Seriously, would Raffo been THAT much worse? This is pathetic.

[Phil Wenneck.sixpack]

I've been on the Cohen train but I'll admit, I've got one foot out the door at this point. There is no excuse for this ****. Yes, it's cold out there, yes it's a tough night to play but we're just terrible. We hit like ****. No other way to put it. I HATE small ball, HATE it. The fact that we actually built a team around it disturbs me. So the field's big, so the bats are different, really who gives a rat's *** when we have nearly no one that can hit it out of the freaking infield? What's ourstrategy? See if we can bunt the bases loaded then hope for one of Cohen's patented hit batsman to drive the run in? The fact that Ryan Collins and Sam Frost touch the field is a joke.

 

[Phil Wenneck.sixpack]

Unacceptable

 

[drt7891]

They are dropping hits on us left and right and we can't buy a hit.

 

[pDigital32Dawg]

**** happens...

 

[Todd4State]

I've seen enough of him. He shouldn't be on the team. Neither should Victor Diaz. I figure he will transfer by this time next year. Neither brings anything to the table.

 

[Todd4State]

That's not a slam against Raffo's coaching ability. But Raffo staying meant Polk stays as a volunteer assistant, and likely Russ McNickle stays. The only way we were ever going to have a hope of getting out of our rut was to get rid of Polk- and when we did that was only the beginning. Notice that when Raffo was hired at Arkansas State, he kept the exact same staff in place other than the head coach who he replaced.

Having McNickle around would have meant no good pitchers coming here, and more pitchers getting hurt. Heck, having him around our program would have been WAY worse than keeping Polk, as odd as that sounds. We weren't getting any good pitching recruits because the word on the street was that he didn't know what he was doing and would hurt you.

I'm not saying that Cohen is the answer or that we couldn't do better- but keeping Raffo sure as hell wasn't the answer.

And also, if Raffo did manange to get some good players in, we would be possibly looking at Polk III or Polk IV depending on how you look at it.


Now, to Cohen- I think bringing in so many JUCO guys was a mistake. I've been pretty vocal about that over the years. A guy like a Luis Pollerena is typically about the best you can hope for. We might get lucky and get an academic casulaty like Tyler Moore, but other than that, we need to steer clear of JUCO's. What happened was when Cohen was at UK, he was able to get a couple of pretty good JUCO players- which in my mind was more of an anomaly than anything. So, of course, he decides that it's a good way to go. We can maybe find some good role type players like Thigpen and Ogden, but we don't need to try to build our team that way. The good news is we seem to be going away from signing a ton of JUCO players. It's hard to get an elite JUCO player- MLB gobbles them up in the draft like they did with Corey Dickerson.

But yeah- the building the team to fit the park thing was always lip service to me. If he really believed that, he wouldn't be recruiting guys like Brandon Woodruff, Hunter Renfroe, and Chase Domino.