By Brandon Schultz
Wright State is not a name that comes to anyone’s mind as a baseball powerhouse, but they are a good team. They were a regional squad last year winning the Horizon League Tournament
Championship. Though they did go 0-2, making the tourney is a big deal. To start the year they played the Ragin Cajuns in Louisianna. Even though they went 1-2 they played close games in all three. Losing 2-3 on Friday and 3-5 on Sunday. They pitched it really well and were competitive in all games. Don’t expect an easy weekend for the Sooners.
Wright State is returning much of the position player group from last year including their 2 qualified .300 hitters from last year (Andrew Patrick and Gehrig Anglin). So far, their biggest threat at the plate is redshirt freshman Gus Gregory. In the young season he is hitting .500 with a home run. They didn’t have a lot of big innings really only one big one, 4 runs in the Saturday game, so they might be more of that large hit total/constant pressure team.
Wright State doesn’t seem to be returning too much on the mound this year. They really pitched it well last weekend though. Jake Shirk pitched great on Friday night. 7 innings of 1 run ball. The Sooners will want to get into the bullpen as I don’t believe Wright State has a ton of depth.
The chaOUs will look to get going during the home stand. We haven’t really seen it kick into gear yet. In fact, so far this season (4 games) there have been times where we haven’t played good offense. Skip talks about this a lot. There were too many innings especially against Oregon and
Tennessee where we just didn’t move runners. We would also get a runner on first with no outs and follow it up with 2 Ks or a strikeout and pop up. I am excited to see that constant pressure of a good offense combined with the power that we have this year get going.
I have zero doubt that the pitching will be good. I know we are only 1 week into the season, but I have a ton of confidence in the pitching staff. Save for a bad game against a really good DBU team, the pitching staff has been nails. The weekend will be the strength and the midweek needs to have the roles ironed out. Which is exactly what you want.
Regardless of any of this, there will be beautiful weather and baseball is back in Norman, OK. Life is good.
Kommentare