Pitching Coach Candidates

[the_real_MSU_is_us]

I think we have three pretty good options.

As I've stated before, if you take Waltons last 7 years or so and average it out he's averaging the 5th best ERA out of the 9 teams in his conference. A quick glance at perfect games recruiting rankings shows OK State is consistently top 4 in that conference, meaning he's underpinning his talent level in addition to ultimately putting mediocre results on the field. I know baseball recruiting is very poorly covered but it seems unlikely the ranking would be so far off as to say Walton has been over performing his talent.

I've dug into Oklahoma State's situation a little bit because I thought it was odd that an alum would leave there. Turns out there are a lot of rumors about Josh Holliday micromanaging the pitching staff which is why Walton wants out. And today their recruiting coordinator just resigned out of the blue. Which I thought was interesting.

An annoying coach would explain his motive to leave, but it doesn't explain his on field staff production. Let me explain: Holliday and Walton have been together for 10 seasons. 7 seasons ago was Waltons best year, and he won the national assistant of the year. Since then, Waltons numbers have been worse than the 5/9 average finish. Am I supposed to believe that Walton did great and Holiday decided to meddle with the national assistant of the year (2016), and then Walton put up with it for 7 seasons? That makes no sense from either coaches perspective... why would you meddle with a PC that just had a fantastic year? And why would an assistant put up with a HC meddling in their staff for 7 years before deciding to leave?

Alternatively, I can believe that after Waltons mediocre staffs for 4-5 seasons (post 2016) Holliday began to meddle and that's making Walton want to leave, but that doesn't excuse the post 2016 sub par performances causing the meddling.

At the end of the day, they guy has been a pitching coach for a long time at a P5 school that recruits OK and he's consistently produced mediocre to sub average results.

Even if Walton gets us to an ERA of 5.00 whatever that is still a 2 run improvement which is massive compared to 7.01. We would get into a regional with that and probably host

8 SEC teams hosted this season. It's not that high of a bar for our conference. DO we want to be Bama and Auburn in baseball, or do we want to be Florida, Vanderbilt, and LSU and COMPETE at the top? What's our goal as a program? To make regionals or to win in Omaha?

Another thing I do like about Walton is he was a successful head coach at Oral Roberts- which I think may be a good fit with Lemonis's coaching style.

Lemonis has been our HC for 5 seasons and the HC at Indiana for 4, and here you are talking about assistants with "head coaching experience" to help him out like he's Arnett and may need a guiding voice year 1 as he learns the HC ropes. And I don't disagree with your assessment; Lemonis DOES need a guiding voice because he's got no idea what he's doing. That's why he should have been fired.

NOW regarding Walton, I understand he's the guy we're hiring. My question is what is the contract details going to look like... can we fire him after 1 season if Lemo fails to turn it around so the new HC can bring in his own PC?