The torpedo bats should help drive offense. But will they drive it right away?
1. Bad Batting: Batter, Blip, or Bat?
So far this week, major league players are batting a collective .224. Teams are scoring 3.83 runs per game. If both those numbers hold on through Sunday, it’ll be the worst offensive week in at least a year.
There are a few possible explanations for this, with small-sample randomness and weather the first to come to mind. But I’m curious. Could this be about the torpedo bats?
Theoretically, it should be hard to adjust to a bat with a different weight distribution than every other bat a player’s ever swung. Timing should be affected, as should the frequency of contact (which should then drive approach). Any oddities should go away quickly—these are major league hitters—but if there’s a widespread adoption of a new kind of bat, it’s not outrageous to think we could see a short-term decrease in offense.
There are other variables we can check, things like pitch counts and strikeout numbers to check on that contact and approach angle. For now, the week’s walk rate is unchanged (actually a little higher than last year’s full-season number), meaning the decreased scoring is really coming from the batting average side of the game.
Maybe it’s been colder weather. Maybe there have been closer games than usual, with more good bullpen used than shoddy bullpen. Maybe this will all even out before the end of the week.
But maybe it’s the bats.
2. Winning in College Basketball Might Be Hard, But You Don’t Have to Do That Much of It
Yesterday, we wrote that it’s harder to win in college football than it is in college basketball. I want to elaborate on that.
I’m not actually sure it’s harder to win in football. I think it is, but I’m not positive. It took Virginia and Gonzaga and UConn each a long time to become the best basketball program in the country, and none of them were able to maintain it for long.
What I do think is true is that the NCAA Tournament both inflates success and offers more chances at Get Out of Jail Free cards.
Success inflation: Coaches get credit for making the NCAA Tournament or for making the tournament’s second weekend. They get big credit for making the Final Four, at least until they do it too many times without winning a title, at which point the narrative turns. If Nate Oats made football’s final four once in six years, at one point failing to make it despite spending most of the year coaching the top-ranked team? Nate Oats would be viewed differently than he’s viewed in college basketball.
Get Out of Jail Free cards: Florida wasn’t the best college basketball team this year. They wouldn’t be favored over Duke if the two played tomorrow. They were the deserving champions—they won the games the sport asks its champions to win—but they weren’t the best team. This is normal in college basketball, to the point where it goes unspoken. It would be abnormal in college football. Thanks to the plinko-based structure of college basketball’s postseason, Todd Golden will always have a championship in his back pocket. Florida will always have a title post-Billy Donovan.
3. The McDermott Thing Is Weird.
It makes sense that Creighton would want a head coach in waiting if Greg McDermott’s really stepping down after next season or the following one, as Matt Norlander reported yesterday. It makes sense that Creighton would want Alan Huss for that role, and that Alan Huss would want to be back at Creighton. What doesn’t make sense is why everyone involved would create this big of a distraction for themselves and their players.
Sure, players can transfer at any time now, so this shouldn’t hurt recruiting as much as it would have ten years ago. But I don’t think an immediate transfer is the goal for every high school recruit? And then you’ve got the players and McDermott himself dealing with what’s effectively a two-year farewell tour, with the post-farewell destination potentially unclear. It makes some sense, but it’s strange. Strange enough to make at least this blogger wonder if McDermott’s going to pull a Tony Bennett this offseason.
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