All the controversy that swirled from Sunday to Wednesday, culminating with yesterday's apparent resolution hastened by Jack Leggett's phone call to Ray Tanner, was an interesting and juicy subplot that accompanied the three-game series between the two rivals.
But there's a more substantial storyline beneath the surface, at least relating to Clemson's baseball team. And it has nothing to do with the Gamecocks' (alleged) dugout brick oven, or some ill-advised smack talk from Will Lamb.
Members of Clemson's baseball team probably aren't going to talk publicly about their concerns with the bats they're using, because they're under contract with Easton and it's not a good idea to publicize issues with an entity that's paying you a lot of money.
But it's not hard at all to read between the lines and pick up on some skepticism about Easton's ability to develop a bat that's on par with other brands that are used by Clemson's competition.
Some of this concern was apparent last week. Two of the Tigers' previous opponents, Eastern Michigan and Michigan State, had used non-Easton bats against Clemson. And those bats seemed to have more pop, and even a different sound, than the Tigers' bats.
Easton shipped Clemson a new batch of bats last week, just in time for the series against South Carolina, and the hope was that the new sticks would be improved and refined in accordance with the NCAA's new standards that intend to make college bats perform more like wood bats.
It doesn't sound as if the new batch was met with rousing approval. Leggett was asked about this yesterday on his teleconference with the media.
"The standards are set the same, but I'm not sure that all the companies got it together; having to scramble so quickly to meet the standards, (I'm not sure) everybody got it right. I think it's a work in progress, and statistics can kind of lie to you one way or the other about whether this company is hitting more home runs, or that company is hitting more home runs. I think it'll all come out in the wash at the end, and we'll have to just take a look at what it's doing to the game and how it's affecting it, and hopefully make some rational decisions and take some input from the coaches at the end of the season. But now, I think what everybody has is what everybody has.
"I'm not so sure they're all exactly the same. They all sound a little bit different, and they all react a little bit in my way of thinking. And that's kind of unfortunate, because I think last year at this time everything was pretty similar, because they had time to get the standards right. There's probably a little bit of frustration on everybody's part throughout the country because of that. So I'm not exactly sure. I can't evaluate that. But you can just do it by eye and see there are some differences."
A critic of Leggett's view would say that this is just a coach complaining and coming up with excuses for his team's lack of home runs (the Tigers are averaging .6 homers per game this season, compared to 1.34 last year).
But it's hard not to see his side of this. I'm far from a baseball expert, but it's not hard for me to spot the difference in sound coming from Clemson's bats compared to the opposition. There's much more of a "thud" sound in the former, and more of a "ping" sound in the latter.
On numerous occasions this season, Jeff Schaus has absolutely grooved pitches ... only to see them result in a line drive that the right fielder catches without even budging.
Maybe things eventually balance out in Clemson's favor, but at this point there's unmistakable concern about how much these bats are holding the Tigers back. There's concern that the playing field is not level.
The belief here is that those concerns are legitimate.
LW
No comments:
Post a Comment