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College | Story | 3/16/2017

Weekend Preview: Week 5

Patrick Ebert

Jheremy Brown

Mike Rooney

Photo: Texas Athletics

Perfect Game Top 25 | PG/Rawlings Player/Pitcher of the Week
College Spotlight: Week 4 | College Spotlight: Stanford/Rice | PG College Player Database

After conference play opened in the ACC last weekend it continues to start over most of the rest of the country this weekend with significant matchups between SEC, Big 12 and Pac-12 foes. In particular the weekend will have three series that will pit fellow Top 25-ranked opponents against one another as No. 8 Texas Tech travels to Austin to play No. 21 Texas, No. 14 Ole Miss will host No. 15 Vanderbilt in Oxford while Virginia faces another stiff ACC test as they travel to No. 11 Clemson.

Below we analyze the dominant Texas pitching staff as well as the potent Virginia offense while also looking at some other top stories in the realm of college baseball.

LakePoint will once again be in action as part of Perfect Game's Spring Swing with games from the junior college level. Follow all of the action from Emerson, Ga. in the Scout Notes from PG Park at LakePoint blog.

Stay tuned to Perfect Game throughout the weekend as Brian Sakowski intends to be on hand for J.B. Bukauskas and 12th-ranked Tar Heels on Friday night in Atlanta against Georgia Tech among other first-hand scouting reports from across the country.

Top 25 in Action

Rk.	Team	Opponent	Location
1	Louisville	home vs. Boston College	Louisville, KY
2	Texas Christian	home vs. Kansas	Fort Worth, TX
3	Florida State	at Virginia Tech	Blacksburg, VA
4	Oregon State	at Arizona State	Tempe, AZ
5	Florida	at Auburn	Auburn, AL
6	Louisiana State	home vs. Georgia	Baton Rouge, LA
7	South Carolina	at Tennessee	Knoxville, TN
8	Texas Tech	at No. 21 Texas	Austin, TX
9	Louisiana	home vs. Appalachian State	Lafayette, LA
10	East Carolina	home vs. Mercer	Greensville, NC
11	Clemson	home vs. No. 25 Virginia	Clemson, SC
12	North Carolina	at Georgia Tech	Atlanta, GA
13	Stanford	does not play	NA
14	Ole Miss	home vs. No. 15 Vanderbilt	Oxford, MS
15	Vanderbilt	at No. 14 Ole Miss	Oxford, MS
16	Cal State Fullerton	home vs. New Mexico	Fullerton, CA
17	Arizona	at UCLA	Los Angeles, CA
18	Oklahoma State	home vs. Northwestern State	Stillwater, OK
19	Baylor	home vs. West Virginia	Waco, TX
20	Texas A&M	home vs. Kentucky	College Station, TX
21	Texas	home vs. No. 8 Texas Tech	Austin, TX
22	Florida Gulf Coast	home vs. Rutgers	Fort Myers, FL
23	Washington	home vs. Utah	Seattle, WA
24	Houston	home vs. Alabama State	Houston, TX
25	Virginia	at No. 11 Clemson	Clemson, SC

Plenty of sizzle in Longhorns’ steak

While the 2017 season has gotten off to somewhat of an up-and-down start for the Texas Longhorns so far their pitching staff has lived up to, if not exceeded, early expectations. The depth of the Longhorns’ staff is the reason why they opened the season ranked as high as they were (17th), and after opening the season by splitting a four-game series with Rice at home they took two of three, again at home, against UConn.

The following weekend Texas traveled to Stanford where they lost three of four games despite winning the first game 4-0. Two of the other three losses were by only one run and the other was by three.

They also have scheduled aggressively during their mid-week contests so far, with wins over Sam Houston State, Lamar, Richmond and Texas A&M Corpus-Christi. On Tuesday they faced Texas A&M, a 4-3 statement win by the Longhorns that allowed them to move to 13-6 on the season, a game that followed their weekend sweep of UCLA in Austin.

