Oddly (to me anyway) Woodard is having some of the same problems as Sanchez, though for slightly different reasons:
Too much roster turnover. He scheduled like he was bringing back a bunch of the bats and maybe an arm that we ended up losing to the draft.
We then put a lot of stock in newly acquired talent, plus hopeful returns to form / health for some returnees, and (very unlike Sanchez), scheduled hard.
Bummer of a season. Not much went our way.
I like the “tough schedule” stuff too, but you have to win a decent % of those still. As of yesterday (per Warren Nolan RPI, which is slightly different from “the RPI” I think) we were showing as 7-16 versus Q1 and Q2 which encompasses the top 100 teams. Have to do better than that.
Nobody is calling for woodards head because he generally has the program going in a good dirrction thus far.
He’s been here what three years and already has an at large ? Nobody would be out on Ron if he had accomplished that.
This year hasn’t gone as well as many expected but even with the struggles this team isn’t terrible, or even bad, just inconsistent.
Woodard is Top 3 in the Conference and Top 75ish in RPI in the country…all while playing a Top 10 OOC schedule.
If Woodard is fireable for that…gotta let Sanchez go yesterday…he can’t sniff that type of metrics.
It was tongue in cheek. I am, however, very disappointed in the season so far. Our pitching has been extremely erratic and we either knock the heck out of the other pitcher or can’t hit a beach ball. We should have 30+ wins now and we should be conference champions.
agreed - our problem has been in the bullpen. an absolute ball buster of a problem, but we’ve had most everything else figured out. can’t recall exactly for the season, but this weekend we had 2 games where we took the lead to the 8th (to be fair, we loaded the bases B8). those have to be wins. surely has happened earlier in the season. we’ll get it turned around, but this is too talented of a squad to be .500.
Anybody who wants Woodard fired should be beaten with barbed wire and dipped in hot vinegar until they admit they are a witch
Woodard isn’t being fired. Good Lord!
Of course he was kidding about Woodard being canned but he needs to figure out a couple of things. He’s was a pitcher extraordinaire and he needs to get his guys to learn that pitching from ahead in counts really matters.
Also, we gotta figure out how to hold runners closer and not let them get basically walking leads that leads to easy stolen bases. Not all on the the C but that needs to improve too
It’s baseball. Thems the breaks. If it was easy and predictable…
I feel for Knight. By his set standards, he’s had another tough year at the plate
But his defense has been spectacular !
I took the firing comment as sarcasm, which I’m sure it was. There are some well-reasoned takes in this thread, which I appreciate. What wears me out is the melodrama.
We’re a talented team that has not put it all together as much as we’d like. There are definitely some breaks that have gone against us, but that’s life. In 2021, way more of the 50-50 situations went our way.
The idea that our pitching is not good or has not improved year-over-year is not correct. I’ve watched this staff evolve over the last 4 years. Remember when walks and HBPs were the weekly complaint? Things are never as good as we want them, but there never as bad as we think they are either.
Just for fun, here’s the current conference only pitching stats, sorted by staff ERA:
