Rippee Writes: A Friday half scoop
Ole Miss loses to Florida, Grill corner with Greg
What’s up friends. Happy Good Friday. No traditional newsletter today as time got away from me recording the podcast this morning and we’ll save up some notes and thoughts for when Ole Miss’ series ends. With that said, we do have the aforementioned new podcast out. The People’s Holiday returned as Greg and I answered your Mailbag questions that included a grilling tips segment at the end that is well worth your time. Check it out on Apple or Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Again, we will be back on Monday with a full recap, but here’s a couple of quick thoughts from the game last night.
Ole Miss played horrifically defensively. They officially had “two” errors in the box score but truthfully had four or five. Three of the four runs Florida scored can be traced back to those errors. It’s one game. It’s baseball. But Ole Miss has had far too many of these ‘kick the ball around like the Bad News Bears’ games sprinkled in this year. If you do that on the wrong day in June, your season is over.
Ole Miss has scored a total of two runs over 18 innings against the three “Friday night” arms it has faced. Last night, Florida's actual ace came in in relief (more on that later) so it’s really one run, but two in the technical sense. That’s concerning and a product of their habit of not stringing quality at bats together. You can get away with the inconsistency in approach and AB quality against middling arms, but against the elite arms in this league, it will get you beat. Yes, everyone has a tough time scoring runs against opposing aces, but the Rebels have yet to prove they can scrape four runs together against an ace to give Gunnar Hoglund a cushion — and it’s not like they’ve faced the roughest the SEC has to offer. I’d argue they’ve faced two middle-to-upper tier staffs and one bottom tier staff. This is worth monitoring.
I got several texts last night about Florida’s strategy of using an “opener” last night hailing Kevin O’Sullivan as the smartest man since whoever discovered fire. Yes, it worked. Credit to him. But he didn’t use Franco Aleman like a traditional opener. Aleman faced 15 hitters. He essentially went through the lineup twice and then gave the baseball to ace Tommy Mace in the fifth. Mace did his job and tossed five innings of one-hit baseball and won the game. Good for him and good for Florida, but I still don’t see this as some genius and revolutionary concept. What’s the difference between what transpired and Mace going five to start and Aleman finishing the game in dominant relief? Maybe it helped Mace to have the mindset of “okay, if I go five innings this thing is actually over and I don’t have to sweat out my bullpen behind me.” But if Aleman had sucked and Mace had to come in in the second inning down 5-1, is O’Sullivan a genius now? I’d rather have my ace start the game in that case, of course. Look, it was inventive and worked. But I don’t think you’re going to see Ole Miss’ remaining seven opponents implement this as some secret sauce to beat them. The Rebels contributed to their demise by sucking at the plate. Again, effective but not revolutionary. Both can be true and I’d like to see how it works today before declaring O’Sullivan a savant.
Anyway, that is all from may. Many more thoughts to come on Sunday’s pod and next week’s newsletter. Have a safe and happy Easter. Talk soon.