Vanderbilt

[messageboardsuperhero]

Is exactly who I thought they were in every single way.

On the mound they are terrific. Leiter is about as good as any starter I have ever seen in CBB- and I thought we actually did pretty well against him in innings 4-6 without much to show for it. Rocker is great too but maybe a notch below. Their pen is really good but not super deep.

Offensively they are just not a very good team. IDGAF what the season statistics say. They only hit a few balls hard all night. Our problem was giving them every 17ing thing they got in the first inning other than the HR. Vandy didn’t even have to work for it. They did absolutely Jack the rest of the game outside of the seventh inning, when guess what? We walked the damn lead off batter and got a Texas leaguer to drop in CF. Throw strikes and they can be shut down.

I see a lot of pouting tonight, but this series is not over. Game one was going to be the toughest one for us to win. The path was always win the non-Leiter/Rocker game and find a way in one of their starts- that is still open. Won’t be easy but it can be done. Just need to quite shitting our pants. This Vanderbilt team is not invincible, and we made them look much better than they are in the first inning.

 

[bulldognation]

Yeah, he's good and agree that he's probably better than Rocker who has gotten knocked around some in the past.

i'd say we are about evenly matched minus the starting pitching. Like someone else pointed out, without their two top-5 pitchers, they're a middle of the pack team. With them, they only need a couple runs to earn wins.

But on the flip side we looked dead in the water after Hoover and now we're playing for a natty. Don't care what anyone else has to say about us even if we lose tomorrow... nobody else in our state has ever made it to this stage and been in a position to win it all as often as MSU over the course of the past 10 years.