Today's Poll - What's Your LOB Measuring Stick?

as long as they can drop it a little bit and keep pace with ASU I don’t mind…

And I think this actually gets at:

In the end, I think I’ll agree with calripken08. If we can get clutch two out hits to score runners, I’m perfectly happy with leaving a few extra guys on base.

Is the timing of the LOB. Are you leaving two on second and third when up 10 to 5 in the 8th or down 4 to 5 in the 8th? For me the former isn’t, of course, as important as the latter. But then there are considerations of are you in a culture of not getting those clutch hits and it can then escalate over time like I think it did last year. Right now I think the team is doing a pretty darn good job at the timely hits and the team top to bottom is hitting a lot better this year, and I really like how someone is off for a few games and others step up. And heck the team did pretty good with one of our best hitters basically out of the line-up (Santos) for the BYU games. As someone else pointed out we are winning the grind it out games that we lost last year.

But I will say improvement is always a good thing!

Besides for padding stats what’s the point of having hits if you can’t score runs?

But wouldn’t more hits statistically equate to more runs? I mean maybe I’m not quite understanding something here but if you getting a bunch of hits the odds increase that you will hitting in more runners because you have more runners. So even if you leave more on every game you are also hitting more in?

I don’t know maybe I’m missing something here.

I guess the Tennessee games illustrate maybe what I’m missing and both games had double digits of LOB and double digits in hits. I guess my point is I just want to see a lot of hits for that increases the odds of getting the runs. I don’t want to see conservative numbers here, I actually think more aggressive base running would help us out.

It’s good to see this type of discussion here, however I also enjoy the “fun” side, especially when the “pond chickens” get the brunt of it!

But I digress, since I was the one who brought the issue up I might as well add a few details to my basic thoughts… In the movie Bull Durham the goals of baseball were never more succinctly stated, “this is a very simple game. You catch the ball, you throw the ball and you hit the ball”. The reasons that the Beavs went to Omaha 3 consecutive years was pitching and defense, yet there was a understated part to the success of those teams, timely hits. I can remember several times when the Beavers played small ball and put pressure on the defense and somehow, when hits came, they found holes in the field. This team seems to have all the components in place to make it back to Omaha (we can only hope!) However look at the losses, all have been close, I think the worst was a 6 – 3 loss @ ASU early in the season. So here’s my point, remember the 1 – 0 win against Michigan a couple of years ago in the super regional? As you get deeper in the tournament the ability to get the timely hits become so much more critical. So while I feel more hits would be great for entertainment reasons, by far the most important aspect is their timing which explains my concerns regarding the stranded RISP.

Like a couple of folks have mentioned the subject of LOB/RISP doesn’t easily condense into bullets or single line answers however it does emphasize how challenging the game of baseball is and how much I appreciate the way Pat Casey, Pat Bailey, Marty Lees, and Nate Yeskie coach these guys. Because at the end of the day each one of them is a professor/teacher and the players are students trying their best out there and that’s all we can ask for.

I hope they clock SC this weekend!

But I looked at the numbers above again, and thinking what would be nice for the Beavs would be something like this (yes, about what ASU is doing right now):

LOB avg = between 7.0 to 8.0
Hits/gm = 9.5 to 10.0

If they could get to those numbers I think they will be very hard to beat.