Kentucky at Jacksonville State (Sweep Edition)
- Thread starter Comebakatz3
- Start date
Burkes hit for Ritter and hits one that the pitcher barehands and isnt able to throw him out. Pitre will run for him.
Thrasher will hit for Jump.
Maybe it's silly to complain here but why not let Pitre hit and Felker hit instead of pinch running them?
Thrasher is out.
Church to now PH for Plastiak. Why didn't he hit the first time? Just weird to me. He gets a base hit. 15-1.
Fogel strikes out.
Thrasher will hit for Jump.
Maybe it's silly to complain here but why not let Pitre hit and Felker hit instead of pinch running them?
Thrasher is out.
Church to now PH for Plastiak. Why didn't he hit the first time? Just weird to me. He gets a base hit. 15-1.
Fogel strikes out.
Thrasher in left. Felker at 2nd. Church at 1st. Pitre at short. I think that's how it looks.
Hudepohl to pitch.
Hudepohl to pitch.
Appears like the Cats got better every game. Just the start CNM needed. Sounds like a good ball club
UK announcer sure has a great radio voice. He did terrific as a fill in. Andrew Kapas?
UK announcer sure has a great radio voice. He did terrific as a fill in. Andrew Kapas?
Pretty decent start. Not sure how much we can take away from the weekend. Really feel like UK took advantage of a very weak JSU bullpen, depth wise. UK hitters didn't do great until they got late into games. To their credit... they did take advantage late and that's big, but I can't help but wonder how much of that was facing much worse pitching in the late innings.
Pitching today was petty solid again. Not a ton of Ks, but only gave up the 1 run and shut the door anytime JSU got runners on.
Can't complain much about the weekend. Should be a building block, but I'm not really sure we will get a good gauge of this team until TCU.
Announcer for radio was excellent. Andrew Kapas (sp?) was the fill in. Not my favorite as he's definitely all business and not big on stories, but very professionally done and still entertaining. I like Gabriel as a person and a great advocate for the program but this was big time upgrade.
I think it was a great weekend. Any time you come away winning 3 baseball games in a weekend, it's good. Doesn't matter who you played. Ask ECU. There are much worse things that could have happened for sure. I agree, I think TCU is going to tell us a lot. Can't sleep on Western Michigan though, they arent terrible.
I think the transfers all did well this weekend. Cotto and Bosma looked good, if not great and Guilfoil and Williams both did exactly what was needed. The OFs and Danny Harris hit the ball and played well in the field. Granted, we don't know how well they'll do against the SEC, but I'd much rather have them have a weekend like they did rather than suck against JSU and we are talking about if JSU did that to us, what's the SEC gonna do to us. Totally different convo now after they had a good weekend like that.
If Ritter turns that double play behind bosma today, does he not walk those 2 guys and save 20 pitches? Could have gone another inningbor 2 maybe.
I think the defense played well too, but had some mishaps today and some baserunning mishaps, but I think those are to be expected in a first weekend series. I think they'll get it cleaned up and I'm excited to see what comes next.
I come from a time of being a UK baseball fan where we regularly won all of our OOC games because we largely played no one. The NCBWA would always put us into the top 25. Then league play would humble us.
So, I've learned to take things slow about success in the OOC and see how we do when the competition ramps up. I've cited it a lot but Estep, for instance, hit .252 a year ago. He was .333 in OOC and .211 in league play. Night and day. You watch him on Tuesdays and he'd be a stud but on Saturdays he'd struggle. Same thing happened to Church last year and to a lot of others. So, I'm real cautious about it
Now, that being said... you're certainly correct that it's better than having a terrible weekend like ECU had; and its certainly better to have more positives to take away than negatives.
While admitting the ECU situation is odd, I've never put much thought in early season games. Get a much better read after 15-18 games, things start to settle in to what to expect overall. Most teams won't look anything like what they showed opening weekend a month from now. Somebody has to win/lose and it's certainly better to win but changes are on the horizon for everybody. Still, lots of balance in college baseball.
It is odd, but Bryant is a very good baseball team. They joined D-1 in 2009. Since then, they've been to as many NCAA tournaments as UK has (3). They should actually have a lot more as they've won their conference every year since 2007, but they have only won the conference tournament for the auto-bid 3 times. They were 40-20 a year ago and were by far the best team in their conference, but they, won the league by 3 games. They didn't go to the NCAA tournament because they got beat in the conference tournament. Last year was their 4th season of 40 wins or more, their highest being 47 in 2016. Wouldn't surprise me if they returned a whole lot from that very talented team.
I agree with you, though. Hard to make a big judgment after one weekend. Credit to them that they took care of business and looked pretty solid doing it though.
One thing I want to point out and is how Roszel handled Bosma yesterday. One of my pet peeves for baseball is not having a bullpen ready early. There are some days where pitchers just don’t have it. It happens, and a lot of coaches let it hit the fan before reacting and then you're playing catch-up. We didn't do that yesterday. Bosma struggled in the second and UK had the pen working. We have a whole lot of depth in that pen, so I liked that he was signaling that he wasn’t going to be afraid to use it. Credit to Bosma for working through it so we didn't have to, but I really liked that we were prepared in case it turned sour.
