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FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - nolemanb - 06-04-2012

First, congrats on winning your regional. Your team is playing extremely good baseball and at the best time. I’ve always respected your program and rememebr growing up watching FSU and Stanford face off early in the regular season and who can forget the 99' 13 inning game? A rivalry renewed. Hoping for a good series. I think you’ll find that our baseball following is very knowledgeable and respectful for the most part. Like all teams, we all have our “bad apples”. I also think you’ll find that playing in Dick Howser Stadium is a great atmosphere for college baseball.

A little bit about our team: FSU entered the season with low expectations for a program that has made 20 CWS appearances and has hosted a ridiculous amount of regionals. We lost our starting rotation, set up man, closer, catcher, CF and LF. Many of our fans, me included, didn’t think we would host a regional, much less be a national seed. We received a of extremely large proportions boost when OF James Ramsey returned for his sr. year. James won ACC POY this year. FSU and our longtime assistant/pitching coach “parted ways” at the end of last season and we brought in Mike Bell, former FSU pitcher and Oklahoma pitching coach. No one expected he would be able to do much with a depleted pitching staff and without a full year to recruit his own players. Bell immediately went with the “youth movement”, starting the season with three freshmen in the starting rotation. Peter Miller, was our Sunday guy, but was inconsistent at times and also had some arm trouble and has not been able to bounce back after taking some time to rest his arm and has not made his way back into our starting rotation. Fast forward to today, and one of the biggest surprises, if not the biggest, this year has been our pitching and overall record. Our pitching is by no means dominant, but we have won way more games with our pitching than anyone expected. Under our old pitching coach, we rarely would win games with our pitching. We could always rely on our hitting to win games, this year; we haven’t been able to do that. This year, FSU (46-15) had a very good regular season and then completely disappeared in the ACC Tournament going 0-3 after winning more regular season ACC games (24) in the history of the conference. What was surprising about the three losses - during the regular season we were 3-0 vs GT and 3-0 vs UVA and then lose to them both in the ACC Tournament. While we lost 2 of 3 to CU @ CU, we were winning all game and then gave up a 3 run walk off hr to lose. We’ve only lost one weekend series all year (1-2 @ Clemson). We have two good pitchers (both freshmen) in our starting rotation, but beyond the two freshmen, we have struggled to find a third starter all year; however, it appears that Junior Scott Sitz has found somewhat of a grove and has been pitching well in the 3rd spot his last 3 outings. So there is hope for our #3. He pitched 4 2/3 in our regional giving up 1 run and a career high in strikeouts. Our ace is freshmen LHP Brandon Leibrandt. He is 7-2 on the year and has a 2.65 ERA. His dad is a former major league pitcher for the Royals and Atlanta Braves. He has been our ace from day one. He has great composure for a freshmen and has three main pitches; fastball, changup and slider. If he has his changup working, he can be pretty tough. He won’t strikeout a lot of batters, but spots his pitches really well and typically will make hitters hit his pitch. He can only give us consistently 5- 6 innings, but has proven that he can go 7 if his pitch count is down (He just went 8 innings in our regional allowing 0 runs, 3 hits and 10k's while walking none). Our #2 is a lot like our #1, except he throws from the right side. Freshmen Mike Compton is 11-2 on the year with an ERA of 2.78. Like our ace, he won’t go 8 or 9, but he can give us a solid 5, maybe 6 innings. Neither pitcher is “dominant”, but they live (and die) by spotting their pitches and getting hitters to hit their pitches (when successful). Since none of our pitchers can go very deep in the game, this eats at our bull pen which is not very deep. I keep hearing people talk about how good our pen is, but really, we only have two-three guys I trust out of the pen and both are RHP (our third RHP out of the pen is a fr., Luke Weaver, who has great stuff and I believe he will be in the starting rotation next season, but he is also very inconsistent). We don’t have one LHP out of the pen who we can count on. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a few who can come in and get outs, just not likely against better competition. We have a very good RHP set up man (Gage Smith) who throws from the side and can give us 2 innings per appearance and a very good RHP closer (Robert Benincasa). Benincasa is 4-1 on the year with 14 saves and a 1.29 ERA. He did not start the season as our closer, but he has proved to be a very good college closer (minus the 3 run walk off homer he gave up in the ACC Tournament). Offensively, we have been a disappointment. Hard to say when you have the top two hitters in the ACC in Boyd (.390 BA) and Ramsey (.385 BA), but beyond our 1-4 hitters, and occasionally our #6 hitter and shortstop Gonzales (who many would like to see be moved to the 5 hole), the bottom of our order has not been able to consistently get things together to be much of a threat. They can hit, and there have been some games when the bottom half of the lineup has carried us, but not consistently. We leave a great number of men on base, something, if you venture over to warchant.com (sectionb), you’ll hear many of the fans complain about; however, we did a pretty good job in the Regional getting the clutch hit when we needed to. We don’t hit a lot of HR’s and we won’t steal a lot of bases. We can do both, just not a great deal.  We do play pretty good defense. All around the infield, we have very solid players who have been playing together for 3-4 years. Our defense has proven to be a value to our team.

