re: Baseball 2022

They are young...but also just bad.

The sad part is that this team doesn't look that bad on a stat sheet. Not nearly as bad as they look on TV. What's worse is the majority of them had offers from other big schools or were drafted. We have good players, they just aren't playing good. The only other explanation would be that several other big schools and MLB scouts all misevaluated these guys.

From a pitching standpoint, our opponents are only batting .238 against us. But then you look at our 4.39 ERA and it tells me that when other teams are getting guys on, they're getting them in. Seems like a good portion of that falls on the back end pitching. Arkansas plating 5 in the top of the 9th last night is a good example.

At the plate, we're hitting .289 as a team. That's really not that bad. If you go even deeper, of the guys that average 2 plate appearances a game, 7 of those 9 guys hit over .275 and 4 of them are hitting over .300. There aren't many teams in D1 baseball that wouldn't take an average of 10 hits per game roughly halfway through the season. We do strike out 22% of the time, but we offset it a little bit with 57 bombs in 30 games. Our .375 OBP% is just okay and our.509 SLG% ranks us inside the Top 25 even after last night.

In conclusion (and sorry for going Billy Beane with all the stats), the only explanation I can come up with for being this bad is that a bunch of the games early in the season helped pad some stats. When you break it down to conference play, we have an ERA of 8.20 and are only scoring 5.5 runs per game. Incredibly hard to win when you give up more runs than you score.