-As great as Thursday night was, the hard reality is that we went down there 3 games under .500 in the league and came back 4 games under. I do generally agree that we would have all taken 1 win before the series if offered, but that always changes when you win the first one. It's been a very long time since we've won a series at Florida.... Skyler Weber, Robert Tyler, and Stephen Wrenn were all in 5th grade the last time it happened. Daniel Nichols was in 6th grade. Heath Holder was a 7th grader. It's hard to believe, really.
-If you think about it, scoring 3 runs over the entire weekend, we were really fortunate to come back with a win. We're most certainly in a funk at the plate... or maybe we aren't.... We've struggled to score runs all season. Running into better pitching, that gets magnified.
-Stricklin, I saw from his post game comments, is banging the RPI and strength of schedule drums (which I would do as well). We are 21-20/ 7-11. I figure that we are going to have to get to 13 wins in the conference. If we go 13-17, we'd have to sweep the remaining two from tech and beat Western Carolina to finish 30-26. That would give us some pad for the SECT. I highly doubt that we would get in at 12-18 in the conference, even if we are above .500.... We are obviously going to have to figure out how to score some runs on the road if we're going to get to 13... And these will be very big series for the remaining four teams that we're playing, as well.
-As far as the offense, I appreciate what they were trying to do last weekend with shuffling some things up, but it's clearly not working now. We've scored 3 runs in our last 4 games. Nick King is not a leadoff hitter. He has a .299 OBP for the year. Granted, it is .338 in league play, but that's still not what you need from your top guy. It should be Stephen Wrenn, who has the highest batting average on the team in league play and second highest OBP (Kieboom has the best on-base)... Today we had Wrenn back in the 7th hole and Michael Curry 5th. In no situation should Curry hit ahead of Wrenn on this team.... Right now, Curry is striking out in almost 37% of his SEC ABs.... I'm not trying to knock the guy, it is what it is.... His numbers and his approach are why he should be in the 7 hole right now, and why I think any other program in the conference would have him hitting 7th. This lineup as constructed now just isn't working. It was a good thought, but we should have gone away from it after Tuesday night.
-Mike Riveria, Florida's catcher. Real class act.
-Whatever you or I think about O'Sullivan, he, Bell, and Weitzel are all very high level coaches. They really ran circles around us this weekend... I think that the A&M weekend was worse for the program.... being outscored 30-3 in a series that somehow wasn't even that close.... That was a huge set-back, but we did some or a lot of that to ourselves. We just didn't play well out there. This weekend, I think, hurts more for this season than for the program in general. O'Sullivan really laid to the blue print out there for how to beat us. I think that we got exposed to a greater degree this weekend than we did in College Station.
-If you like Wendy's and you're driving north on I-75 from Gainesville, you are in luck.... I don't know why I noticed that, but it seemed like there was a Wendy's at every single exit for about 100 miles...
-Driving around Greg McGarity's old stomping ground this weekend wasn't a whole lot of fun and never is. As I said last night, I really hate Gainesville. I was thinking today during the game and on the drive back, and maybe this isn't the time to say this, but it just seems sometimes like we are a knock-off athletic department. We hired Jeremy Foley's alleged #2 guy (albeit out of an "emergency" situation) at a time when UF's athletics program was really humming along. We spent the last three years or so shaking the Alabama football tree at what felt like an unprecedented level, all the way up to hiring Nick Saban's #2 as our head coach (and while I think that Kirby will do great here, that is the reality of what we did). We hired a mid-major baseball coach based seemingly exclusively on what we did in one season at that mid-major, rust belt school..... I don't know, it just seems like our mindset since 2010 has been "this person was successful in this different circumstance, let's bring him to Athens and sell that prior success." Is it unfair for me to say that? Maybe. But that's how it feels to me. Perhaps I should go watch another round of hype videos.
-Two weeks ago we came off a very disappointing weekend and went over to Atlanta and beat tech. Let's beat those guys again and clean some things up for Vanderbilt. This team can still go to the postseason if they stay locked in and if we get our lineup slotted a little better.
-If you think about it, scoring 3 runs over the entire weekend, we were really fortunate to come back with a win. We're most certainly in a funk at the plate... or maybe we aren't.... We've struggled to score runs all season. Running into better pitching, that gets magnified.
-Stricklin, I saw from his post game comments, is banging the RPI and strength of schedule drums (which I would do as well). We are 21-20/ 7-11. I figure that we are going to have to get to 13 wins in the conference. If we go 13-17, we'd have to sweep the remaining two from tech and beat Western Carolina to finish 30-26. That would give us some pad for the SECT. I highly doubt that we would get in at 12-18 in the conference, even if we are above .500.... We are obviously going to have to figure out how to score some runs on the road if we're going to get to 13... And these will be very big series for the remaining four teams that we're playing, as well.
-As far as the offense, I appreciate what they were trying to do last weekend with shuffling some things up, but it's clearly not working now. We've scored 3 runs in our last 4 games. Nick King is not a leadoff hitter. He has a .299 OBP for the year. Granted, it is .338 in league play, but that's still not what you need from your top guy. It should be Stephen Wrenn, who has the highest batting average on the team in league play and second highest OBP (Kieboom has the best on-base)... Today we had Wrenn back in the 7th hole and Michael Curry 5th. In no situation should Curry hit ahead of Wrenn on this team.... Right now, Curry is striking out in almost 37% of his SEC ABs.... I'm not trying to knock the guy, it is what it is.... His numbers and his approach are why he should be in the 7 hole right now, and why I think any other program in the conference would have him hitting 7th. This lineup as constructed now just isn't working. It was a good thought, but we should have gone away from it after Tuesday night.
-Mike Riveria, Florida's catcher. Real class act.
-Whatever you or I think about O'Sullivan, he, Bell, and Weitzel are all very high level coaches. They really ran circles around us this weekend... I think that the A&M weekend was worse for the program.... being outscored 30-3 in a series that somehow wasn't even that close.... That was a huge set-back, but we did some or a lot of that to ourselves. We just didn't play well out there. This weekend, I think, hurts more for this season than for the program in general. O'Sullivan really laid to the blue print out there for how to beat us. I think that we got exposed to a greater degree this weekend than we did in College Station.
-If you like Wendy's and you're driving north on I-75 from Gainesville, you are in luck.... I don't know why I noticed that, but it seemed like there was a Wendy's at every single exit for about 100 miles...
-Driving around Greg McGarity's old stomping ground this weekend wasn't a whole lot of fun and never is. As I said last night, I really hate Gainesville. I was thinking today during the game and on the drive back, and maybe this isn't the time to say this, but it just seems sometimes like we are a knock-off athletic department. We hired Jeremy Foley's alleged #2 guy (albeit out of an "emergency" situation) at a time when UF's athletics program was really humming along. We spent the last three years or so shaking the Alabama football tree at what felt like an unprecedented level, all the way up to hiring Nick Saban's #2 as our head coach (and while I think that Kirby will do great here, that is the reality of what we did). We hired a mid-major baseball coach based seemingly exclusively on what we did in one season at that mid-major, rust belt school..... I don't know, it just seems like our mindset since 2010 has been "this person was successful in this different circumstance, let's bring him to Athens and sell that prior success." Is it unfair for me to say that? Maybe. But that's how it feels to me. Perhaps I should go watch another round of hype videos.
-Two weeks ago we came off a very disappointing weekend and went over to Atlanta and beat tech. Let's beat those guys again and clean some things up for Vanderbilt. This team can still go to the postseason if they stay locked in and if we get our lineup slotted a little better.
