Fire Nate Thompson?

DirkPiggler · 2025-03-17T10:18:27-0500

Now that I have your attention...some highlights of the season through the SEC opening weekend.

Six hitters with batting averages over .351.
Each of those six is slugging >.556, with two >.800.
Seven hitters with a decent number of ABs with OBP over .400 (Kozeal just misses at .393).
Team is 5th in SEC in batting average (finished 11th, 12th, 12th last three years).
3rd in SEC in SLG (10th, 11th, 5th last three years)
6th in OBP (11th, 10th, 8th)
T3rd in HR (9th, 7th, 5th)

This isn't intended as a defense of Nate, but it's entirely possible that a large part of our hitting woes the last few years were more a function of recruiting or evaluation errors rather than his philosophy or teaching style. Obviously there is a lot of baseball left to be played, but we seem to have a lineup that should be able to at least hold its own. Now to fix the ptiching...

Some of the raw numbers can possibly be explained by hotter bats, juiced balls, whatever. But the relative placement in the league stats shows that either a good bit of the improvement is real, or a lot of other teams got significantly worse.

PorkRyan12 · 2025-03-17T10:21:10-0500