re: Official 2015 Alabama Baseball Thread

Always disappointing to lose a game when you pitch as well as we did tonight. Most of you will remember we lost 9 (I think was the final tally, including the season opener and the first game of the regional) games last year in which we gave up 2 runs or less, which is unheard of and incredibly frustrating in college baseball. So naturally tonight's inability to hit with men on base, or show any competence when "small ball" was asked for, and taking a loss to a quality team despite basically pitching lights out sucks. However, Houston's starter tonight was an All-American so even I am not too discouraged by the offense tonight. Although frankly the offense is talented enough to score on anybody and these nights are surely frustrating, and a bunch of them like we had last year will be impossible to stomach. The biggest thing to take away from tonight's game was that Taylor Guilbeau pitched like a true ace against a top ten team. He made just the one bad pitch and that's unfortunately all it took tonight, but if he finally has turned into the frontline starter we always thought he would be, then that's a huge question mark answered for our team this year.

Saturday and Sunday are huge for this team and it's resume going forward. Obviously we'd all love to win both and take the series, but just winning one is a must. Looking ahead to next week, I think just about anybody would've taken a 3-3 mark against Houston and ULL as that would put us right in the position we need to be moving closer to SEC play, and that 3-3 mark is obviously well within reach (I'm still hoping for 4-2). But the way we perform this weekend on the road against a top 8-seed quality team will go a long way to forming expectations for our bunch. We have so many pieces to build around, and yet so many questions in key spots, but there's reason to be optimistic. The top half of our lineup, on paper, can hang with anybody and it's starting to look like our crapshoot starting pitchers (who could have always gone either way) will perform as well as anybody could hope. Hopefully by Sunday night we're dreaming big of Omaha