re: Is Jason Kelly legit?

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Most freshmen hit a wall, especially pitchers.

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Floyd wasn't a freshman. Neither was Money, Cooper, Hasty, Fontenot, Vietmier, Reyzleman, Collins, Gervase, or Hilliard.

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Next year he will be judged differently having another year to develop the pitchers on staff. Next season I would expect to have better starting pitching. If they have the same problem next year than Jay and Kelly are going to be under pressure to get that situation figured out.

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Agreed. I'm not calling for Kelly's head and neither is OP. My only point is there are some red flags.

I don't know that it's that we didn't have the talent on the front end as much as it is Johnson/Kelly value a strong bullpen over a strong rotation.

I think many other coaches would have tried like hell to extend Reyzleman, Gervase, or Cooper and include them in the rotation. Any of those three likely would have been an average starter in the SEC. I think it was just Johnson/Kelly's philosophy to keep those arms in the pen and pray your Saturday/Sunday guy can give you 3 or 4 solid innings.

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I've spent quite a bit of time on a pitching mound

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Then why are you sitting here shitposting on Tigerdroppings instead of pitching in the major leagues? Since it’s as simple as getting a great pitching coach who teaches you how to throw 98 MPH and 4 movement pitches with control and all. Anybody can do it apparently!

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Reyzelman/Gervase, and Cooper all have 2 pitches.

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Having two pitches does not disqualify you from being a starter. Very rarely does a college starter have more than two pitches that they can throw consistently.

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Gervase is 6'10. It's hard to repeat those mechanics for several innings

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This is silly as well. We've had our fair share of tall starting pitchers as have several other SEC teams. Anthony Ranaudo was 6'7" and was our friday night guy for two years.

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There's a reason there's only been a handful of 6'10 + pitchers in the entire history of the MLB.

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That's true.....it's because there's only a handful of 6'10"+ people in the world, and most don't grow up playing baseball.

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You gave a first year coach who took over a staff with no clear cut starters and needed multiple transfers to complete and turned that into a top 5 staff in the SEC a C-?

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Welcome to the rant

Thought he was fantastic. Can’t wait to see what they do in the future with the portal and recruiting

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Floyd wasn't a freshman. Neither was Money, Cooper, Hasty, Fontenot, Vietmier, Reyzleman, Collins, Gervase, or Hilliard.

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I never claimed any of those players were freshmen. I was responding to this comment, "We had several talented freshman come in last year and 1 barely seen the field and other 2 underperformed" to give reasoning for their fall off toward the end of the season.

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We did not have the starting pitching this year, what they did with this staff to be 4th in the SEC in era with the lack of starting pitching was quite impressive

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Due to the lack of starting pitching we taxed the bullpen too much and as Kelly said it was unsustainable. But to be able to mix and match the pitching staff with the lack of starting pitching is impressive.

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My only point is there are some red flags.

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What was the red flag? How would you have handled the staff differently? They tried to go the portal route to find starting pitching but there just was not any. And with the pitchers we had on staff there might very well be pitchers with the potential to be good starters but they were not ready.

The one promising observation is that Floyd got better as the year went on. Him, Taylor, and Dutton look to have a bright future as long as they continue to develop.

Raking dirt maybe!

I posted this in another thread:

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I do think it's noteworthy that they weren't able to develop a 2nd pitch for several of our pitchers who have plus fastballs (Floyd, Reyzelman, Gervaise). And, they were unable to fix Fontenot's shortcomings with his control. And, a few guys completely self destructed at different times during the year to never get it back (Dutton, Taylor, Money, Hasty) after being effective for a period.

In the macro sense, it was probably a good job (until the end). But, there's plenty of red flags to make you take a wait and see approach.

I seem to remember Kelly talking a lot about developing a changeup for his guys. We really didn't see a lot of that (although Floyd finally started to get a feel for it at the end).

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