Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Interesting Starts

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The first releases for the year of my rating system, the ISR's, and my imitation of the NCAA's rating system, the pseudo-RPI's, came out earlier this week. I realize that virtually everybody reading this close to its publication date is already familiar with at least the RPI's and probably both systems, but I wanted to throw that plug in for the folks who get here through Google or whatever later. I'm not going to read you the whole list, but my research project for the week flubbed (it turns out that I can't find any evidence that the warm-weather teams are starting earlier and earlier each year, although that was my instinct), so I did have a few interesting starts I wanted to point out. Argue if you want to, since my mailbox has been a lot quieter the last couple of years, but remember that it's the first week of March, and I'm not claiming any of this will last through the season. Still, these games count, too, and there may be a few nuggets to be gained from looking around the country.

• Cal State Fullerton is for real. In contrast to their usual relatively slow starts, they swept through Stanford to open the season and haven't slowed down at all against a reasonable schedule since then, including wins over Texas and Tulane, with only a loss against UNLV to mar perfection.
• Arizona State is 24-1. Most of their competition is either unproven or proven actually bad, but there's a series win over Long Beach State in there, and enough of the other victims are likely to prove good enough that the Sun Devils have to be considered a legitimate threat to win the Pac 10.
• Baylor has been looking pretty good so far, sweeping Southern California again and taking two of three from an otherwise strong-looking Arizona team.
• UC Riverside hasn't been a giant-killer, but they do have wins over Pepperdine, UCLA, and Oregon State, all of whom will probably be in the top 50 at the end of the year. Riverside is 14-3 overall.
• A couple of usual non-contenders got off to great winning streaks to start the season: North Carolina-Greensboro is up to 12-0 now, while Alabama-Birmingham started off 13-0 before finally dropping one to Mississippi State Tuesday night. It's too early to declare either a conference favorite due to lack of competition, but beating bad teams always has to be considered an improvement over losing to bad teams.

• Whoever put together Florida State's schedule should be really embarrassed. Other than a series win over Stanford, the Seminoles have run to 14-1 against a really weak string of teams with whom they have no long-term rivalry to excuse the scheduling. One weekend against Evansville is understandable to work out the kinks; a month of junk food will give you trouble the next time you get a steak. This weekend they probably improve the fare with Florida, who has gotten to 11-1 using the same techniques.
• Early season troubles have become almost routine at Louisiana State, who is sitting at 7-6, including a series sweep by Kansas.
• Other than demolishing Auburn on a Tuesday night, South Alabama has shown no signs that this is the year they escape from regional obscurity, being swept by Southern California on the way to a 5-6 record.
• Cal-Irvine, expected by many to be the third-best Big West team, is 4-11. They've played a bit better than that, suffering from a bit of bad luck along the way, but they're unlikely to contend for the postseason at this point.
• Hawaii-Hilo has already managed to lose 27 games. I've talked before about their scheduling problems, and a lot of those losses have come against what looks like good competition, but they're still struggling.
• Finally, it's worth noting that the SEC as a whole has not been all that good when seriously challenged. Florida's cupcakes were referred to earlier -- their only good win to date was a split with Miami. Arkansas and Tennessee have one loss between them, but zero quality wins. LSU managed only a split with Houston, was swept by Kansas, and lost two of three to Long Beach. Alabama gave Rice its only loss but lost to Houston. Auburn did manage two of three against Clemson, who also split with South Carolina. Georgia managed to lose two of three to Gardner-Webb, in their first year in Division I. It's possible that one of the unchallenged teams like Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, or Mississippi State could rise to the top, or one of the others could overcome a slow start, but nobody's taking charge just yet, and the league is running out of meaningful non-conference games.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

I had some hopes for Jeremy Sowers' future with the coaching change, but it looks like those may have been unfounded, so I'll have to go back to just hoping his arm holds together somehow.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Interesting Starts

About the author, Boyd Nation