General Thoughts From The Weekend
A great weekend for Mississippi State. Literally couldn't have scripted it better. Baseball and Softball sweep and Basketball gets a big road win over Ole Miss. And.....we killed the science on Saturday!!!! Now let's get into it:
1. Ace Reese is who we thought Ace Reese was. Ace goes 5-12 on the weekend with 3 2Bs, a HR, and 4 RBIs. There is a reason everyone was fighting to get him in the portal. I truly think he'll be a finalist for the Golden Spikes in June.
2. Tomas Valincius will end up being the Friday guy, but we're keeping him on Sunday to match with UCLA in 2 weeks. It's obvious this kid is going to be the Fri night guy but it's clear that O'Conner is setting us up for a top 3 matchup on Sunday in two weeks in Dallas. Valincius controlled the zone and controlled the game better than any of the other starters, and probably out of any pitcher we had this weekend.
3. McPherson will come along and be fine, but I need to see more out of Foster before I'm ready to hand him the ball on an SEC Sunday. I actually thought Foster settled in ok after the first inning but he just came out of the gate flat, and you can't have that on Sundays in this league. McPherson worked around some early trouble but kind of fell apart in the 4th. I still think he will be fine moving forward. He's done it in this league enough for me to look past one bad outing. People forget Khal Stephen got shelled by Ga Southern early in '24 and ended up 8-3 and one of the best pitchers in the league. I trust Parker will get McPherson right.
4. Reed Stallman will be the 1B until someone takes it from him. Probably had the best weekend of anyone outside of Ace.
5. The MIF is going to be something we need figured out sooner rather than later. It's obvious the staff is really high on both Gehrig Frei and Ryder Woodson. Woodson struggled all weekend at the plate and I think we'll see Wyers in the midweek. I don't necessarily think it means that Woodson is bad or we need to give up on him but it looked like he was trying to hit the Bryan Building with every swing. On Frei, I think Gatlin is a better 2B defensively and I think Wyers will get a look there in one of the games in the midweek, but I do think Gehrig will continue to get a majority of the ABs there. His bat was pretty good this weekend and we've seen what he can do.
6. I was really impressed with a couple of arms out of the pen this weekend. William Kirk was really damn impressive and I really wouldn't be shocked to see him draw a midweek start sometime in the near future. Also thought Jack Gleason and Maddox Webb pitched really well too. It looks like Ben Davis will be the closer moving forward and I think that's a good idea. I think he's got the stuff unless we think we can bring Bauer along and move him into that role later in the season and let Davis be the SU guy.
7. Overall we have a lot to clean up, but it feels better cleaning those up at 3-0 than 2-1. We would've lost that second game on Saturday the last two years.
8. I thought basketball played their most complete game since Oklahoma on Saturday. We controlled the game from the jump and Ole Miss was never closer than 3 after the 8 minute mark in the 1st half. They never trailed by less 12 in the second half. Achor Achor getting hot early forced OM to make a change defensively and stop basically tripling Hubbard every time he touched it. Once they did that, it was over. Hubbard lit them up.
9. When we let Josh be Josh and we can get 2 more guys to get us 12-18 points, we are really dangerous. We got exactly that on Saturday with Epps getting 12, on a really bad shooting performance from him, and Achor giving us 18. I am not proclaiming that we're about to turn the corner and win 6 straight to close the year. But I do think 4 of the last 6 is very gettable. Which would be absolutely hilarious because we'd finish 8-10, which is the same record we've finished with in conference EVERY YEAR under Jans.
10. The New Mexico, USF, and SMU losses are what did this team in. And the Kansas St loss looks worse and worse. New Mexico and SMU would've both been Q1 wins and we had both of those on the racket. USF was because Josh goes down.
11. The next 120 days are MASSIVE for Jans and Co. He needs to hold on to Hubbard, JDF, Macura, King, and probably Tee Bartlett. Everyone else needs to hit the road. With those guys and a really good Freshman class coming in, we shouldn't have to go so portal heavy this offseason. We still need a big guard to play with Hubbard, a big who can stretch the floor, and 2 three and D guys but we don't need as many guys as we needed last year. Jans also needs to reevaluate the staff outside of Brooks and Anwar.
12. Softball, although early, looks really good right now. 10-0 and it looks to be Ricketts' best team she's had since she's been here. They don't get a lot of press or notoriety, but it's extremely impressive what Ricketts and Tyler Bratton have built on the softball side. Tyler is one of the best recruiters in the softball world and Ricketts has really done a great job of elevating that program well past where we ever were under Jay Miller or Vann Stuedeman.
