Honestly, I think we've had a lot of our success in baseball over the years in spite of ourselves getting in our own way. From distracted coaches, boom and bust cycles, a couple of bad coaching hires, and generally being too easy to accept being less than our real potential. We've underachieved a lot more than we've overachieved or even met reasonable expectations through the years. But I think this is a new day for MSU baseball. We've got the best coach we've ever had, and it's not close. And we seem to have a real plan to be nationally competitive on a regular basis.
I tend to agree with this. I mean let's look at all the missteps.
- I think we were fine until 1990 or so. I can get over losing the 85 title, it happens. We were relative newcomers, and we were winning, so whatever. Even built back to 1990, I can live with all that.
- Polk should have left/retired/whatever else he wanted to do at that point. I know the early and mid-90s had some good points with attendance and all, but let's face it, any decent coach was going to take advantage of that 1994 signing class and do some big things, so let's not act like Polk did that. But he gets credit for building us to that point.
- I think Pat McMahon underachieved, but he deserved the job, and we could have done much worse, so can't complain about his tenure.
- We all knew the biggest mistake was hiring Polk back in 2002. That was the last ride, we let the program fizzle out while Ole Miss stocked up on the MS players.
- Can't complain about Cohen and Lemonis up through 2021 obviously.
- Lemonis simply failed in the portal era.
I know it's easy to say now about Polk in the early 90s. But it's not like there would be any heartburn if he'd left, the old boomers now still idolize him. Augie Garrido left Fullerton twice, I highly doubt there's any ill will there.
But man, all we needed was a semi-hungry coach in 2002, and we could have warded off a lot of things. Paul Maneiri probably was that guy. Not to mention that is the time where attendance really started slipping because all the lifers were dying, kids were inheriting, and many weren't coming to games. That alienated the folks who saw all the empties but weren't allowed to sit there. That was a staple of the Polk 2 Error, and we simply ignored it.
