Arkansas-Pine Bluff

[65Jacket]

I enjoy Jim Poole's comments.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

OK, so @RoosterJacket got me thinking about the issue of throwing strikes, and we have all been talking about freebies, so I decided to do some figuring. Here are some interesting stats over our first 8 games in 2018 vs 2017.

Corrected from my earlier note///TOTAL FREEBIES (2017)=40....TOTAL FREEBIES (2018)=28 ...TOTAL FREEBIES (Last 5 Games)=6 (yes, you read that correctly)
Average # of pitches per game (2017)= 151...Average # of pitches per game (2018)=138....Average # of pitches per game (Last 5 Games)=124.6
% of Strikes thrown (2017)=62.1%....% of Strikes thrown (2018)=65.1%....% of Strikes thrown (Last 5 Games)=68.9%

Maybe we are facing just horrid offensive teams. But that wasn't exactly murderer's row we faced last year and only in 2 of the first 8 games last year did we exceed 65% strikes, which we have done in each of the last 5 games.

It is encouraging.

Yes, this reminds me of Josh Pastner in basketball - just make your free throws and don't turn the ball over. It is this type of lower freebie count that will enable us to 'steal' a win here and there in ACC play that we would normally lose. If we can keep it up.

I went back and looked at last year - we lost 7 games in regular ACC play by 2 or fewer runs. We lost both of our 2 games in the ACC tournament by 1 run.

 

[MWBATL]

For whatever it's worth (not much probably) UA-Pine Bluff lost to Tennessee by a 9-1 margin yesterday. This compares to our 8-0 victory.

Interestingly, we stroked 16 hits while Tennessee got only 9 hits. Pine Bluff was weak against both staffs, with 5 hits against the Vols after getting only 3 from us.