• Goags20172
    162
    I broke down and bought some baseball tickets online last week. They are available to the general public. It's just that the purchase has to be made through the ticket icon on the ucdavisaggies.com website, you have to buy in pods of 2 or more, and there's a $6.00 fee per game you're buying tickets for. So it works out to $20 for 2 seats per game. Outside of the limited box seats not sure how they determine seat numbers but I'll find out soon. I know the allocared bleacher space for each ticket is numbered at Aggie Stadium, but didn't yhink it was at Dobbins.

    When I do go in a couple of weeks I'm hoping the team will be doing better than 7-19. That has included an 11 game losing streak that was just broken up by two wins against UCR. The Highlanders are one of the weaker conference teams, but wins are wins.

    I combed through the box scores to see if I could get an idea of what's going wrong. They looked like they wanted to be good last year before the season cancellation. What I determined was this-they just haven't been that good. Yeah, deep analysis I know, but it's been a lot of not horrible but not good play across pitching, fielding, and hitting just adding to a poor season. There's not a single problrm you can point to.

    So let's start with pitching. The team ERA is pretty ugly. Some pitchers have done pretty well and been consistent like Zach Carrell, Nathan Peng, Nate Freeman, and Jake Spillane. This tells us that the bad and ugly performances have been pretty bad and ugly.

    The team has used 7 starting pitchers. They started with a rotation of Erwin, Spillane, Carrell, and Meredith. Now it's Spillane, Riccomini, Weiser, and Erwin. Personally I think they should have stayed with Carrell. I think the reason he was demoted to the bullpen was he walked too many hitters, and that's really a bugaboo for Vaughn. Erwin was demoted temporarily to the bullpen in a week they didn't need a 4th starter and then didn't pitch for about three weeks, so that really hurt them. His two starts since have been solid. Weiser and Riccomini earned their promotions with quality long relief work. I don't know whether or not Meredith is injured but his last two starts were very short (neither lasting more than anning) and not very good, so an injury may be to blame for that. Rodriguez also got 1 start, which was kind of a head-scratcher for me. Not sure what the strategy was there. Maybe they were using him as an"opener", which is popular in MLB now. Freeman followed up with five solid innings. If Freeman were available for 5 innings, why didn't he start against PEP ?

    The bullpen has been a very mixed bag. They have received some excellent contributions in long relief from Weiser, Riccomini, Freeman, and Peng, sometimes in games they were already out of. The problem has been more short relief, protecting leads late in games. Looking at the body of work from game to game this year tells you Freeman has been excellent in long relief, but has struggled in short outings. The team doesn't have what you'd call a traditional closer or even a set-up man.

    Because of this Vaughn has made a few questionable late-game relief choices. He gave Nick Johnson his first pitching opportunity three weeks into the season against Cal Baptist in a save situation. Hasn't pitched since. Way to ease him into competition after that long layoff. Ouellette also received a save opportunity. These two have a lot of potential but given their injury histories they should be getting some tune-ups first in lower-pressure situations, maybe some of these junk innings in already lost games.

    On the plus side lots of different pitchers have gotten work and Carrion, LaCour, and Ryder have done well in a small sample of work. Good to see that from some freshman pitchers.

    Hitting has been more of a head-scratcher. They only really lost 3 starters on offense: Murray, Denholm, and Lara and their replacements (Arenado, Campagna, Brandel) are among the ones doing well

    More on hitting and fielding later today.
  • Goags20172
    162
    8-19 now- need to hurry up and cover the rest of what I was going to talk about before this thread gets buried underneath more posts about football games that have already happened and I can't find it lol.

    So where was I ? The hitting has been a mystery this year since Jalen Smith is doing well and the replacements for the departed starters are filling in quite capably. Mostly the bats have been quieter than you'd expect from this team. Even with today's shutout win over CSU Bakersfield the offense got a boost from sloppy Roadrunner play. The Roadrunners were so sloppy the CSU San Bernadino Coyotes could've beaten them. That was funnier in CCAA days.

    Hurting the situation are the many different lineups used looking for consistency. Fortunately the bats of Gedestad and Morrison have warmed up so the offense has picked up a little lately. Still haven't gotten the production out of the DH spot but it's looking up.

    The team has made 35 errors in 27 games. Not good but not horrible. In fact they've had several errorless games, so the potential is there. Arenado leads the team in errors, but you expect that from a college shortstop. They have to cover so much more ground than the corner infielders. One definite positive is that those 35 errors have led to only 30 unearned runs and in only 2-3 games have those unearned runs cost the Aggies a win. What that means is this year's team is keeping the cluster**** errors down.

    Take out the games decided by errors and questionable
    pitching changes together and it still wouldn't be a winning season. Overall, it just hasn't been that great a year but hey... THREE GAME WINNING STREAK.
  • Goags20172
    162
    The Aggies are 2-0 since I started this post. Maybe I should criticize them more often

    FOUR IN A ROW.
  • Goags20172
    162
    Wait they've got 1 more game today. Fart !
  • BlueGoldAg
    1.1k
    Keep it up...they won 5-0 today for their 3rd in a row! :rofl:
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to Aggie Sports Talk!

AggieSportsTalk.com, the pulse of Aggie athletics. The home of Aggie Pride. Create an account to contribute to the conversation!