There has to be a balance and for several years the scales have been way heavy on the pitching, as the hitting declined. Every year we think this is the team that will bring back the offense, then it doesn't. We used to have a handful of hitters you could depend on. That kept going down, till we would have one great hitter like Payton. This year it looked like Johnson would step up, but he is declining now. We have some power, but it has been mostly against the lesser teams. We split with Rice and Stanford mainly because they had at least two starters that didn't throw because of injury, and ran out of pitching. Texas batters swing at so many bad pitches to strike out it's frightening and prevents them from drawing critical walks that would help the run production. There is no production in strike outs. Our running game has become nonexistent lately, so we can't manufacture runs with that part of the game. Remember when Horn base runners would steal third about as often as they stole second? We make mistakes on the base paths to kill potential rallies or cut them short prematurely. The pitching staff is still very good, but lacks a proven closer. The freshman, Kyle Johnston, has great stuff and a A+ fast ball, but can't control it and walks people in key situations. So he can't be a closer and it's being done by committee. Skip has made it work mostly. Losing Morgan Cooper, as I said has really hurt in that regard. Texas for the last several seasons can just fold up offensively as a team for an extended period of time. It reminds me of our basketball team when it goes a long stretch without scoring, nothing seems to go right and you just wonder, what are they doing? It's like they lose complete comprehension of the strike zone and just start swinging wildly. I don't know who I would want up in a critical situation, to get a clutch hit right now. The new ball was suppose to help our hitters and it has some as we have more homers and extra base hits, but we need consistent hitting and it's just not happening. The new ball doesn't go any further than the old ball when you don't make contact. I see players that should hit, do for a bit, then here comes the long slump. Every kind of combinations have been tried and in the end have failed for the most part in the long haul. I wish Keith Moreland or somebody would come in as an advisory hitting coach and just examine our players mechanics and approach to hitting in general, what could it hurt and maybe it would help. You can't expect to get the out of this world pitching like we had last year, to make a run, like we did late last season, very often. The pitching and Skip are outstanding and the glue that has held this program together for the last several years. The pitching in the post season was just amazing to watch and kept going almost to the championship series in Omaha. It ended only because of little topped grounder to short, that was beat out by a fast batter running on the play. The pitching and defense have more than done enough to win the games we are losing and this is with the new ball being used. The offense must show up or I don't expect us to be a contender for the conference crown or make it back to Omaha. The better teams are yet to be played in Big 12 competition, with many of them on the road like OSU next week and later TCU. We don't start picking it up with the bats soon and we will fade much like the basketball team did down the stretch in conference play. We can only hope that is the case because as good as the pitching is, they can only do so much in this new ball era. They are after all, only human. There had to be an alien or two on the the staff last year down the stretch.
