re: Baseball - Pre-Season Assumptions vs Reality

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Remember how we were all bragging before the season about our pitchers and the amount of left handed arms?

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We have a good pitching staff. Like many said preseason, it's better top to bottom than it was last year. We just don't have someone like Paul Skenes this year. Our team ERA is marginally better this year and that's without Paul Skenes. People forget that until our postseason run, everyone in the universe said we didn't have the pitching to get through. We had no consistently reliable starter after Skenes the entire regular season and our two best bullpen arms (Shores and Edwards) got hurt early on in SEC play. Hurd was bad most of the year. Cooper, Ack, and Herring didn't come on until late. The rest of the staff had 7+ ERAs. This year we have 8 arms that have sub 5 ERAs in the bullpen, with 4 who are sub 4 ERA guys. We also have two good starters in the rotation. Very few teams in the country have a reliable Sunday starter.

The problem is no one expected our offense to struggle as much as it has. They thought our pitching with what they expected our offense to be would produce a very good baseball team, which we would have been with even an average offense. But we're 10th in the SEC in BA, 9th in OBP, and 13th in runs scored. To overcome that, like Arkansas has, we'd need to have THE best staff in the conference/country.

Here's some pitching stats just for reference, and remember Paul Skenes is included in the 2023 totals

Team ERA
2023: 4.47
2024: 4.45
removing Skenes: 5.16

Ks/9 innings
2023: 11.73
2024: 11.43
removing Skenes: 10.95

BB/9 inning
2023: 3.98
2024: 4.21
removing Skenes: 4.61

OPP Ba
2023: .225
2024: .234
removing Skenes: .239