Yes, we did win a natty with Bednar and Sims. But Bednar was the best of both worlds....he could bring it AND he understood how to pitch. Sims was dominant, but he was dominant not only because of his stuff, but because we brought in his stuff behind guys with different stuff. That change-of-pace matters. If everyone were upper 90s fastball/slider guys, we'd be pretty easy to game plan for.
I loved Ross but he came along at the perfect time for him to be successful, that early era of the BBCOR bats where nobody could hit. They changed the seams on the ball for his last season here and he proceeded to get hit like batting practice.
Its not a crapshoot if you can pitch it like OM did last year. In 11 NCAA tournament games from 2022 OM gave up a TOTAL of 25 runs. The most they gave up in any game was 6 runs and gave up an average of slightly over 2 runs per game. In the CWS they gave up more than 3 runs only once in the 6 games they played. It was the most dominant pitching performance throughout the tourney from one team I've ever seen. That's the reason they won. Their pitchers just all got hot at once. No matter who they threw out there they were effective. Will probably never see anything quite like that again.
And compare that to how their pitchers looked the first half or 2/3s of the season.
What’s SPS’s take on Clark?
You make him, Hines and Chance battle it out for the RF/DH roll. I would throw Hujsak into that mix as well, but he must look like **** in practice or be in the doghouse because he’s looked good in limited time
59 walks in 9 games and 10 batters hbp pretty much sum up the "facts" this season. That's 69 extra base runners given a free pass so far so avg of 7+ free runners per game.
Don't forget the 16 charged errors and probably that many more plays that should have been made but were not charged.
