Quote Originally Posted by Todd4State View Post
1. We don't know what will happen but at a minimum we will be very strong up the middle next year with Highfill, Mershon, Cupp, and Dakota Jordan. Teams that are typically good are strong up the middle. We know Hines is a 20 home run guy as well and Chance appears to be a quality player who should be better. Improving a team ERA of 7 is hardly unrealistic as well. Lemonis has hit pretty good in the portal on position players- Dubrule, Yeager, Larry, and Ledbetter to name a few.

2. I don't think most of our fans fathom how bad Foxhall was. If we can improve our team ERA to five which is still not very good but significantly better than this year then we will easily be in a regional. Foxhall was essentially Lemonis's Peter Sirmon. Which is a lot more relevant comparison compared to the Moorhead comps. If our rotation next year is Loo, Loftin, and Holcombe that would be three top 200 MLB draft prospects in our rotation alone. Our fans don't think someone average as a pitching coach even could do something with that? Not to mention Dohm coming back. And by the way- having a winning record with an ERA of 7 and setting a school record for walks by a mile is unheard of. And actually in a morbid way kind of impressive.

3. Hancock had not had any problems before this year. And it's not like Highfill didn't get better as the season went on. A lot of those stolen bases early on were on our pitchers not holding the runners on. So yeah- even that is on Foxhall. We made 65 errors as a team this year 28 of those were by two players alone. Seems like an easy fix- in fact Lane Forsythe won't be back from what I've heard. So there goes 15 right there. I haven't heard anything about Alford yet although there are rumors he will enter the portal. But at the same time I wouldn't be shocked if we bring him back and see if he can improve while bringing in a UTL type INF that profile at third if he can't figure it out. He may be a douchebag but he also got some of our biggest hits this year too. None of us are around the team but losing can turn people into assholes sometimes. Essentially he's our Roger Dorn.
This is getting very wordy so I'll just pick a few highlights to address.

1) Fox is Lemonis' Peter Sirmon: and Mullen fired him after 1 season. If he had kept Sirmon into '17 for another 5-7 season Mullen would have been fired.

2) you can't pretend the bad defense is going to go away. We have no 3B, Chance may start for us and he's not known for defense, and Mershon hasn't proven he can play defense better than Forsythe. You also mention Alford maybe coming back as of he's not God awful defensively

3) on Hancock, he "hadn't had any problems before this year" because he hadn't caught before this year to have problems lol. Are you suggesting his arm magically got weaker this past off-season?

4) on the rotation-you can talk about how highly these guys are thought of in MLB circles, the fact is they have to go from "can't go an inning of relief in SEC play" to "SEC starter" in 1 off-season. That's extremely rare. Dohm coming back is great but his SEC ERA was what? He also needs to take a step to become a stud.