Those days are over now - folks spent money to build fancy facilities for baseball so they expect immediate results
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Our players went from living in a old home with a leaky roof and torn up carpet under the left field bleachers to a mega mansion new construction in River Oaks. They have every piece of technology available to study spin rate, exit velocity and have every video game system, golf simulator, etc. at their disposal now. Do these kinds of things produce immediate results? Heck no. You canât buy your way into Omaha. College baseball is a different animal.
Some of the greatest players of all time grew up using paper gloves and hit bottle caps with sticks. But baseball is changing: spin rate, launch angle, exit velo and WAR are the stats that matter at the MLB level and college baseball has followed the trend. Guys like Frank Anderson cut through that noise and keep the game simple: throw strikes and hit the ball.
Cougar Baseball needs to get back to the basics and be a hard nosed gritty program with something to prove and stop acting like something we arent.
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And while I am on these rants, my young nephew is a select ball player in Ft. Worth and 8 years old. Yes 8 years old. I have seen snippet videos of his private lessons. It is 30 minutes of hitting one ball off his $400 bat then running over to a TV screen to see the stats on launch angle, exit velo and distance then running back to hit another, repeat, repeat, repeat. And let me tell you, the kid canât hit it out of the infield off the dad pitcher in little league. Love the kid, but its the truth. This trend is not going away.
Our guys have had this technology now for two offseasons and it just produced the worst hitting season in Cougar history. Was this just a one-off season at the plate? Did the technology fail us? I guess we will find out next season. There are no more excuses. We allegedly have everything we need now.