First-year Head Coach David Pierce made some tweaks to his staff over the weekend, pulling Kyle Johnston out of the weekend starting rotation and inserting him as the team’s closer. The move worked well, at least initially, as Johnston delivered a save in each of Texas’ first two wins of the series. Nolan Kingham, who has been bringing mid- to upper-90s heat so far this year, has seemed to have cemented his place as the team’s staff ace, while Morgan Cooper and Blair Henley have settled in nicely as the team’s Saturday and Sunday starters.

Connor Mayes and Nick Kennedy have both made a couple of midweek starts, with Kennedy getting the nod this past Tuesday against Texas A&M, and gives the team enviable depth. Beau Ridgeway, who opened the year as the closer, is the team’s primary go-to arm out of the bullpen and they have numerous other hard-throwing options they can turn to without burning any one pitcher out.

‘Hard-throwing’ is the key component with all of this as the Longhorns staff can bring gas. Kingham is the hardest throwing pitcher of the group, but Johnston, Cooper and Henley all have the ability to sit in the low-90s, touching higher, while mixing in legitimate secondary offerings. The current weekend trio (and the team has enough depth and overall versatility to change things up from week to week) of Kingham, Cooper and Henley is 6-2 with a 1.76 ERA, and the staff as a whole has a combined 2.54 ERA with a ridiculously low .205 batting average against. And the “against” part is notable given the level of competition they have faced so far this year.

For as good as the pitching staff is the Longhorns starting lineup doesn’t have the same impact. Kacy Clemens and Brett Boswell are off to good starts this season, hitting .365 and .321 respectively, and Austin Todd has been garnering more playing time, hitting .314, but their next best hitter, Travis Jones, is hitting .270, and there’s another significant drop off after that. They’re hitting .245 as a squad, although they do a good job working counts getting on base and putting pressure on opposing team’s defenses as four hitters already have 10 or more walks and they’re 19-for-24 in stolen base attemps.

Texas opens Big 12 play this weekend as they host in-state rival Texas Tech to town, the eighth-ranked team in the nation who are off to a red-hot 14-4 start and appear to have as balanced of a team as a coach could dream of. How the Longhorns arms match up with the Red Raiders' impressive weekend trio could make a significant early season statement.

– Patrick Ebert

A force to be reckoned with

Over the last handful of seasons the Virginia Cavaliers have established themselves in the upper-tier of national prominence in collegiate baseball and they’ve done so with a balanced, consistent approach. The pitching staff has produced more than a couple of premium draft picks in this span, as has the offense, a focal point of the Cavaliers success in 2017.

Hitting .322 as a club heading into a weekend bout with ACC foe Clemson, one reason Coach Brian O’Connor’s club is able to put up runs (they’ve scored nine-plus runs in 10 of their 17 contests), aside from natural talent, is the advanced and disciplined approach they bring to the plate. Though by no means the norm, here’s something to consider: last Friday’s game against North Carolina saw the first, and only two strikeouts, thus far for starting shortstop Ernie Clement, as he possesses some of the best bat-to-ball skills in the entire country.

As a result of the approach and strike zone awareness, Clement has proven once again to be a catalyst atop the Cavaliers’ lineup hitting .325 and is currently second on the team with 25 runs scored. Expectations were high last spring for now-sophomore outfielder Jake McCarthy before an injury derailed those plans, costing him the majority of his freshman campaign. With the injury now behind him McCarthy is producing the way the coaching staff had hoped for and he's hitting .333, he has walked three more times than he’s struck out and is a perfect 14-for-14 in stolen base attempts. That’s a lot of quick-twitch muscle and overall athleticism out of the leadoff and No. 2 holes in McCarthy and Clement.

The talent continues as you make your way down the lineup and reach lefthanded bats Adam Haseley and Pavin Smith. That previously mentioned approach at the plate is alive and shining with both hitters, as each has walked at least twice as much as they’ve struck out, and the end results are clear. Haseley is arguably one of the hottest hitters in the country and he’s doing it with strength, hitting .400 over 65 at-bats. Over his first two seasons, which equate to well over 500 at-bats, Haseley had connected for seven career home runs, a number he’s already matched this spring in just 17 games. The high-level contact and gap-to-gap strength have always been there but now we’re already seeing a change in approach from pitch-to-pitch and the ability to work a favorable count while driving the ball much better this spring.

