Yeaaaaah, that'll be made much easier due to the fact that we would have just fired the coach that won us a national title.
How so? By conserving arms? We know you don't know much about that.
The 2021 team went farther bc it didn’t have to throw Plumlee against Rocker in the most important game. It was able to throw a first rounder against him in the most important game and face him on short rest
Postseason baseball is a crapshoot. The best team rarely wins the title. We've had several teams better than the national championship team, but 2021 was the year the breaks went our way for a change.
Wow, talk about revisionist history and changing the narrative.
Huh? Exactly. Thats why the 2019 couldn’t advance. They ran into a phenom that had found his stuff by year end. And we had to throw a juco that wasn’t drafted against him. Thats way different than throwing a first rounder against him and he is on short rest. Not sure what I revised.
Sorry, after reading through the other comments, I thought you were trying to make the same point that Lemonis didn't handle his pitching staff well in 2021 and before.
What was meant by this? Too much time spent on strength training and not baseball fundamentals?
Pitchers need to throw. They need to be limber. Any weight training needs to include stretching and flexibility training also. Not sure if that happens or not.
Bednar, on that day, pulled off the greatest single game performance in MSU athletic history.
Or the pitcher doesn’t peform as well on short rest as ours did That would be the logical answer. A critical error in the first inning helped as well. As did the fact the Vandy lineup was a shell of the 2019 lineup. I can assure you all that probably played a much bigger role. And again we didn’t get to pitch our best against the best team we played in the most important game in 2019. You can say we had two first rounders but neither pitched against Vandy. Bednar threw every critical game against the 2 best teams in the country.
Go look what happened before he was coach. The guy before him was better. That conference is bad anyway. But he finished worse than the previous skipper.
This was an interesting point, so I went and looked it up. A couple have been pretty bad (Van Horn went 26-29), but I haven't found one back to back yet. And certainly not after a national title, i.e. you're 'established'. Jon Savage at UCLA is the only one who comes close, they went 25-30-1 after they beat us in 2013, then rose up to a national seed the following year, fell off and went 25-31 the next, went 30-27 the next year then finally got back semi-permanently. But they haven't become elite again yet.
I didn’t say we only won a natty bc Rocker was off. I was showing you one of the many differences between the 19 team and the 21 team after they won their first game in Omaha bc for some reason you think that micro analysis has anything to do with Lems ability to coach. Seriously go try to convince someone to hire him based on that argument after they can’t understand why he has fielded two of the worst back to back teams in sec history.
This deep into his tenure (like I posted)? Not a good coach.
"The guy before him" won 54% of his games, Lemonis won 61% of his games there.
Average Record
Polk 2 was a pretty bad coach. He wasnt even trying to run a college program in the modern era.
Late season, outside of Bednar, Hootie, and PJ, we had no starter. ZERO. Macleod, Stinnet, Fristoe were absolute head cases who fell apart late and simply couldn't throw a strike under any circumstance. That has to be remembered. If not for Sims and the other three already mentioned, our pitching was already going bad. If not for Bednar turning in the single greatest athletic performance during the whole CWS run, we could not have advanced with the remaining pitching. Flash forward to 2022, even with the pitching change of Sims to starter, our pitching was still very, very poor before the injuries and wheels fell off. (Sims was 0-2 I believe.)
I'd go further to say that his total performance in the CWS as a whole is probably the greatest athletic performance in MSU history. Or at least his Texas performance and then the short rest gem for the title.
As mediocre as Polk II was, other than 2008, it was light years ahead of where we are now. 5 regionals and 1 CWS in 7 years (missed his first and last years). Cohen took over a program that was down for sure, but there was really no excuse for back-to-back last place finishes in his first 2 years.
Jake might have been 2 years gone but many of the players that played with him were still there. There is no way you can say TA and Rowdy didn't inherit some of the will to win that the 18-19 teams had. Now we are also talking about TA who probably goes down in my book as the MSU baseball goat over Mangum so the point is moot but I guarantee you TA would credit Jake, Foscue, Westburg, MacNamee as influencing his playing attitude. Sure, the players on the 21 team won it, but they had a pedigree.
I dont care that much bc I dont think Cohen is necessarily the greatest coach ever. But I dont think people realize how bad the pitching situation was with those teams. Polk had just flat quit.
We just thought the pitching was bad back then. ** Seriously, I don't really disagree with you. I almost threw up in my mouth a little defending Polk.
Absolutely Rooker deserves credit also. 1 of only 2 SEC triple crown winners gets you that. Jake probably drew from him in turn. I do think a winning attitude grows from year to year and players learn and grow form being exposed to fellow players. I'm not saying Jake was THE reason for the ship but his place in MSU history did play a part in it, just as Coach Polk did just by his coaching legacy. Sad thing is that for 2 years now, we have had zero leadership on this team and they are absolutely playing like it.