We really rebounded well after a let down in the ACC tournament and pitched extremely well in the regional allowing only 4 runs in three games (1 run came in the 9th in a blowout). We also had timely hitting which was refreshing to see. Beating Appel will be VERY tough. Our best bet is that our ace pitches well and keeps us in the game to srike late. Beyond game 1, I think game 2 and 3 are toss ups. I would def. give Stanford the advantage in game 1. 

Good luck this weekend!

Go Noles!

Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - BigEasyCard - 06-04-2012

Thank you for stopping by to brief us on Seminole baseball.  It should be a really good series.

I'm tempted to drive down the road from the Big Easy and try to catch one or more games.  Do you have any advice on how best to obtain tickets?

P.S. Do they display the lyrics to "O Canada" or do we need to bring our own cheat sheet?

Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - fullmetal - 06-04-2012

Piscotty was tabbed to go 20th in a recent SI.com MLB mock draft.  Link here.

Quote:1: Houston Astros -- Mark Appel, RHP, Stanford

Appel has a terrific arm, is close to the majors and is a potential staff ace. Recent high schoolers picked "1-1" have fared poorly (infielders Matt Bush in 2004 and Tim Beckham in 2008, for instance) and prepsters usually take awhile to reach the big leagues. Appel is Houston's safest option.

...

20: San Francsico Giants -- Stephen Piscotty, OF/3B/1B, Stanford

Currently ranked 13th in home runs in the NL, the Giants are desperate for power. Nearby Stanford may provide at least part of the answer in Piscotty, a slugger whose easy, sweeping power swing would fit comfortably in the middle of the San Francisco lineup.


Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - BobK - 06-04-2012

Appel not in the top 6  >:(

Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - fullmetal - 06-04-2012

Nope.  The pundits didn't count on Appel declining a $6 mil contract from the Astros.  (That's what I heard anyway.)  I guess every other team went ahead and stuck to their guns...

Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - nolemanb - 06-07-2012

(06-04-2012, 12:52 PM)BigEasyCard link Wrote:Thank you for stopping by to brief us on Seminole baseball.  It should be a really good series.

I'm tempted to drive down the road from the Big Easy and try to catch one or more games.  Do you have any advice on how best to obtain tickets?

P.S. Do they display the lyrics to "O Canada" or do we need to bring our own cheat sheet?

Sorry, I've been out of town. You've probably already figured out ticket; however, if you haven't already, you can purchase tickets by going to www.seminoles.com or by calling the Seminoles ticket office at 850-644-1830. No lyrics are posted so you'll need a cheat sheet :)

Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - nolemanb - 06-07-2012

(06-04-2012, 03:29 PM)garvin link Wrote:Hey, nolemanb, thanks for the extremely interesting rundown on your team. I'm a lot closer to Tallahassee than to Stanford (a lot closer, in Miami) so I've followed the team mostly by newspaper rather than actually seeing the games. Hopefully somebody like wbbfans 1 and 2 or others who attend games regularly will stop by with a more detailed briefing, but here's just a quickie:

We don't a lot of power, but we hit well for average, over .290 as a team. Oddly, though, this does not translate into good run production -- we score only about 3.3 times a game. Most exciting guy to watch at the plate is outfielder Austin Wilson, a combination of speed (seven for seven stealing bases) and power (nine homers to lead the team.)

Another major offensive weapon who's been misfiring lately is outfielder Stephen Piscotty. Though he's still hitting around .320, that average has come down significantly since he moved into the pitching rotation as the No. 3 starter. Distracted? Or coincidence? Dunno. He's started four games, pitched pretty well in three of them -- and though he got roughed a bit in our regional final against Pepperdine (11 hits in 6.1 innings) he still got the win.

Piscotty got a shot as a starter when our No. 2 guy, Brett Mooneyham, started to go off the rails a bit toward the end of the season. Mooneyham's ERA was under 3 for much of the season but has soared over 4 recently. He got knocked out in the third inning in our Saturday regional game. This is worrisome.

No worries at all about our No. 1 guy, Mark Appel, who is rumored to be the major league draft's No. 1 guy as well. A righthander, he's 10-1 with a 2.27 ERA. Opponents hit just .210 off him, and he's also durable: five complete games in 15 starts, pretty good in this pitch-count-concious world.

A few years back when our schools played in a regional, a Florida State alum in my office came over and offered a bet in which the loser had to wear the winner's cap for a week. The result was a total fashion humiliation for her. She stopped by today to chat about the game, but I noticed she didn't offer to bet. I sure hope that turns out to have been a wise decision on her part.

Likewise - thanks for the post.

Re: FSU Fan here - FSU Baseball - yvonne - 06-10-2012

Congrats, Nolemanb. Clearly, the better team won. Good luck in the CWS.

Gawd, what a face-plant - Redrum - 06-11-2012

We should fire Johnny Dawkins immediately.