Quote Originally Posted by maroonmania View Post
And really we have to focus the NIL money available primarily on any proven pitchers in the portal. Without improved pitching it really doesn't matter if we marginally improve our offense.
Todd is implying we need to develop the guys we have vs bring in new arms.

Personally, I think Parker could improve every returning pitcher by a mile and they still wouldn't be SEC starters. Thats how far of a hill we have to climb.

I do agree with TOdd that we need a 3B and a OF. Cant have 2 dead bats at 2 of your 4 "slugger" positions. I agree with you we need a legit SEC starter or 2 from the Portal but we can't let 2/9 ABs go to waste either

The Bama 3B that hit 25 HRs went to UF. Literally a guy enters right beside us and we let a team that's still paying 4 states away out recruit us. Or out spend us, not sure which. We need to get 2 Portal bats like Todd said and 10+ innings of SEC pitching like you said

I mean lets do the math on it, how many innings of SEC pitching did we have this year in a weekend? Cade gave us 5. Nixon 3 at most. dohm 3 a most. Gartman maybe 4 when healthy but he'd be roughed up that whole time. Hunt could give 2. Loo, Holcombe, Siary, Hardin etc could give you an inning or 2 every 3rd appearance, they were not reliable for any amount of time.

That's 17 innings of pitching in a 27 inning weekend, with me being charitable. We loose Cades' 5 and Hunts 2. Oh year, Gartman's 4 is gone too right? So we return 6 innings of SEC proven pitching for next year lol.

SOme here will say the 21 missing innings will come from improvements to our young guys + injured pitchers returning. I say you have to plan on 5+ innings of arms to go down with injuries (ie you need to start the year with 32+ innings of good arms) and that Parker isn't a miracle worker. He can help them all, he can get 1 to make a big breakthrough, but he can't get 4-5 to have a breakthrough like we need. No coach can. There's a reason pitchers are supposed to get better each year, because the coaching builds. You can't cram 3 full years and seasons of coaching into 1 off season and expect the pitchers to reach their ceiling.

We need 10 innings of pitching from transfers imo. Really we need more than that, I"m being aggressive with assumptions about our guys making jumps to talk myself down to just 10 innings