Can someone in the know give a summary of this year's team and prospects for the future? I saw we had a few guys drafted last year. Are we young? Are still relying on JC talent. Have we gotten any top end talent? Is coach JJ the guy that can make us competitive in the ACC? Is this a rebuilding year?
Pitt Baseball
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Never say never, but very difficult given that we are a North East baseball school.
The issue that I have always had with Jordano is that he is a good recruiter and speaker, but not very detail oriented, involved in strategy, or drilling to maintain fundamentals and situational awareness.
Unless the NCAA changes the baseball season to one that is more, well, sane, it's going to be hard for any northern school to be a consistently good program. There have been teams that have had good stretches, for instance St. John's had a pretty good run when we were in the Big East, but no one has been able to do it year after year. Playing half of the season when no one with a brain thinks that baseball should be played is always going to hold the northeast schools back. And frankly the southern and western schools are perfectly fine with that.
The National Championship series should be played the week before the College Football season starts which would do 2 things:
1. Allow the season to start 6-7 weeks later which allows for cold-weather teams to be on a more level playing field for recruiting
2. Fills a summer college sports void allowing for the growth of the sport.....especially in the NE and midwest.
The NCAA should not cater to the MLB Draft or wooden bat leagues. If players decide against going to college because of this, so be it. I doubt many make that decision.
So baseball players would get zero break from school? How about the kids with summer jobs or internships?
The problem isn't that kids wouldn't choose college because of that, the problem is that if the season did go to the end of August that way too many kids would get drafted in mid-June and sign with the teams that drafted them, leaving the college teams high and dry. For instance last season, TJ Zeuch gets drafted and signs his pro contract 2/3 of the way through the Pitt season. Then what does Pitt do? What if you are a good team and a couple of your top pitchers and a couple more of your top position players get drafted and sign pro contracts? All the sudden your team goes from a national championship contender to a conference cellar dweller in the space of a week or so.
It'd also kill the wooden bat summer leagues. This would presumably hurt players' later transition to wooden bat play in the minors and hamper scouts' ability to gauge how players are going to adapt to wooden bats. It'd also hurt those towns where wooden bat leagues have long been established.
Yeah, it would, but the wooden bat leagues aren't and shouldn't be the NCAA's concern. Similarly though, college baseball is not MLB's concern. In fact with pitchers every team in MLB would like to draft and sign them earlier so that the college coaches have less of a chance to screw them up.
However, if wooden bats were a concern of college baseball they could simply pass a rule outlawing anything other than wooden bats. It won't happen, and the manufacturers have done a pretty good job of making the bats that the colleges use react more like wooden bats so I don't even know how necessary that it is. The bats in college baseball now are significantly "tuned down" from how they used to be.
To answer your question, the team is young. At least 2 freshmen starting every game due to last years draft. Six panthers were drafted but 2 that they were not expecting to lose when they were drafted higher than expected. Still the team is 6-9 in the ACC tied with Duke, heading into this weekends home series with Miami. Jordano has done a great job under the circumstances (northern team in the ACC) because he has had a ton of guys drafted in recent years. So despite playing in the best baseball conference in college, they are holding their own and putting kids in a position to go pro.
Took game 1 of a double header against da U 10-2!! Twitter account said it was our first ever win over Miami, can't be right can it?
It is absolutely correct, Miami had a 15-0 baseball record against us coming into today. Their long string of NCAA baseball tourney appearances (30 or 40 yrs in a row?) appears to be in serious jeopardy. We are both 7-9 in the ACC as we get ready for game #2.
10 runs in game 1 and 2 singles in game 2, we need to get the win tomorrow to have the tie-breaker which could be important later down the line. We already have the tie-breaker over Duke and VT, others close to us in the standings.
I said this last season and I'll say it again. If the Pitt coaches didn't realize that Charles LeBlanc was draft eligible last season then someone, if not all of them, should have been fired. I mean good lord, I knew it and even posted about it on this board half way or so through the season after he really broke out.
Not being prepared for college baseball players getting drafted and signing a pro contract is a sad indictment of a college coaching staff. It's their JOB to prepare for if guys get drafted, and indeed they ought to be thinking that if they do a good job coaching guys they coach will leave.
While, I agree that it would suck for a team to lose their best players 2/3 of the way through a season, that is a tradeoff I think you make to allow the game to be played through a college sports dead period and to grow the game in the NE and Midwest. I am sure BTN, ACCN, P12N, and SECN would love that programming in June, July, and August.
Also, with July 1 starting a new academic year, perhaps a rule can be passed to allow incoming frosh to be immediately eligible on July 1......but still be considered frosh when the season opens the following April.
Nothing about college baseball is ideal, but if you allow wooden bats, start the season later, and allow incoming frosh to start the season on July 1, I think a lot of positives would come out of that.
not good news with Coastal leading (by far) UNC coming in next weekend. Did you see parts of the game on video goalieman? Several times I've watched Pitt and I swear the uni tops look black, is that right? Seems many games I've watched, looks like we're wearing black quite often? Or is our blue just that very very dark?
I can't tell whether they are black or a dark navy blue but they do look black on some of the videos.
they sure as heck look black on the internet feeds I've been seeing. I know hoops has worn black on rare occasions, so football has resisted, but baseball looks like they like the black, that shade they're wearing looks way too dark to even be a dark navy blue. Not that I'm against black, but I'm old school and much prefer the school colors
They look very dark in person too. Not quite black but almost like the late 90s dark blue
they sure as heck
look black on the internet feeds I've been seeing. I know hoops has worn black on rare occasions, so football has resisted, but baseball looks like they like the black, that shade they're wearing looks way too dark to even be a dark navy blue. Not that I'm against black, but I'm old school and much prefer the school colors
Here are the jerseys. Are you saying these are black or are you talking about a different jersey?
http://www.pittsburghpanthers.com/view.gal?id=205185
http://www.pittsburghpanthers.com/view.gal?id=205185
They give the slightest hint of a very dark blue in these photos, but in the feeds from WatchESPN, they certainly show no sign of blue at all, and look distinctively black. Do we have regular blue jerseys, or are these our normal blue jerseys or are these our black jerseys? Maybe I'm too old and am color-blind? Is there a comparison photo of our blue and black jerseys?
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