After having read this morning's Advocate article on LSU baseball, I have a question. Smoke moaned about the lack of home run hitters and he stated that LSU wouldn't be playing gorilla ball. Why not? Didn't gorilla ball contribute greatly to some of our National Championships? Why did we stop recruiting HR hitters? Don't give me that thing about the change in bats because other teams seem to have found HR hitters. Did our coaching staff mis-read the impact of the smaller bats? I don't understand why we went from the best HR hitting team in the history of college baseball to one of the worst HR hitting teams in the SEC. There have to be some baseball experts out there that can shed some light on this.
My two cents is that the bats do make a difference as far as a whole team hitting home runs. With the new rules, it's hard to have more than three or four home run guys. The new bats require more bat speed to put enough carry on the ball. Because of that, the only guys that really can do that are the types that play DH, 1B, 3B and outfielders. You're no longer going to have a Brandon Larson at SS or Mike Fontenot at 2B hitting a bunch of homers. My opinion is that LSU didn't have a stable first basemen last year. The outfield didn't really produce a lot of homers either. That was why other teams had more HRs. The Tigers were just simply weaker at those positions in 2002. Hopefully this year will bring more power and in turn more wins.
My thoughts... I agree with the post that the bats had the effect of limiting power hitters to those who are truly hitters and not allowing everybody to be able to jack the ball out. Keep in mind that LSU has had top recruiting classes in baseball get destroyed by the minor league draft the last couple of years. Some top talent signed and then never made it to campus. Put our coaches in a big whole to get bodies to fill out a roster. I think that will change with the players we have now and that these articles are going to be discussing. Plus, a lot of the guys last year expected to make an impact early took much longer to develop. Give them the off season to develop physically and mentally and we should be improved at the plate this year....
