re: Thatcher Hurd - discuss

quote:

---

This is the key factor. It's mental. He's got to be able to keep his composure and not let his frustration take over when he gets a bad call, et cetera. His body language changes dramatically. He's got the talent.

---

I said this last year, and you could see it last week. (I didn't get to see him today). He doesn't handle in-game adversity well, and he turns a dominant, great outing through 3 into getting run the next inning over little things like not getting a close pitch, and error behind him, a balk like last week. He's volatile. Which can actually work in the post-season with all the energy of the crowd, with everything on the line, and some guys thrive on that and pitch over the heads. It happens with almost every CWS NC team--somebody steps up and channels all that energy, feels invincible, and shoves. We saw it with Cooper, Ack, Guidry, Heard.

The problem with Heard is there's not all that energy to feed on on Fridays in February and March against sup-par competition and he lets great starts turn into bad ones, and way too short ones for a Friday night guy. Mentally, he doesn't appear to have mastered how to let things go, to know that the only pitch that matters is the next pitch. He has a hard time not letting small things turn into bigger things, and he can turn a 3-0 3rd inning lead into being down 4-3 and bounced with amazing quickness. And it's not necessarily a terrible thing long-term. Sure, he gets pissed off umps who squeeze him on a 3-ball count. And he probably gets frustrated when guys make errors behind him.

But I think a lot is that he is so competitive and has such high standards for himself, that when make a bad pitch, he gets down on himself too. Which shows he cares. And I also think his back injury has something to do with it. Coming back, it's probably harder to consistently repeat his delivery, to do things he knows he was/is capable of doing, but with the injury and him missing some time, his muscle memory isn't as automatic as it once was and that's probably really frustrating.

But there's guys who are just mental midgets and wilt under the pressure. I don't think that's Hurd at all. As we saw with how dominant he was last year when the stakes were at their highest. I think it's more of a confidence thing with him, and he'll figure out the mental aspect the more good outings he puts together. And I think he will. But I think that's gonna have be on Sundays where there's not as much pressure to be almost perfect and allow under 3-4 runs an outing to keep us in the game against other teams' aces. And the confidence thing has been obvious since the very 1st time Jay ever spoke about him. He goes way out of his way to praise Hurd, even when coming off bad outings, telling him and the media that we needed him to win the CWS. Which wound up being true last year.

But this is a different season and a different team. We have WAY more pitchers Jay can trust than we did last year, and our offense, while really good and deep and is going to score a lot of runs is still very young and dependent on a lot of guys who have never faced SEC pithing. Or have and not done well. I think a lot of them have developed and will be much better to handle SEC pithing this year, they are going to go into funks at times throughout the year.

So we're gonna need to be able to win some close, 3-2, 2-0 games unlike last year. We are going to be good, win a lot of games, and be competitive enough to put ourselves in a position to make it to Omaha, but it's gonna look different than last year, because that team was simply gonna score. The lineup was too deep with not only really good, but mature veteran hitters, who had seen a ton of good pitching througout their careers.

So we're gonna have to lean on our pitching a lot more this season than last. And because we so damn deep, there really shouldn't be too much pressure on any one guy. Again, I don't think Hurd is a mental midget, and I think once he gets more confident, he be a huge part of the SEC rotation and could wind up being a post-season start like he was last year. But there's no reason to put the pressure on him of being the Friday night guy this year. As least right now. It's not in his best interest currently, and it's not in LSU's. That Friday night start is so important because you're going up against the other team's best pitcher and it's hard to win SEC Friday night games consistently unless you're running a Skenes or Nola out there. And winning that 1st game is so crucial to wining the series. But also, you can't afford to run a guy like Hurd (right now) out there who you don't know what you're gonna get. He could give you 8 innings of shut-out ball, or he could not make it out of the 3rd. And that fricks up your entire plan for the series, having to go to the pen guys you trust way too early in the series.