[Husker] End of baseball season

[Skylar Dodds]

As you all know, baseball's my first and foremost.  Here's my breakdown of the end of the year

In the regional:
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Regarding what I think happened, I liked the rotation for the first two games, but I'm not sure about why we didn't see Bird in game 3. When you're coming through the losers bracket, you have to play to win every game, imo. 

Plus, we abandoned the aggressiveness we saw early on and started playing station to station offense. I think when you're struggling it's twice as important to be aggressive. 

It wouldn't hurt to practice for a week how to run bases vs a lefty. I'd probably have Jennings throw a big looping curveball for bp for Farst, Belfonte, and Neer. 

Just for the record, I called that curveball just about every time that guy threw it vs uci. Every time he threw his fastball for a strike, he came back with that hook.  I kinda wish the guys would pick up on that. To be fair, he had a great curveball that was 15-20 mph slower than his heater.


End of the season:
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This team had great success for the end of the season, but the reality is, we're in Nebraska where people don't understand baseball.  In college baseball, the best teams win 75-80% not 95-100% like in football.  The top 10 teams were 431-134 this year, which is 76.3%.  

With that, you have to realize that there are going to be losing stretches in there somewhere.  We had a crazy stretch of baseball all year long and didn't really have any low points (maybe @OSU, but we won the finale, coming back on a high).  Ours came at the wrong time, that's just the way it is.

I also think the aTm series was SO draining.  We fought a LONG 16 inning game the first night, have a double header where we come back from 5 behind twice, then go play Creighton at Rosenblatt where there's 18,000 fans and a lot of passion.  There was a let-down coming and Missouri exploited it big time.  Then, confidence went down (and in college baseball, confidence is king) and the team stumbled.

I thought we had that back, and I still think we win the series if we find a way to beat UCI on Saturday.  We'd have confidence and we could find a way to win one more, especially with Bird available.

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Skylar