LSU vs Kentucky - Crowdsourced weekend preview

To kick things off, let’s look back to when Kentucky head coach Nick Mingeone was an assistant at Mississippi State:

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Hanover was going to throw home when all of a sudden he heard a voice yelling '2-2-2-2,'" Mainieri said. "It was their first base coach yelling that. There's no rule against it in the rule book, but there's an unwritten rules in the game of baseball. You’re not supposed to do things like that. That's a bush league move and I let him know that."

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Nick Mingeone is a garbage human. He’s the type of person you’d like to set on fire and put out with a wet chain. He’s smeared poo.

Kentucky is 27-5 on the year after somehow improbably facing zero ranked teams on the season even through 4 weeks of the SEC schedule. I think they might be leading the Ohio Valley Conference right now.

Their team is nearly exclusively built through the transfer portal. It’s easy to understand why. See, the traditional recruiting timeframe for an SEC prospect starts somewhere in their sophomore year of high school but can be as early as 8th grade. That’s far too long a time for anyone to want to be around Nick Mingeone. In the portal, you can just wine and dine a kid for one weekend and let the conference letters do the heavy lifting. On the odd chance your real personality still shines through, the guys in the portal are only looking for a short-term marriage of convenience and are desperate for exposure, so they’ll sign anyway.

As a team they’ve hit about the same amount of home runs as Jac Caglianone. They play like a West Coast team from the early 2000s, but more annoying. They play a lot of small ball with bunts and stolen bases, but still manage to strike out frequently. Hunter Gilliam is their best hitter in all categories. He was all-Big South at Longwood last year and is exceeding expectations this year because he’s playing all the same teams again this year. I don’t respect Kentucky’s program enough to find any other hitters to mention.

On the pitching side, they feature the oldest player in the SEC. Darren Williams transferred from Eastern Kentucky and has been in college since the Obama administration. He’s legitimately older than Juan Soto. He’s made a handful of starts with some success. He’s got a WHIP under 1. The putz who shoved against us in the SECT last year, Ty Bosma, has pitched more than anyone else for them. He’s a lefty with poo stuff.

If you take anything from this preview, it's that you shouldn't overlook hating Kentucky because of their relative obscurity in the baseball world.
They are plenty hateable.
This is where John Cohen began his SEC career, after all.

The beer of the weekend is Montucky Cold Snacks. It’s a light lager from Montana that gives back to charity. Very easy drinking.