Let's start off on the highest note:
Williams came back from injury way sooner than should be humanly possible and dazzled in his return, picking up right where he left off. Not sure if he will make his way into the starting lineup, but if not, he could play a very similar role to what we saw from Guilfoil a year ago. Basically to be a long reliver who comes into a game in the 5th or 6th, or whenever the starter begins to struggle, and go the distance to close out the game.
Also good:
Pitching overall. Very good. Elon is an absolutely horrible hitting team. .226 as a team a year ago, which is just astronomically bad. As a whole UK held them to well under that. I don't think any of our pitchers really ever struggled at any point. Martin made a couple of mistakes and Elon hit something like .272 against him, but he limited the damage and did enough to win that game. I'm still nervous about him being a Friday night starter, but I am certainly not writing him off.
Ehh:
Hitting. Elon had a good pitching staff last year. They finished with a pretty low team ERA. However, I can't say that our hitting against them was particular impressive. It got better as we faced less experienced pitchers and the bullpen, but we still didn't exactly dominate. I did like that we had several timely 2 out hits in games 2 and 3. So, I will be looking to see us continue that moving forward. I still don't like Pitre in the 4 hole. I see him more as the 2 hole guy and I think it could be good to switch him and McCoy. I think it is much more dangerous for us to have Waldy leading off and working the count and seeing a lot of pitches and getting on base with a high OBP, and then Pitre having the ability to hit, or bunt, him over, and Burkes to follow that with more power. We will see how the hitting improves, but I think we will face much tougher overall pitchers and staffs moving forward, so we will need to take a pretty big step to get to where we really need to be.
Not ideal:
Fielding. It wasn't so much that it was horrible across the board, but Byars at third had 2 errors and could have been attributed a third. I'm not sure that many other players were put in particularly difficult spots. We did have an error on a pickoff move by Bosma in game 2. He did a good job getting himself out of that problem though. We will see how this goes moving forward. No one can be perfect, but it is more ideal that we clean it up.
Horrible:
Base running. The box scores seem to say that we were 3 for 6 in stolen bases this weekend. I believe that this is leaving off the two times we were picked off on Friday night. So, really we were 3-8 (38% success rate). I think it could have been a bit worse as they were somewhat generous giving us a stolen base on one attempt that could have been a defensive indifference as Elon did not even look to attempt a throw when we had runners on the corners and advanced McCoy (IIRC) to second. So, could have even been 2-7 (29%). Not sure I heard anything on the weekend that indicated there was particularly good base running, such as last year we often even took third on hits in front of the runner to the left side of the infield. Ritter was notoriously good at this. However, to be fair, we didn't have a ton of guys on second with less than two outs this weekend. Either way, we tried to move the runners a good bit and we failed way too often. This was against multiple pitchers and catchers, so we weren't necessarily facing a particularly nasty pickoff move or a one stud catcher. It does not appear that UK, to date, is going to be an amazing hitting team and it doesn't appear that we'll have a ton of power throughout the lineup. So, we will need to rely on getting those runners moving to increase our scoring chances. Giving away outs on the bases, especially at this rate, is just outright unacceptable.
Weekend starters as first base coaches. It was mentioned during the games by a couple people. I don't mind the players being there, but weekend starters makes no sense to me. As someone else mentioned, a hard line drive isn't likely, but it still could conceivably catch one of your weekend guys over there and then you're out a starter. Heck, even using pitchers doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You could use a guy like Felker over there who can then pay attention to a pitcher's pickoff move and get that timing down and when you need him to pinch run, he might have seen that pickoff move and be ready to time it up and get a stolen base for you. Then, if you want to possibly pinch hit him you can swap him for someone else prior to that inning. That just makes a lot more sense to me than using a pitcher, much less a starting weekend guy.
Williams came back from injury way sooner than should be humanly possible and dazzled in his return, picking up right where he left off. Not sure if he will make his way into the starting lineup, but if not, he could play a very similar role to what we saw from Guilfoil a year ago. Basically to be a long reliver who comes into a game in the 5th or 6th, or whenever the starter begins to struggle, and go the distance to close out the game.
Also good:
Pitching overall. Very good. Elon is an absolutely horrible hitting team. .226 as a team a year ago, which is just astronomically bad. As a whole UK held them to well under that. I don't think any of our pitchers really ever struggled at any point. Martin made a couple of mistakes and Elon hit something like .272 against him, but he limited the damage and did enough to win that game. I'm still nervous about him being a Friday night starter, but I am certainly not writing him off.
Ehh:
Hitting. Elon had a good pitching staff last year. They finished with a pretty low team ERA. However, I can't say that our hitting against them was particular impressive. It got better as we faced less experienced pitchers and the bullpen, but we still didn't exactly dominate. I did like that we had several timely 2 out hits in games 2 and 3. So, I will be looking to see us continue that moving forward. I still don't like Pitre in the 4 hole. I see him more as the 2 hole guy and I think it could be good to switch him and McCoy. I think it is much more dangerous for us to have Waldy leading off and working the count and seeing a lot of pitches and getting on base with a high OBP, and then Pitre having the ability to hit, or bunt, him over, and Burkes to follow that with more power. We will see how the hitting improves, but I think we will face much tougher overall pitchers and staffs moving forward, so we will need to take a pretty big step to get to where we really need to be.
Not ideal:
Fielding. It wasn't so much that it was horrible across the board, but Byars at third had 2 errors and could have been attributed a third. I'm not sure that many other players were put in particularly difficult spots. We did have an error on a pickoff move by Bosma in game 2. He did a good job getting himself out of that problem though. We will see how this goes moving forward. No one can be perfect, but it is more ideal that we clean it up.
Horrible:
Base running. The box scores seem to say that we were 3 for 6 in stolen bases this weekend. I believe that this is leaving off the two times we were picked off on Friday night. So, really we were 3-8 (38% success rate). I think it could have been a bit worse as they were somewhat generous giving us a stolen base on one attempt that could have been a defensive indifference as Elon did not even look to attempt a throw when we had runners on the corners and advanced McCoy (IIRC) to second. So, could have even been 2-7 (29%). Not sure I heard anything on the weekend that indicated there was particularly good base running, such as last year we often even took third on hits in front of the runner to the left side of the infield. Ritter was notoriously good at this. However, to be fair, we didn't have a ton of guys on second with less than two outs this weekend. Either way, we tried to move the runners a good bit and we failed way too often. This was against multiple pitchers and catchers, so we weren't necessarily facing a particularly nasty pickoff move or a one stud catcher. It does not appear that UK, to date, is going to be an amazing hitting team and it doesn't appear that we'll have a ton of power throughout the lineup. So, we will need to rely on getting those runners moving to increase our scoring chances. Giving away outs on the bases, especially at this rate, is just outright unacceptable.
Weekend starters as first base coaches. It was mentioned during the games by a couple people. I don't mind the players being there, but weekend starters makes no sense to me. As someone else mentioned, a hard line drive isn't likely, but it still could conceivably catch one of your weekend guys over there and then you're out a starter. Heck, even using pitchers doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You could use a guy like Felker over there who can then pay attention to a pitcher's pickoff move and get that timing down and when you need him to pinch run, he might have seen that pickoff move and be ready to time it up and get a stolen base for you. Then, if you want to possibly pinch hit him you can swap him for someone else prior to that inning. That just makes a lot more sense to me than using a pitcher, much less a starting weekend guy.
