This team lost to Missouri twice. Anything is possible. Anything
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This team lost to Missouri twice. Anything is possible. Anything
I think one things for sure if we're going to omaha we have to take the training wheels off sims for the next 2 weeks.
Which is why Bednar against a lineup where everyone hits RH and MacLeod for Game 2 potentially against a VCU team that has 3-4 lefties that will bat makes a lot of sense.
If Game 1 and 2 are the same and you feel roughly equally confident in MacLeod and Bednar, then you play matchups to give your pitcher the best chance to be successful. Which is why Bednar makes sense here.
And for those that think Bednar is appreciably better, he has a 3.23 ERA to MacLeod's 3.6. Bednar's WHIP is 1.11 while MacLeod's is 1.23.
Give your two best pitchers the best chance to win by making the matchups work in their favor.
Samford is the worst team we'll see in the post season. If we can't beat them without our ace on the mound, we ain't winning shit!
We've thrown Mac on Fridays all season but all of a sudden matchups matter vs damn Samford? Give me a break. That's classic overthinking and over analyzing. Is Lemonis a statistician or a coach?
Or...we're setting up our pitching for a super with our best pitcher throwing game one.
Too lazy to look... are vcu and Campbell lh heavy?
I feel like it's silly if for matchups alone. If he's saying "matchups" to keep from having to say "I'm super confident we're about to smoke these scrubs and will be playing next week in a Super, so I'm setting my pitching up"....
https://media3.giphy.com/media/VDAv7...1Y2Net/200.gif
Can Macleod beat Samford? If the answer is yes, then you pitch him first and Bednar 2nd. Anything else is overthinking.
This is where our inability to find a trustworthy #3 starter is hurting us. Had Brandon Smith pitched well in Hoover I think he gets the start on Friday. But because he got hit like BP, we are probably throwing Bednar since he is our only trustworthy right handed starter at the moment.
Everyone wants to point to the Maholm fiasco in 2003 but is quick to ignore that we did something similar in 2013 and 2016 and it worked out. I think our coaches view MacLeod and Bednar as pitchers of equal caliber (statistically they are very similar), so I don?t know that I mind them just playing the matchup game here. The goal is to win the first two games and then trust that you are fresher and more talented once you get to the end of the Regional. Assuming we are using MacLeod and Bednar the first two games, the order you pitch them in doesn?t really matter as long as you make sure you win both games.
I don?t think it matters that their ace has a 5 plus ERA. Didn?t Mizzou pitch it?s batting practice guy against us? If you screw around and lose game 1 the odds are not in your favor. In tournament ball with our current lineup you play to win from day one.
In a perfect world you would throw your mid week guy in game 1 but our offense has been run by Moorhead lately and not Leach.
Smith's biggest problem is he is a ground ball pitcher and he has our infield behind him.
And I agree. The problem is we don't have a reliable third pitcher. Although at this point it should be Harding. I think Fristoe and Smith and etc. are good enough to beat anyone in our regional but they also could implode as well.
One thing no one is talking about is even if we lose one of the first two games odds are whoever we throw as a third starter is probably better than the other teams third starters. Honestly, with this draw we should have an advantage no matter who we throw and when we throw them. And yes, I know we could look like trash and lose two games but as far as strictly playing the odds it probably is more beneficial with this draw if we throw MacLeoud and Bednar first in whatever order. And if he's throwing Bednar because Samford has a ton of RH hitters- I'm fine with that reasoning. And yeah- MacLeoud probably could beat them but with the peripheral stats showing that Bednar has more of an advantage and maybe MacLeoud has an advantage over the other two- why wouldn't we throw Bednar?
You have to take into account our team too. We don't have Ethan Small, Dakota Hudson, Chris Stratton, etc. Basically Bednar and MacLeoud are like Small and Konnor Pilkington in 2018. Pretty good but not dominant guys that are going to give us 7-9 and K 10+ guys in a game.
I'm just going to trust Lemonis on this whatever he does because I'm pretty sure he has a logical reason for whatever he does that he can back up if it backfires. Which if it does backfire it's probably going to be because we made a ton of errors and not the pitchers which is how we seem to typically lose our games.