Super Regional? I think so. And not good enough to just run through the competition like hot butter.
We won't really reap the recruiting rewards from winning a National Championship for another couple of years. Just like 2013 helped us to build the 2015 class which included guys like Mangum, Stovall, Small, and etc. Two of those players- Mangum and Small flipped to MSU. Mangum had family athletic ties to every school in our region except for MSU and was committed to Alabama where his Dad played and his uncle played football at Ole Miss. Small we had to fight Vandy to get. But that happened because of the success we had on the field. The same thing will happen again a couple of years from now.
Other than being a MSU legacy I don't know. I think he is worth starting. But I do wonder why we haven't dropped him in the order. May happen with Yeager playing much better now.
Chizik literally never had a winning record before he came to Auburn with Cam. Lemonis has had winning seasons every year of his tenure including at Indiana which is not an easy place to win much less sustain success at and made regionals three out of his four seasons there- which is roughly the equivalent of us making a SR when you compare resources between the two programs.
Jim should come before Ron