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Post by actualfactual on Mar 25, 2018 18:58:39 GMT -5
Two wins out of four is actually a nice outcome for the logistical weekend from hell.
Were people in this thread indicating Pine may have been on the bus? I hope he was on the whole trip! That's how foolishness like the 2018 PL schedule gets curtailed. The reason the league schedule has been short in prior years is the small number of teams. The old four games per opponent was pretty typical. Five is more than average. If the league wants to have a longer schedule, it should focus on finding an associate member for baseball and have a seven weekend season. I am not saying that would be easy but it is a far better way to expand the league schedule than what they came up with.
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 25, 2018 10:03:15 GMT -5
Yes, defense is an area where the team is not surprising us in a good way. Strength up the middle is the stupid-but-probably-true baseball axiom. We have freshman and sophomore starters at catcher, shortstop, second base and centerfield. Don't expect HC to finish near the top of many PL defensive categories in 2018.
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 25, 2018 9:39:06 GMT -5
From the stats, some pieces of the puzzle are falling into place for this year's team. Pitching depth was concern #1. McGowan emerging as an iron man, with 28 innings pitched already and a low ERA, is huge. The same is true with Barlok filling the role of universal relief pitcher. If the back end of the rotation is able to get more consistent, this year's team should make the playoffs and perhaps have some success. They also need someone not named Masel, O'Neill or Russo to step up on offense. Dudnakis, Livingston and Rinaldi are contributing but this list needs to lengthen. The team is not in a bad place after losing 13 seniors but more new faces need to step up for 2018 to be a good season. There is solid rebuilding here at worst.
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 23, 2018 23:02:08 GMT -5
No, this is the team's travel weekend from hell and I'm with Mr. haze. If you can squeeze two wins out of this weekend, at the height of the insanity in a poorly constructed 2018 schedule, you're in great shape. Later on, when some other PL team is totally trashed from a long bus ride to West Point/ Worcester, you need to take care of business! It's hard to imagine a worse way to come into the PL season than two weeks of canceled games followed by a monumental bus trip to historically strong opponents. I blame the supposed grownups behind a crazy PL slate and what's worse, our AD/coaches scheduling every tuneup game for two weeks prior to league play on Massachusetts fields in Mid-March! It really gets no dumber than this.
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 20, 2018 14:42:49 GMT -5
It's early days but I'd love to hear about our baseball alums in the professional ranks. From what I know, Mike Ahmed, George Capen, Brendan King and Nick Lovullo are all active players in MLB organizations as of the opening of spring training. I believe Anthony Critelli will be returning to the independent Frontier League, joined by Justin Finan. Jon Escobar, Sean Gustin and Donnie Murray all played professionally last summer. It would be great to share updates on these young men as spring training breaks and their seasons get underway!
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 18, 2018 12:00:54 GMT -5
In a year when you plan to play a lot of true freshmen -- not the JC guys or redshirts the big schools bring in -- it's hard to tell how you'll do that year. I invite you to look at the 2014 stats for some of last year's heroes if you doubt this. The key to HC getting into "reload, not rebuild" mode is smoothing out the number of new recruits each year. It's subtle but you see D doing this. There won't be thirteen seniors on the team in 2021, like there were in 2017.
5-8 is a wonderful record after the spring trip. Some newcomers impressed and the returnees have stepped it up. I'm optimistic but not ready to call the team a favorite to repeat in the PL just yet. I would love to see that though.
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 18, 2018 11:22:09 GMT -5
Tim, I hear you but trust me, the players get a huge thrill out of being in the real NCAA playoffs when they win their league. Opening up against elite teams in actual baseball weather down south is a thrill as well. With a little adult judgement in scheduling, you can navigate what is always tough spring weather. Instead, we've had two consecutive sunny days, turf field available and games canceled because, surprise-surprise, it's still winter in Massachusetts in mid-March. There are plenty of D-1 teams within a bus ride of Worcester who are not in conference play yet and played this weekend. The HC schedule should have been games in PA/MD/DE this weekend and NJ/NY/CT next. This has been done in the recent past. BC and Northeastern in mid-march? Are you kidding me? Just a dumb move by Pine, Coach D. or whoever.
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Post by actualfactual on Mar 17, 2018 16:45:17 GMT -5
When HC spends $3 million of donor money on turf for Fitton Field someday, it will make much LESS difference than the proponents claim. It's still WINTER in the Worcester area until early April.
Northeastern has turf. Was today's game played, in dry, sunny weather? No, it was cancelled. The high in Boston today was 37 degrees. Baseball is an exciting but leisurely-paced sport meant for warm weather. You don't play in the winter. Soggy/icy fields actually get playable fairly quickly when it warms up. I said when!
