A&M hired their hitting coach…
- Thread starter dawgstudent
- Start date
Man. Hiring baseball coaches is hard unless your AD is best friends with a great one.
Friendly reminder: many people on this board believe we could "easily" hire a coach better than Lemonis.
We can. The problem will still be landing players who can get more elsewhere and still come play in the dude on a weekend series.
To be clear, you think it would be challenging to find a head coach that could do better than 14th in the SEC, 13th in the SEC, and going 1-2 in someone else's regional over the last 3 years? Not to mention that disaster that next year is shaping up to be?
What's actually been challenging, for 100+ years now, is for Mississippi State to hire a head coach in any sport who proves capable of coaching a team to a national championship.
Maybe they will now hire our hitting coach?
Man, if #1 is true, that says a LOT about what kind of person Schlossnagle is.
That was before he knew he was the A&M head coach. He had the choice of following Schloss to Texas or waiting to see if he had a job with the new A&M coach.
So you’re thinking aTm should have gotten a head coach from the B1G who’s had some on-the-field success? **
No, he’s saying that it’s an incredibly risky move for a team that just played for a national championship to hire an unproven assistant just to try to keep players from transferring. This never would have happened prior to the transfer portal.
Correction: We were 2-2 in the regional in 2024.*
Let’s look at his entire record in five complete seasons:
-two trips of Omaha
-one national title
-two top-8 national seeds
-one SEC West title
-two 20 win SEC seasons
-three 17+ win SEC seasons
-three regionals (two wins and one 2nd place finish)
-18 NCAAT wins
Yes, I think it would be challenging and expensive to hire a coach that would produce those results.
*-Not saying I’m happy with that, just trying to deal in facts.
I think their present AD must have called former AD Ross "Bjorn" Bork as a consultant because that's exactly like something he would have done (cough cough Matt Luke)
It doesn't benefit the narative
You sure like to point out that National Championship. Why are you so hung up on that? It’s a real downer to those people trying to get high off the hate.
Mississippi State fandom in a nutshell.
The better question would be what coach out there would do better than that with the same players, injury issues, etc.?
Biggest strike against Lemonis, in my opinion, is hanging onto Foxhall one year longer than he should have. 2022 was going to be what it was, no matter what. National title the year before (so no justifcation for any staff changes), 4 major pitching injuries, and pretty much whiffed on an entire class worth of pitchers from HS / JUCO. That last thing was all Foxhall, and put us behind the 8-ball big time for all of the past 3 seasons. Should have canned him after 2022, but its also easy to say that in hindsight….knowing full well that team was postseason bound at a minimum without the injuries. 2023 was a disaster for the same reason as 2022 was, plus Foxhall totally misusing Cjintje. Had we hired Parker before 2023, we’d have been in postseason play that year. We somehow won 9 SEC games with a conference ERA of nearly 10.
I don’t think you’d get any different results if you inserted Vitello, Jay Johnson, DVH, Cohen, or anyone else into the driver’s seat over the past 3 seasons. Best case is we’d have a real pitching coach that had a 2023 season that was equal to or slightly worse than 2024. We still had too many injuries and holes in the pitching staff from Foxhall’s recruiting….but we’ve also been pretty decent at using the portal (Khal, Dohm, Hujsak, Ledbetter, Yeager, etc.).
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