South Carolina 247 is saying..
- Thread starter 57stratdawg
- Start date
I know nothing about this guy, but why is SC letting him go (as I assume they’re not matching an offer)?
Have no fear, people will demand he be fired within a day of his hire if he's coming to us.
They aren’t as financially committed to baseball as you would think with Ray Tanner as AD. WBB has gotten a lot more focus in the last decade. Their head coach is a candidate for the Miami job.
I think they want to keep Parker but aren’t willing to pay the big bucks, and we are in desperate need of a good pitching coach and have the money to spend.
They were close to a new HC last year. They surprised and made the Supers this year, but had their worst season in decades in 2022. I think there is some feeling Kingston’s days are numbered in Columbia. He’s been connected to the Miami job.
Steve also mentioned WBB is eating up funding internally at the school. It’s easy to see parallels between Cohen and Ray Tanner from a distance.
The days of giving a retired coach a cushy job as AD ended about 30-40 years ago. You need a completely different skill set to be a good AD than you do to be a good coach.
Agree. I dont think Tanner is dying to commit to Kingston and Company. This is a nice hire. He has his work cut out for him. He inherited a similar rebuild in 2022 at SC after they lost some
Key starters to the draft and posted a 6.18 conference ERA in a year without the tight zone and no juiced ball.
He must have had a sidebar conversation with Selmon that he's the guy if Lemon cannot get it over the finish line. No way I'd leave SC for PC money. SC has the best stadium in the SEC just behind MSU and have much better talent than we do right now.
Gone from a baseball coach stealing poon to one stealing a cock. Not sure how I feel about that.**
This means LSU is getting him and we are locked in on the up and coming Valley pitching coach!!!
I’m pretty sure the balls in 2023 were the same as 2022….right? They went to the low seam ball way back in 2015….nothing else has changed since then. Strike zone change may or may not have happened between 2022-2023x but it was almost imperceptible if so. Total runs per conference game per team was 6.04 in 2022, 6.46 in 2023….some difference but not huge.
And if we had a 6.18 conference ERA this year, we’d almost assuredly be hosting. I’ll take even a 6.5 team ERA in 2024 right 17ing now if we somehow had the option to lock that in.
I think most people following college baseball and coaches feel like the ball was wound tighter this year. Kendall Rogers even talked about it. Bart and Charlie have talked about it. The strike zone was very noticeable. Thats a 7% increase in runs per game with fewer innings played this year due to the run rule.
7 of the 10 teams that made it this year had a 5.33 ERA or better Of the other 3, Auburn and LSU had 6.17 and TAMU was 7+ but were also the top 3 in runs scored. So it’s not that simple.
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Maybe I should have said the impact on runs scored from strike zone change (which is always going to be fluid from umpire to umpire and even inning to inning) was imperceptible. 7% isn’t a huge jump.
Hell, league average goes from 6.46 to 6.34 only from making MSU’s staff ERA equal to just the 13th best league ERA (Ole Miss). That’s 1/3 of the gap right there…..just from Foxhall’s shenanigans. As far as balls being “wound tighter”, I have no idea how you qualify that as far as happening or not, or how you quantify what the physical impact is even if it was happening. People talking about it and saying they feel like its happening doesn’t really carry much weight without some type of objective evidence being provided by a 3rd party or the manufacturer. By contrast, the low seam ball change had very measurable change - about 20 ft further ball flight on sweet spot contact, etc.
I think the bigger impact has been the recruiting of college players has changed to match the MLB three-outcome profile, and pitchers who throw hard over everything else. You have power hitters all over the place, many who can’t play any position very well, and a bunch of flamethrowers. All that adds up to more home runs, more errors, more walks, fewer double plays, and more pitching injuries. And all of that makes runs scored go into orbit. Analytics is far, far more responsible for the increased offense than anything else, but there still hasn’t been very much of a change at all from 2022 to 2023. It’s been far more noticeable if you go back to 2018-2019 and compare those numbers to 2022-2023.
Let’s make this easier and get to my main point. Let’s just assume that the ball was fine and the K zone was not an impact. The 2023 data on teams with a plus 6 ERA in conference says you need to be a hell of a lot better at scoring runs than we have been.
And I still think some of it is tied to mental approach with RISP which is tied to the broken culture of the program. Regardless Parker has a tall task ahead. It’s not hard to make the tourney so I could see us being a 3 seed and settling In for a nice run of Polk 2.2.
But to the point of runs, the top league ERA this year would have been 4th last year.
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If we see the same level of performance and lack of improvement from this pitching staff, rightfully so.
I agree, and I expect us to be a lot better scoring next year with a large portion of the lineup back….including our 2 most talented hitters in Jordan and Hines. Of course we get a huge bonus if either Clark or Ledbetter decides to come back. But either way, I expect us to score more next year than we have for the past 2 seasons….which is why I think if the pitching can make what is still pretty damn big leap from “worst in SEC history” to simply “slightly below average”, we’ll be OK for 2024.
Disagree. It has been repeatedly proven by multiple studies that clutch hitting is a myth. Good clutch hitters are good hitters, period. And all hitters (good or bad) are going to eventually hit around the same average with RISP than they do without RISP. There aren’t players out there who hit .250 overall but hit .450 with RISP….not over the long haul.
No idea how the “broken culture of the program” you refer to ties into anything, or what that even means. These guys have been playing baseball for dozens of teams damn near year round since they were 8 years old. A few years on any particular team isn’t going to make them forget everything they know about their approach with RISP.
But I do think analytics plays a factor here as well. When the analytics say swing for the fence every damn time, regardless of game situation, RISP approach generally gets deemphasized across the board…..because the RISP approach is the same as the general approach…..either hit a HR or walk. Or worst case, don’t hit into a DP.
I do of course agree that Parker has his work cut out for him. We’ll certainly know quickly if he’s doing a good job. I’m not so sure we’ll know whether or not he’s doing a bad job….but if it even gets called into question its really not going to matter.
Well admittedly I wish we published RISP. I know what the analytics say but I also bet the analytics would say we should score more runs considering our Slug and K Rate. But its hard for me to believe 18-22 year olds can’t get super tight at the plate when runners are in scoring position vs otherwise.
I dont think I’m alone with the culture comment at all. We were a blue collar, tough program. We have lost that.
I think he pretty much gets a free pass for his first year, because there’s a chance it’s his only year. Lemonis will get whatever heat may come next year, and rightfully so.
With zero GA seats?? Not the best in the world. Shiny and pretty good looking, but one of the most uncomfortable stadiums for non-season ticket holders in the country.
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