Don't bother scheduling BC around St. Patrick's day. It's a nice marketing idea but the game has been played only one year out of the last four.
You have to schedule New England college baseball like the big league teams did in the day of train travel. The weekend after the Southern spring trip needs to be an away series in the mid-Atlantic. By the last week in March, you can play around NYC or Southern CT. After that, you can get going on Patriot League play with New England rivals sprinkled in.
Northeastern teams can compete in college baseball if the AD's are realistic with scheduling. Global warming is averaging just a fraction of a temperature degree per year. We didn't have little league tryouts where I grew up, north of Boston, until very early April. It was warm enough by then and the (grass) fields were good enough. That's when you schedule local games. BC on March 14 and Northeastern on March 17/18 wasn't a stretch; it was a joke!
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Post by actualfactual on Feb 19, 2018 17:03:57 GMT -5
Good question; I don't know. At a smaller D-1 program, the two kinds of pitchers you can rarely recruit are accomplished lefties and big righties who throw 95 coming in. However, Hedaya is a true Sophomore, probably 19. He's listed at 185, which for 6'2" is probably below his potential athletic weight. Wherever his fastball sits now, it can probably be 3 mph higher as a Senior if he has talent and puts in the work on mechanics and conditioning.
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Post by actualfactual on Feb 19, 2018 16:40:29 GMT -5
McGowan was in the starting rotation as a Freshman but faltered a bit last year. Good to see his solid effort. Cronin is thought to have good stuff and the team is counting on him to blossom. Again, nice to see his early results. Hedaya is the sleeper. A person whose baseball opinions I respect more than anybody's says that Zane has great stuff but it was not quite harnessed last season. In fairness, he saw very little action in 2017, with five Seniors pitching regularly. Anyway, my man says Hedaya is a pro prospect if he develops good control. That would be a big deal for this team, where both the ace and closer role seem up for grabs!
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Post by actualfactual on Feb 17, 2018 11:55:38 GMT -5
You have to give Coach D. credit for unsurpassed passion, hard work and effective national recruiting. HC has been getting good players other schools ignored as well as many who had bids from the Ivy League or service academies. No JuCo transfers and no redshirts will always be more of an issue than scholarships; when a top-25 team has a bad year, they turn over half the roster! So maybe 1952 will be the one-and-only CWS win but the Crusaders can field a fine team of real student-athletes and knock off the big boys occasionally. It's baseball!
Speaking of no red-shirting, Holy Cross GRADUATE Ben White is the named starter for Tulane tonight, their second game of the season against Wright St. He'd probably be taking the hill for the Crusaders tonight or tomorrow if Holy Cross were, say, UConn or St. John's.
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Post by actualfactual on Feb 17, 2018 7:04:13 GMT -5
Luck played a role, as it usually does in an upset. You don't want to count on getting line-drive double plays to end an inning or scoring three runs on only seven baserunners. HC played a clean game with clutch contributions by new faces, though. That's an encouraging way for a young team to start the season.
In the last five years, a league championship and runner-up. Wins against Mississippi State, Long Beach, USC, Nebraska and Houston. A good field, good indoor facilities now and a tenured coach. Four alums playing for MLB organizations. Sounds like a real program!
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Post by actualfactual on Dec 30, 2017 21:45:12 GMT -5
It's an impressive group on paper. It's the right number, also, with fifteen coming in replacing thirteen graduates. History shows that fifteen will end up being more like ten in four years. The baseball team's recruiting cohorts have been unbalanced, causing performance to be cyclical. It's no coincidence that we won last year and were finalists four years earlier, with many seniors both times. The 2018 team size is below minimum, so D will be able to bring more guys on next year than the few graduating. Having about ten new recruits each year is optimal and that balance is important for programs like HC which don't allow redshirting and don't take JC transfers in. Looks to me like Coach D gets this and is trying to modulate the recruiting classes toward more even numbers each year.
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Post by actualfactual on Dec 15, 2017 7:20:53 GMT -5
This may sound weird but there would be leverage in the HC baseball program if someone endowed assistant coaching positions. Coach D works very hard on recruiting but Jeff Kane played an important role in getting a lot of the seniors on last year's team into the program. Where's Kane now? At Navy, making quite a bit more $$ than he was at HC from what I understand. Baseball has had quite a bit of assistant turnover in the last few years and low salaries are the main cause. The current freshman class is important because its a large group and it needs to eventually replace a number of key players. We hope for the best but my concern is that the recruiting skill in the program is not what it was when assistants Kane and Rakowski were on board.