Smith has long been revered as one of the more polished collegiate bats, and though he possesses big and easy raw power from the left side, scouts were waiting to see it play more regularly in-game. So far this spring Smith has already launched four home runs which puts him on pace for a career best in long balls and currently leads the team with 23 RBI while striking out just three times in 67 trips to the plate. The balance, hands, swing and overall approach have helped shape Smith into one of the premier bats on the college side and 2017 is just proving to be more of the same.

Those are the top four hitters in the Virginia lineup but they are much deeper than just that quartet of talent as Robbie Coman (.387) and Cameron Simmons (.353) are second and third on the team in batting average. This is a deep club on the offensive side for O’Connor that’s multi-faceted and has the ability to beat you in more than one way.

– Jheremy Brown

It's Go Time

We are officially entering conference season this weekend. Here are some wonderings that should become clearer as teams begin to play their peers.

1. Are freshmen better than sophomores?
Vanderbilt travels to Ole Miss this weekend and this is a battle of two elite recruiting classes. Vandy’s sophomore class was Perfect Game’s No. 1 ranked class in 2015 and the Ole Miss Freshman group was ranked No. 2 overall in 2016. Both of these classes are major influences in their respective programs with each representing at least four everyday players in their lineups plus key rotation and bullpen pieces. Thus far in 2017 you would have to give the edge to the Rebels’ young freshmen but it will be fun to play it out on the field.

2. Is Coastal ready for the Sun Belt?
All eyes have been on the Chanticleers in 2017 because of their inspiring run to the 2016 National Championship. They are off to a 'disappointing' 11-7 start this season, yet that is exactly the same record as the 2016 team had through 18 games. Here’s the problem: with no disrespect to the Big South, the Sun Belt is an entirely different animal. This is a great baseball league with the likes of South Alabama and Louisiana-Lafayette excited to welcome Coastal Carolina aboard. This is no place to get healthy.

3. Can the Lobos slay the Southern California detour to Omaha?
Ray Birmingham has another offensive juggernaut at New Mexico and he’ll take his club to Fullerton this weekend for a three-game set. This will feature one of the nation’s best lineups versus Fullerton’s always stout rotation. New Mexico has made it to Regionals in five of the last seven seasons but the Lobos have yet to advance to a Super Regional. Three of those Regionals have been in Southern California and you have to wonder if the heavy air in that region, which suppresses offense, has been a factor?

4. How good are these guys?
Missouri and Kentucky both have new coaching staffs and it is no coincidence that they are two of the hottest teams in the nation. There is a different vibe around both clubs and it is working. Having said that, the Tigers head to Alabama and the Wildcats head to Texas A&M to open up SEC play this weekend. Let’s just say that there is no college baseball reality check quite like the 30-game gauntlet of the SEC.

5. Dealer’s Choice
Here are some rapid fire questions that will be addressed this weekend:

• Can Tennessee’s exciting freshmen hitters protect their home turf versus a veteran South Carolina pitching staff?

• Who is the more dominant presence in a three-game series, Virginia’s Adam Haseley or Clemson’s Seth Beer?

• Arizona State has been the nation’s most volatile unit so will it be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde this weekend versus Oregon State?

• Which of these is the real deal: the preseason hype around West Virginia or the hot start for Baylor?

• If Conference USA doesn’t belong to Rice then who? Southern Miss heads to red-hot Louisiana Tech and Charlotte travels to FIU.

– Mike Rooney

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Weekend Preview: Week 5

Conference Preview: America East

Texas Region Top Teams

Perfect Game Softball Winter Warm Up 18U Division

Deep South Region Top Teams

Conference Preview: Horizon

Deep South All Region & Top Tools

Conference Preview: Ivy League

California Region Top Teams

Conference Preview: Ohio Valley

Conference Preview: Summit