re: How is this the pitching staff at LSU?

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I mean Cam Johnson not developing at all should have told you this staff’s ability to develop.

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he sucked just as much last year at Oklahoma as he did his freshman year here, and he's still been wildly inconsistent this year there. He has 37 BBs and 9 HBPs in 51 IP. He's always had stuff and he still can't control it very well.

In SEC play he has a 4.55 ERA, 29.2 IP, 32 BB, 7 HBP, and 35 Ks. He's been there 2 years and is still having the same problems he did when he got to LSU. So is it that LSU couldn't develop him or no one has been able to do it?

One criticism of Yeskie that I think may be fair—not quite enough sample size yet to really know, but I think there’s obviously at least a little something to it—is that he hasn’t adjusted fast enough to the changing landscape of college baseball relative to more teams having older and more experienced hitters. Yeskie’s philosophy is to get strikeouts. Which has been very successful.

But there’s a lot more 4th, 5th year hitters who’ve seen velo and overall stuff and aren’t going overwhelmed and don’t chase like 2nd and 3rd year guys. So our guys wasted a lot of 2 strike pitches because the hitters today just aren’t chasing anything more than a ball or 2 off the plate like they used to. Same with pitches early in the count which put our guys in hitters’ counts consistently. Which turned into a ton of walks and ball getting barreled. 0-2 filthy sliders just off the plate were wiping guys out and having them wailing a couple of years ago. The exact same pitches are just getting spit on now, not fooling anybody (relatively).

I do think our terrible defense and catching probably had something to do with a lot of that, though. There’s no telling how many obvious strikes were called balls simply because our catchers couldn’t squeeze them. And he was probably a bit hesitant—especially earlier in the year, I think our catchers got significantly better towards the back end of the season—to call for breaking balls in the dirt or fastballs up with runners on base, particularly 3rd, because he didn’t trust our catchers to block them up or reach up real fast and snag a fastball that may have been a little “too up.”

And that affects the pitchers, too. They were scared to throw those breaking balls in the dirt, tried to make perfect pitches, and wound up missing just a big and catching way too much plate. It’s why guys were barreling up 0-2, 1-2 pitches, which is always super frustrating. I’d like to see opponents batting averages in
0-2/1-2 counts relative to the rest of the SEC. We have to be last in that. Probably in 0-2 homers given up too.

To sum it up, Yeskie didn’t do a great job with what he had, Jay and the recruiting staff didn’t do a good enough job of evaluating and giving Yeskie what he needed (stuff-wise and mentally), our infield defense was atrocious, and our catchers contributed to too many free bases and affected pitch calling. And Moore’s injury was devastating and had a huge negative downstream ripple effect. Evans’ injury hurt too, but we were probably already cooked by that point. Just a ton of things went wrong and we weren’t good enough to play overcome it.

Just a bad baseball luck season. Those happen every now and then. Just like a lot of stars had to align for us to win the CWS last year, they aligned in the opposite way this year. I’ll chalk it up as an anomaly for now. But I wouldn’t trust another coach as much as Jay to learn from this season and pivot in the right direction. It could wind up making us a better program over the longterm. The 2027 season will be telling.

(One thing specifically that Jay fricked up on that I don’t think he’ll repeat again, is that we can’t put ourselves in a position where an injury to a Cooper Moore completely derails the season. This staff was only going to be nationally competitive if every single thing went right regarding injuries and guys taking huge jumps. And no season ever goes exactly right. We didn’t even have bad injury luck honestly. Relative to other teams this year and in the past. Ours just seemed worse because our staff wasn’t good enough to absorb any).

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Not really, but even so, CJJ is aiming for Omaha, and he takes risks to get there. Sometimes the risks pan out and he gets a trophy; sometimes, like this year, the risks go bad. Your advice amounts to take less risks and be content with good-not-great.

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This is a good point. For Jay, it’s Omaha or a failure. Hell, after getting a taste of hoisting those trophies, he might think it’s NC or bust. So yeah, he’d rather go all in and gamble on some things that if they hit, could wind up with another Omaha dogpile. If they don’t, we might not make the tournament. There is no plaque for 2nd place. (Well, there probably is, but you know what I mean.)

But one thing I love about Jay is that he’s not gonna concede not winning an NC until the final out of our seasons. We all know we don’t have the team to win in Omaha. But he’s setting up the pitching staff to try to win the SECT. And if we do, he’ll pull out all the stops to win the regional. And so on. We can see that’s futile, but he’s never gonna just punt.

But I also see him pivoting a bit and hedging his bets a bit more moving forward. Now, in today’s world, hedging those bets requires spending more money. People focusing so much on the revenue share part are being ridiculous. That’s such a small piece of the equation. He’s got to shake some trees himself, and I bet he and Verge have a plan to do just that. More people may be more willing to spend after a season like this than they were after an NC season, where they thought the status quo was good enough. But there really is no status quo now. That number keeps getting bigger every year.

This isn’t the first year Yeskie has had staffs with serious control issues too. I’m a bit over it but have to trust Jay

Embarrassing huh

Am I right? And I right?

LOL

I kinda think there was a miscalculation in developing all these guys by trying to create all these pitchers that have secondary pitches but not just working on actual location with their primary pitches. I don’t see as a staff as a whole how it’s this bad but with a ton of k’s.

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The seat gets warmer every game and the natives get more and more restless.

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Nah...it is pretty must just you and your "seat gets warmer" analogy you have shitted up the board with 100000 times.

The only thing that needs to be kept from this years Pitching Staff is Moore, Schmidt, Evans, Sheeran (but will probably get drafted high), Lachemayer, Garcia, and Paz. Everything else needs to be culled and possibly even a couple of what I listed? At a minimum all of these showed the ability to compete and contribute in the SEC at one point of another.

Theopilous has shown enough to still be on staff. And if Cowan is still eligible under 5 for 5, he should still be here and a weekend starter.

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Pruitt is on all-freshman team

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Must have been a pretty weak freshman class in the Sun Belt if a guy with a 6.81 conference ERA got on the all-freshman team. Pruitt got crushed by SB teams, .276 BAA against and 25 of 40 hits allowed were for extra bases. He lost his starting spot.