the mantra on Genespage was "wait til Polk gets his boys in and gets Pat's players out of here!" Unfortunately for us, that happened. Especially when Pat's players included Maholm, Papelbon, and Tatum among others, and then Polk pissed away their chance at Omaha in 03 with his awesome coaching.
So, I think it's only fair to let Cohen get his players in here since so many people over on the lake wanted to give Polk five to get his players on board.
So far, it looks to me like the baserunning overall has improved. We're taking extra bases a lot better than we used to.
Pitching is better- and with a ton of promising freshmen to boot. The last time I can even recall a group of pitchers like this was maybe 1995 with DuBose, Jeremy Jackson, Scott Polk, and Van Johnson among others. And I'd say that this group of freshmen has the chance to be better than that. Two seasons from now, our rotation may very well have three guys that can throw in the mid-90's with good breaking balls- Stratton, CC Watson, and Daryl Norris and a solid midweek guy in Luke Bole, and then a bullpen that is likely to have Chad Girodo, Kendall Graveman, Wes Rea, and Ben Bracewell. And I wouldn't bet against Devin Jones being back as a senior.
We are hitting better- Despite Conner Powers going down looking on Sun., how often has that happened so far? Not very much. We have some guys that are hitting with some power already- which is tough this time of year, and will get better as the weather warms up, and our averages are pretty good so far. We've been consistently scoring five runs a game, which is enough to win on a lot of nights. I think we've only scored less than five runs once this entire year. I looked at our batting averages today, and most were above .300, and then Russ Sneed is hitting in the mid/high .290's. Cohen specializes in hitting, so we will probably be pretty good at that as long as he is around. And looking at recruiting for the future, he has some guys that I think will hit for power eventually- Kolby Byrd, DeMarcus Henderson, Luke Bole, and some guys that can run and hit for average like CT Bradford, Sam Frost and then he has some Rusty Thoms type players coming in Braydon Jones, Chase Luwallen and Taylor Stark- who can fly. I would like to see him recruit some more power guys now that Ethan Bright is gone, and I suspect that we might offer Jackson Posey of Sumrall, a guy who is 6'4" and hit .515 last year with 11 home runs. Then we have some two-way guys that might hit and pitch in Rea and Norris as well as Bole.
Defense- Yeah, it's not good right now. I'm not sure that it's much worse than when Polk left though. I think it's more noticable now because we have improved in some other areas- like pitching. Most of the guys who have been defensive liabilities are Polk's players. Sneed, Jet, Ryan Collins, and heck, Ryan Duffy was so bad last year, Cohen pulled him out of the game in the middle of an inning. A big reason Luke Adkins was benched at USM was because of his defense, or lack thereof. All of those guys came on board during the Polk era. The only Cohen recruit that I can say is really kind of shaky defensively right now is Nick Vickerson.
Baserunning- So far, I think we are better here. We're not world beaters, but at least it's not like we're station to station anymore. We also bunt 100% better than at any time than under Polk.
So, by my count, the only area that we haven't really improved that much in under Cohen is defense. And that's with players that don't exactly fit his style.
Ultimately, what has happened this season is likely what will happen all season. We will have days where we look OK like we did against Rhode Island, I think we will gut out some victories like we did against UAB, and I think we will have some weekends where the wheels come off like this weekend.
