Dominant Deck and the Swarming Jackets

Welcome to the ever evolving world of my college baseball blog. So far I’ve dropped Georgia State from weekly mention despite the fact they have had a solid season. The University of Georgia is now making it very hard to make a weekly analysis possible, mainly because of the Southeastern Conferences crazed money grabbing ($85.95 annually to listen to the games?!). It’s difficult to make numbers exciting for either me or you but I will continue to try in a scaled down manner. Luckily for me the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets make following NCAA baseball fun and easy and have pushed themselves to the forefront of my baseball writing. (Disclaimer: I cannot stand the Yellow Jacket football team but everything has its floors.) Anyway on to the weekend review.

The aforementioned Yellow Jackets travelled up to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to face a very solid Tar Heel team who, going into the weekend, were ranked #19 in the country. Friday night set up and elite ACC pitching match-up between UNC’s Matt Harvey and Jacket ace Deck McGuire. The game became the pitching duel it was supposed to be and McGuire came out the winner. Last week’s loss at Maryland is quickly proving an aberration with Deck now at 4-1 with 1.17 ERA with 49 strikeouts in 46 innings. While LSU’s Anthony Ranaudo has only thrown seven innings so far this year McGuire is establishing himself as the number one draft prospect this year, any MLB team that gets McGuire will be lucky and will have an incredible pitcher who impresses me more every time I see or hear anything of him. While Friday was all about the guys on the mound Saturday and Sunday became a hitting showcase. Usually this would result in fickle old me bashing Brandon Cumpton and Jed Bradley in an unfair way, instead I’m going to ignore those two outings and just try and convey how incredible the Jacket line-up is this year. From Jeff Rowland at the top through to Brandon Thomas at the bottom there is average and power but it is the middle of the order that has most impressed so far. When you start with co-ACC player of the week Derek Dietrich batting second and hitting .363 on the year with 6 home runs it makes the 3-4-5 guys jobs so much easier. Those 3 have been Tony Plagman, Cole Leonida and Matt Skole and thos 3 have been awesome. Senior first-baseman has been .333 with 27 RBI’s and a team leading 9 homers and is playing as well as any other first-baseman in the country, especially with his .1000 fielding percentage. If Plagman is playing the prototypical first base role the Leonida is going above and beyond as a clean-up hitter, his team leading 33 RBI’s goes to prove that. Behind him Matt Skole has had an incredible break-out Sophomore year, better than anyone could have expected. When you look across the board and see his .393 average, 6 dingers and 25 RBI’s Skole is fast tracking himself to MVP status when you think he could be playing in Atlanta for two more years.

On Sunday the Yellow Jackets played really bad baseball for the first eight innings with pitching and hitting deserting the team. Then game the ninth inning and the real Georgia Tech. As soon as Derek Dietrich came out of his phone box the power surged through the line-up. With Tech scoring five runs in the top of the ninth it proved an awful lot about the Yellow Jackets and quieted a lot of the doubters. With the guts they showed Tech moved to 21-2 on the season and number 2 in the USA Today/ESPN coaches’ poll. Tonights game with Georgia State should be a humdinger with the two offences on the field. This kind of game makes Atlanta seem a lot further away than it actually is, and that’s still a long way.