re: Guidry needs to move immediately to Shortstop

Ya let’s play milazzo too every day & guarantee to never score a run again

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Let’s think about this for a minute…. Within months of arriving on campus as a 2-way player the offensive minded head coach decided to completely give up on Guidry being a position player and solely focus on pitching

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Like another person said, this isn't entirely accurate.

Guidry was in the field and getting ABs all last fall as well, he did not do well. They gave him another chance and it was bad. So that's 2 chances and 2 failures.

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You can't say "let's see". That's not good enough. You have to tell me what you think Guidry would have to hit in order for this move to make sense.

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If you're waiting for a substantial and rational thought on this, then you obviously aren't familiar with moock.

Why not mook blackjack at SS, since we are not going to go with the best guy?

If Guidry was good enough he’d be the SS. If we are replacing Braswell it will probably be either Milam or a freshman.

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Let’s think about this for a minute…. Within months of arriving on campus as a 2-way player the offensive minded head coach decided to completely give up on Guidry being a position player and solely focus on pitching

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Upon arriving on campus, that same coach took the best high school pitcher in the state and made him exclusively an outfielder.

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Cant find the Fall 2023 stats but he simply couldnt hit at all during that stretch which is why for winter they just moved him back full time to pitching for this year

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Fall 2023 Guidry hit .158 with an OBP of .327 with a 40% K rate.

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Upon arriving on campus, that same coach took the best high school pitcher in the state and made him exclusively an outfielder.

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This is an interesting point. I wonder if he is 2nd guessing that decision yet with the bullpen not being as good as expected.

However, I'm not sure how exclusive he is in just the OF. I think there are chances of him pitching in the future. Maybe not this season but we will see.

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Ya let’s play milazzo too every day & guarantee to never score a run again

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I'm not advocating Guidry playing SS--or anywhere else for that matter--but I think you need to come off your Braswell take just a bit. I heard a clip of Jay from Saturday's post-game presser, and you could tell he was pretty fricking furious with Braswell despite not even mentioning his name.

I didn't hear the question, but I think it was about relief pitching, and Jay goes right into (paraphrasing) "We had a 9-0 lead Thursday, then we make an error, and instead of getting out of that inning, they score and get it to 9-6, and we have to use our best pitcher to close out that game instead of saving him for Friday." Strongly implied that that error fricked up the rest of the weekend and probably cost us Friday's game.

He then went on to say he doesn't know why we don't have another Herring, seemed to be some combination of frustrated, confused, disappointed, and pissed. Not sure if was aimed more at Ack and some of the other veteran guys he thought he'd be able to trust by now or Yeskie. Probably a combo. But, in the moment, and considering where we are with the pitching staff right now--it is what it is--it felt like he blamed a lot of Friday's loss on Braswell's error on Thursday leading to have to burn Herring.

And then he benched him Saturday after an error (and he also pulled a ground ball almost down the line and grounded out to 3rd with a runner on 2nd and no outs, when anything to the right side would have moved the runner to 3rd for Tommy with 1 out. I think the score was 5-1, so that would have been big run to make it 5-2. I know it's not easy for a right-handed hitter to hit the ball to the right side against a pitcher at that level, but he didn't even try. At all. Like he either didn't care or was simply unaware. Either is unacceptable for a 3rd-year SS hitting lead-off who should be one of the leaders of the team. If he doesn't care enough to do the little things, how can the freshmen be expected to?

And I think he's getting a little too much praise for his offense, too. Sure he's getting on base a lot. But I think he's playing over his head a bit at the plate and will eventually regress to his mean. He's better than he was at SC last year, but I'm not sure how much, actually. Hunt did a segment last week where he went over his preseason "bold predictions." One was that Braswel would have over 24 extra-base hits. He's got 6. Or did before this weekend--not sure if he had a double, but I don't remember it if he did.

That sucks for a 3rd year guy with his size (he's skinny, but tall and lanky with enough leverage that he should be able to barrel one up into the gap or down the line more than once every other week) who's been in the lineup every day. His OBP has got to be close to his SLG%. Maybe higher. Which is very Milazzo-esque, so maybe we don't throw too many stones at Milazzo if we're gonna be defending Braswell at staunchly as you have been recently. (Though I did and still do agree with you that he's likely our only realistic option there this year).

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This is an interesting point. I wonder if he is 2nd guessing that decision yet with the bullpen not being as good as expected.

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He has to be. But I'm not blaming him----the last thing he probably thought he needed with this team was another LH guy in the pen throwing 91-93. We've got like 9 of them. I'll take this time to repeat what I kinda harped on in the game thread Saturday. We threw Herring 3 1/3 Thursday to finish the game, then Jump started Friday and threw however long he did, then Ack finished that game, then we started Coleman Saturday. And Loer faced a hitter or 2 Friday as well. So we threw 5 LHP that are all basically the same dude (91/92 from the left side, with a similar arm slot, with similar off-speed pitches with similar shapes and similar velocities) in like 14 of 15 innings after Holman left the game.

Herring fared better because well, he's by far the best of the bunch and he can tick it up to 94/95. But also because he was following Holman and giving Vandy a completely different look. But by Saturday, they were very familiar with that look, so of course they were gonna have good ABs. The only break from it was Hurd's 4 hitters (I think 2 reached base) and however long Herring went Friday, but I don't even remember him actually pitching.

I think one of the biggest disappointments of the staff is we have no RHP that Jay really trusts to throw out there. Maybe Guidry for an inning, but it seems SEC hitters are seeing his breaking ball a lot better this year the 2nd time through the conference. Hurd has been a huge disappointment. As has Little. Not sure what Ulloa has done wrong, but it seemed like he was going to be a high-leverage guy, but for whatever reason, they're not confident using him. And I guess Moffett hasn't developed into a guy they can trust either, though he seemed to have been pretty promising the outings I've seen.

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However, I'm not sure how exclusive he is in just the OF. I think there are chances of him pitching in the future. Maybe not this season but we will see.

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There will definitely be some re-evaluaitons after the season. I don't think Brown not-pitching this year has much to do with his pitching talent. I think it was mainly that we had (or thought we did) plenty of LH arms that do what he does on the mound, but OF wasn't quite settled and Jay wanted a good bat/great athlete in the mix until somebody won the RF job. And that was with Pearson at 2nd. Milam moved Pearson to the OF, so that's ANOTHER guy out there, and Kling hit his way out of the every day CF role, so now nobody's grabbed either CF or RF. So I'm gad he gave Brown the offseason reps at the plate. Shame he got hurt and sort of slowed his development.

I also think Jay thought his athleticism would play on the base paths this year in case we needed to run more. And he played him at 1st I think as insurance in case Bear went into a funk like last year and became an auto out against SEC pitching. But he's really been the only guy from last year's class that has actually progressed from last year and cemented himself in the every day lineup.