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Post by actualfactual on Dec 10, 2017 9:28:27 GMT -5
Women are not at fault here and Title IX is what it is. I was commenting on what I see as lack of resolve by male alums. If somebody said, "I'll give my usual hundred bucks this year but it would be a hundred thousand if you start a baseball scholarship fund," it would be interesting to see HC make that call! All I'm saying.
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Post by actualfactual on Dec 9, 2017 21:37:42 GMT -5
As generous as the HC alumni base is, I am surprised you all don't exert more pressure on the school concerning athletic scholarships. If someone donated cash for baseball scholarships only, the pushback would be "Title IX." If you then say, "okay, I'm not writing the check." you may be surprised at how quickly raising cash for an offsetting women's track scholarship would become a development office priority. Although the college is 50/50 coed today, the alumni base is not. Are you GUYS being too nice???
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Post by actualfactual on Dec 9, 2017 21:02:23 GMT -5
I hope Holy Cross is still the Crusaders in 2018, but that's being beaten to death in another thread here.
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 28, 2017 17:00:27 GMT -5
The team played a weekend set against Furman in 2016. Nice school in a nice town but it's probably too early to go back. Georgia Southern was a spring trip opponent in 2014. No players on the team now were players then. Mercer has not been an opponent that recently. If we've played either Houston or Oklahoma it was long ago, I think. Those teams will be a tremendous challenge given the loss of a big senior class but it's consistent with Coach D's strategy to face ranked or possibly ranked teams right out of the gate. When you look at HC's PL record under D, facing very tough opponents early seems to have paid dividends. It's tough to get used to the idea that what starts like 3-12 can turn into a good season but that has happened more than once.
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 24, 2017 17:44:20 GMT -5
Rowley was MVP of the 2013 Patriot League tournament. HC was favored to win that year. One reason we did not was the complete game Rowley threw to start the series. I believe it was 150+ pitches! (Check me on that if someone knows differently.) Anyway, I thought the theory at the time was that he'd never pitch again, as a Senior heading to military active duty, so there was no reason to leave any gas in the tank. Apparently that was not a great theory! Maybe Rowley's ankle wasn't bleeding that day but it was a gritty performance. Safe to say he is dedicated and driven.
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 21, 2017 7:54:00 GMT -5
I am not a Pine hater by any means but if on-field performance doesn't eventually catch up with improvements in facilities, PR and administration, what's the point? Until there are a handful of obvious examples of programs turning around under coaches hired by Pine, the jury is out. He deserves more time but the corks should stay in the champagne bottles for now.
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 21, 2017 7:21:24 GMT -5
I'd argue that Pine can most directly control fund raising, PR, administration and head coach hiring. I see improvement in the first three areas. For my own understanding, as a newbie and non-follower of the less popular sports, are there real examples where Pine has hired new coaches who seem to be building winning programs? I get that he's only been around for three seasons in some cases, which may make it hard to see what I am asking about.
Championships can be a good shorthand measure but there will always be situations where your heavily favored team is upset, or the opposite, like Men's Basketball in 2016. The school would be in a good place if most programs were along the lines of Baseball, which is in the conversation for the league championship more years than not. As I said, it's not always easy to see this. Baseball's strategy to compete in the Patriot League is to play a tough non-league schedule, so our successful coach has a career losing record. That might get Coach D fired at some schools but it's the right approach at HC. Do people see programs rebuilding like Baseball was a few years ago, under coaches hired by Pine?
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 15, 2017 12:39:24 GMT -5
I worry that Pine is more of a development and public relations guy. There's an important place for those skills in the AD job but once you have raised money and improved the facilities, you need to win. It's time for Pine to put the right coaches in place to turn around MANY of the teams and to do what's necessary to support those turnarounds. Luth is almost finished. The football stadium seats 9x the student body. The baseball field used to host a pro team. I imagine the DCU center needs some good "content," which high-level college hockey or basketball would provide. Facilities are not holding back most of the other sports, at least in the context of the Patriot League. Alumni (which I am not) have a right to expect success starting very soon, with or without Pine.
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 3, 2017 19:42:10 GMT -5
Father Burroughs spoke at commencement, of course. He mentioned every aspect of college life I could think of, except athletics. I don't think he considers any sports program at HC important enough to fire any coach in mid-season. As obvious as Gilmore's shortcomings may be, it would not shock me to see him ride out his contract.
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Post by actualfactual on Oct 3, 2017 19:25:05 GMT -5
BK was limited to 3 innings each outing because he already threw 80 for HC. He alternated between starting and being second man in. The Cubs are looking at him primarily as a starter. Cubs bloggers see him starting the season next year in either Eugene (short A, like Lowell Spinners) or possibly South Bend (A.) Depends on how he looks in minor league spring training next year.
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