Tennessee Tech, Baseball

[78pike]

Our starting pitching has been very inconsistent, some good and some atrocious. As I said before, we have a barbell distribution on ERAs (see below). I give a pass to opening night since it was too cold to feel the baseball. After that, no love for walks.

I think we hve the pieces to have a reasonable pitching staff and come in the middle of the ACC in ERA rather than second worse which is what I remember last year. Another factor helping the pitchers is the DPs turned. That makes a big difference. Realize you can only turn a DP with runners on and 0 or 1 outs. So they are massive and we've already turned 9 compared to 28 all of last year.

The trick is going to be NOT pitching the guys who don't throw strikes when we get to ACC play. And IMHO have a two walk / batter leash which we saw on Sunday. It hasn't been that short a leash in the past but we'll see. I've seen other coaches whose teams have lower ERAs have that short a leash. But there is a lot to ERA other than leash length. (D, depth, etc)

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Agree with everything you said. This is the time of year where you try to get as many pitchers in as you can to determine who you can rely on when we get to the conference schedule. We didn't always do this in years past when we came out of the gate with pitching so bad that CDH seemed to rely on his older arms to get the wins in those early games and never got to see the young arms. Say what you will about Borrell, and many of us have, but we do seem to be recruiting higher quality arms than we have in the past and in greater numbers. I think we have seen more depth in the staff so far this year than we have in the past. And even some of those pitchers with the double digit ERAs show that they have good stuff but they need to hit their spots and control it. Despite the overall ERA I am encouraged by what I have seen so far.

 

[Eli]

Our starting pitching has been very inconsistent, some good and some atrocious. As I said before, we have a barbell distribution on ERAs (see below). I give a pass to opening night since it was too cold to feel the baseball. After that, no love for walks.

I think we hve the pieces to have a reasonable pitching staff and come in the middle of the ACC in ERA rather than second worse which is what I remember last year. Another factor helping the pitchers is the DPs turned. That makes a big difference. Realize you can only turn a DP with runners on and 0 or 1 outs. So they are massive and we've already turned 9 compared to 28 all of last year.

The trick is going to be NOT pitching the guys who don't throw strikes when we get to ACC play. And IMHO have a two walk / batter leash which we saw on Sunday. It hasn't been that short a leash in the past but we'll see. I've seen other coaches whose teams have lower ERAs have that short a leash. But there is a lot to ERA other than leash length. (D, depth, etc)

View attachment 14056

50% of the walks are by two guys who are freshmen. (One being a true freshman) Samol has the tools to be one of the best pitchers we’ve seen at Tech. 6’8 lefty in the mid to high 90s. Let’s see how these guys develop through the season. I am actually very happy in how we are managing these guys early on