Wow what a difference a week makes...

[thekimmer]

This time last week we were riding high at #1 in the west and tied for first in the SEC after scoring 28 and allowing just 4 in a sweep of Bama. We enter this week with tails tucked at 4th in the west and 6th in the SEC after the table was turned giving up 27 and scoring 10 getting swept by arky.

I can scarcely remember a sweep as humiliating as that one being #3 in the country and being largely non-competitive in the series. So much went wrong this weekend. We did get two pretty good pitching starts in games 1 and 3 but I don't think I've ever witnessed a more inept bullpen performance as ours was this weekend. How do 6-7 guys all forget how to throw strikes at the same time? Defense was not good. In several of their big innings we either opened the door or failed to close it by blowing the opportunity to make a play. Not all the missed opportunities were errors but they were missed nonetheless. Hitting was awful. Their friday guy is legit but after him they have a bunch of guys who tend to give up a lot of runs. Their sunday guy had not pitched more than 4 or 5 the entire season. He pitched 7+ of shutout ball against us. Lots of Ks in scoring situations. Even Mangum looked like a guy trying to do too much.

Its just one weekend and things can turn again but the thought has to enter one's mind that perhaps we were a bit overrated. We have beaten some ranked teams but against the top 10 (at the time) I believe we are 1-5. I guess its kind of like this, we are probably not as bad as we looked this weekend but we are probably not as good as we looked the weekend before. This upcoming week will do a lot to tell us who we really are.

 

[maroonmania]

In the end we really hit their opening game pitcher about as well as we hit anybody else they threw out there. From a hits standpoint, we had a whopping 6 hits in Game 1, 5 hits in Game 2, and 6 hits in Game 3.

 

[Seinfeld]

I know that ups and downs are going to happen with any baseball team throughout a lengthy season, but I have to admit... last weekend showed me some chinks in the armor that I didn't think existed up until that point. If we had lost all 3 in similar fashion to the Thursday night game, I'd probably be sitting here thinking how we were right there at the end, the ump made some bad calls, and our pitching/defense really only had one terrible inning.

As things now stand, however, I'm questioning pretty much everything. Our pitching outside of just a small handful of guys is highly inconsistent, our defense has been problematic all year, and even out bats were shut down by multiple unproven pitchers this past weekend. Considering the way that our guys have played all year, logic should tell us that last weekend was an anomaly, but there are quite a few question marks that will need to be proven otherwise