re: Baseball - Pre-Season Assumptions vs Reality

You guys make great points! There are two guys, Kling and Cam Johnson, two guys who were the highest rated prospects to sign to play college ball their senior years, that are really head scratchers to me! Johnson not quite as much as Kling, as he is just a freshman, but you would expect a player of his projected caliber to make some kind of noise during the year. Has he gotten any quality coaching at all??

As for Kling, it's like he has not improved AT ALL, if not regressed! If I remember correctly, he was supposed to be a quality offensive player with a little "pop" in his bat?

So were these two just a total wiff on talent evaluation by all major prognosticators, or is there any player development happening? Not making any accussations, just curious!

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Remember how we were all bragging before the season about our pitchers and the amount of left handed arms?

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We have a good pitching staff. Like many said preseason, it's better top to bottom than it was last year. We just don't have someone like Paul Skenes this year. Our team ERA is marginally better this year and that's without Paul Skenes. People forget that until our postseason run, everyone in the universe said we didn't have the pitching to get through. We had no consistently reliable starter after Skenes the entire regular season and our two best bullpen arms (Shores and Edwards) got hurt early on in SEC play. Hurd was bad most of the year. Cooper, Ack, and Herring didn't come on until late. The rest of the staff had 7+ ERAs. This year we have 8 arms that have sub 5 ERAs in the bullpen, with 4 who are sub 4 ERA guys. We also have two good starters in the rotation. Very few teams in the country have a reliable Sunday starter.

The problem is no one expected our offense to struggle as much as it has. They thought our pitching with what they expected our offense to be would produce a very good baseball team, which we would have been with even an average offense. But we're 10th in the SEC in BA, 9th in OBP, and 13th in runs scored. To overcome that, like Arkansas has, we'd need to have THE best staff in the conference/country.

Here's some pitching stats just for reference, and remember Paul Skenes is included in the 2023 totals

Team ERA
2023: 4.47
2024: 4.45
removing Skenes: 5.16

Ks/9 innings
2023: 11.73
2024: 11.43
removing Skenes: 10.95

BB/9 inning
2023: 3.98
2024: 4.21
removing Skenes: 4.61

OPP Ba
2023: .225
2024: .234
removing Skenes: .239

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Neal's swing produces loft but to watch him over and over again trying to pull these outside pitches and pop it up has been depressing.

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What's wild is he has shown oppo power too. I don't know why he totally abandons that approach for most of his ABs.

Jay said in the preseason that people had told him he had the staff to pitch them into Omaha, and he agreed. With no major injuries, it is pretty easy to say Yeskie and this staff has been a colossal failure in coming anywhere close to achieving that.

I think you are pretty spot on from a on the field perspective. I think a lot of these on the field issues can be attributed to lack of leadership and mental toughness. For all these kids the talent is there, they just can’t put it together to win a tight game. This team has no backbone, no one to fall on when the game is close. Part of this is that every game we play right now is do or die so everyone is pressing, but we played ourselves into that. I can think of 4-5 games that we should have won and lost because of little errors/dumb mistakes. Assuming you win those, we beat Fla, Vandy, Bama in series’ with our series losses coming at State, Arky, and Tenn. we would be hosting and could play our way into a Nat’l seed with that resume based on this weekend and Hoover. Just a weak, soft team.

Meant to respond to OP.

Edit: The softness can really be seen on the amount of Sundays we have been 10 runned. That’s just inexcusable.

Every NC team needs BIG MOMENT players; those guys that when the moment is there, with men on base they step to the plate and let the hammer down and get RBI to score! We only had possibly two of those guys this year, Jones and White. White IMO has been on the come back trail this entire season as he has struggled to match his capability from last season! Think his shoulder surgery has hurt him in that regard. Jones has shown definite improvement from last season with his ability to evaluate a good pitch from a nono pitch! He got stung in the beginning of this seson by swinging at the wind but as season progressed he got better! It has not been a fun Tiger season!

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So were the preseason prognosticators and pollsters. LSU was in the top 5 in most of the preseason polls.

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I never agreed with it. Not enough returning bats and I didn't like the hitting additions in the portal. Always had concerns about the hitting this year.

People like to point out the pitching, but I don't even think it's that much different overall. The difference is this team doesn't have enough dudes with pop IMO. It's basically just two guys. I am disappointed in Braswell's lack of power. I thought he had more pop.

Florida was ranked ahead of us as well and probably has more overall talent than we do and their season is just as bad.

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Hold up on number 4. Neal is an offensive juggernaut along the lines of Condon from Georgia. He can really really hit.

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Really

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Two words: Nate Yeskie. There are at least a dozen mid-major pitching coaches who are better than him, regardless of his resume.

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As others have already pointed out, stability is needed right now at pitching coach. Maybe he isn’t the very best for the job, but it’d be nice to have stability for a few years.

Not blaming the previous coaches for landing head coaching jobs. That’s just the way it goes.

Still not sure what happened with Bingham. I was hoping at the beginning of the year that he could be a significant contributor, but he's basically a nonfactor now.