(06-03-2018 12:07 AM)BeagleUSM Wrote:  

(06-02-2018 08:15 PM)EagNBran Wrote:  

(06-02-2018 08:11 PM)Wildeagle Wrote:  1. Berry is 2 time CUSA coach of the year and is near the bottom in salary
2. This team never had enough pitching to win a regional
3. It’s been a hell of a good year
4. It is, what it is.

I don’t care about his accolades. His budget hasn’t ever been an issue here and we routinely have good recruiting classes that don’t pan out. At one point, coaching has to be questioned for the consistent underperformance of our team year in and year out. I don’t care if he’s National Coach of the Year, if 1-2 is our standard for success, we’ll never get back to Omaha.

Well, most of the guys on this team weren't highly recruited. It's not like 2012-2014 when we had rosters with several draft picks on it.

Wallner wasn't even really looked at until UND cut their program. Reynolds is a transfer. Sandlin had offers from Georgia State, Kennesaw, Georgia Southern, USA, and a D2 school. Slater had offers from SELA, Samford, and USA. Powerhouse programs weren't exactly knocking down the door of our best players out of HS.

The staff has done a pretty good job of recruiting and developing hitters. However, they've obviously done a poor job with the pitchers. Ostrander seems to be recruiting more HS pitching (already 5 committed for 2019), which I think will help. Not too many good pitching staffs out there that rely so heavily on JUCO guys.

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I wrote this up this morning...and yeah, we're getting our asses kicked by a fellow "mid-major" but make no mistake, the regional was lost last night.

You should see a trend with this attachment.

Since 2003, our teams have played 21 games against major conference teams. Our record is 4-17....with all four of those wins coming in 2009. In those 21 games, we have been outscored 167-89....so we are giving up almost 8 runs/game and scoring 4.2. (I did this pretty quick, so there may be some oversights)

People can go on-and-on about this program "choking on the big stage." For some reason, it makes them feel better to **** on a bunch of 18-22 year-olds as being chokers, lazy, lacking cajones, etc. when our #2 guy who throws 86, doesn't locate that well, and hasn't notched a quality start in half his outings against weak competition gets mashed by a really good SEC offense (and make no mistake, he would have by DBU). I guess it is hard to admit that maybe your team just got their asses kicked by better teams.

The story, however, is pretty obvious. We run into good pitching with these teams and can't do anything with it, and we don't have the pitching to match. This program has never had the caliber of pitching needed to get through regionals, and it's why we never have without our offense going on an ungodly tear (2009) and haven't even been close to doing so in any other year outside of 2017.

As for this year, I think Ostrander and Berry have wrung every bit that they can out of a pitching staff made up 50% of guys that I'm not convinced should (based on talent) be seeing significant action at a D1 level. Some of it may be a development problem, but I suspect 80 percent of it is a recruiting problem. We just aren't bringing in the talent on the mound that we need in the postseason. And there have been few better examples than this year's staff.

Blaming the coaching staff for recruiting and development seems like fair game, to me. It is much harder to recruit pitching than hitting. I seriously doubt that we ever will bring in the depth of a major conference team, but we should at least be able to occasionally win a game (or hell, let's start with not getting killed) against a power team with our #1 or #2.

I would also blame them for scheduling, as our teams need to at least see some big-time arms and our pitchers see some good lineups to learn what they can't get away with. Bad habits form when you can get away with things. The belt-high breaking ball that you struck out countless UTM, UAB, Southwestern Central Louisiana State, etc. hitters with because it has a lot of movement ends up clanking off the scoreboard against Arkansas.

But I don't know how in the hell you look at this specific team and say that they have underachieved and I damn sure don't see how you look at this team and think they should have gone into a national seed's house and won a regional.

Can’t argue much with that. Frustrating to see teams with less support than us and less history than us consistently find pitchers who can throw strikes.


We should not be happy with 1-2

(06-03-2018 05:44 PM)EagNBran Wrote:  We should not be happy with 1-2

But what about Jose Cruz and Rick Camp Jr? They were the greatest in the history of SUNWACUSA.

(06-03-2018 05:44 PM)EagNBran Wrote:  Can’t argue much with that. Frustrating to see teams with less support than us and less history than us consistently find pitchers who can throw strikes.


We should not be happy with 1-2

I'm not "happy." I just don't think that this team was better than 1-2.

And it's not so much a matter of throwing strikes, to me. Our team didn't walk many. Yeah, Powers walked four against Arkansas...but when you're getting drilled all over the park, your window gets a lot smaller. And there's a difference between walks and location. Powers cut down on the walks this year...but he still struggled with location and that's why C-USA competition nearly hit.300 off of him.

Arkansas hit the ball on the screws from their first three batters of the game. Powers got a pretty generous strikeout call and groundout to end the first. But it was obvious from the start that his fastball was flat, slow, and he was going to get drilled with anything that wasn't perfectly located.

The problem is many USM fans had made up in their mind that we were a really good baseball team because we were ranked most of the year, had 40+ wins, won our conference, had 2 all-americans etc. But we failed to realize that a LOT of that had to do w/ the fact that we beat a bunch of terrible teams. Now many of us are pissed and can't reconcile the "why"....well it's because we were given fools gold. We weren't a very good team to begin with...we just played in a terrible conference.

If we played against tougher competition then we'd prob. have less than 35 wins, prob. not won our conference, Sandlin/Reynolds would not have been all-americans, and we may not even be ranked in the T25. We benefited from playing crap teams all year long, period.