Y'all aren't buying what our AD is selling. BTW the loss yesterday was our worst loss over the past 3 years. Mismanagement of our pitching staff...
Would have liked us to let Fincher at least start the 9th. Griffen appears to warrant a short leash in relief. If he's on, he's tough! If he's off, he has trouble getting it going. If memory serves it was that way last year for him. Wish I could have been there last night to see the 9th because I don't know how close we were to making the plays on the first two hits.
On to Arkansas. Go Dawgs!
Griffin threw strikes which is obviously first and foremost. He didn’t get a few close calls around the strike zone that didn’t help. They hit the ball squarely and where we weren’t. A slight twist of baseball fortune and it could’ve gone differently.
Absolutely horrendous handling of the bullpen in this game.
Kyle Griffen is a whiley crafty side-winding southpaw that requires lots of movement on his pitches to have success; otherwise, his pitches come in flat and get barreled up. Cold weather does not allow for a good feel of the baseball, hence pitchers always licking their fingers to get some grip. Cold air is heavy which leads to lack of movement on pitches. Cold weather usually is best for power pitchers. Power pitchers with a good straight change should be better than crafty southpaws. Guess we didn't have any of those types available yesterday.
The weather is hurting our Sunday starter the most. His signature pitch is not moving in the cold weather.
The runs we gave them early were the killer. They should not have been in the game in the top of the 9th. I was not able to attend, but I'm betting we didn't get a guy up to warm up even when the bases were juiced. Then we had an E1 with the balk by the the reliever. Just bad coaching and bad baseball.
How many of our roster pitchers have not seen the mound yet? There's your sign.
I started to include "Incoming from PawDawg! "
I've wondered about the number of pitchers seeing the mound too. All I can figure is, outside of the guys we're red shirting, the rest just haven't shown enough. Early season games are the time to be trying people out in game situations before conference play starts. But you also have to be building your resume for post-season play so can't afford to lose many early games. Just have to trust that Silva & Burroughs are making the right decisions.
Or maybe be a part of the loyal opposition.
Ya know I luv ya, man!
Our baseball roster still shows 47 players. We know it is actually 35. It could be an SID screw up, but fans deserve to know who the roster players are.
The players know so I assume we could research it to find out. Maybe our HC does not want us to know how many pitchers are on the roster.
Hopefully he has no players on the roster than he plans on red shirting. That would be a horrible waste with the exception of Leal.
Griffin hasn't been sharp all year. Hopefully he will come around - we need him for middle relief. Remember Follis comes in for an inning or two and has to leave hurt, Smith is unavailable, Leal is out, and perhaps we should have brought in our Saturday starters for one inning for some mid week work. Otherwise, its baseball. We should have scored more than 4 runs but our pitching has been very average this year which will likely be grossly exploited this weekend. We will need to score a LOT of runs this weekend to win any of the (3) unless we get a great performances from our starting rotation which we have not to date. Burroughs says he got out coached so maybe this one was more on how the offense and pitching was managed.
We are 8-3, S. Miss is 4-5. We need to play well this weekend and find some momentum and confidence moving into conference.