How did we not have a huge drop-off between players that exited and those expected to step up?
Dalton Shuffield, SBC Player of the Year at the most important defensive position, currently in the Twins organization and even played some games at AAA last year in his shortened rookie season: gone, replaced by a JUCO tandem who simply can't be expected to replace Shuffield's senior year productivity (cause who can?)
Justin Thompson, senior who hit .323: gone, replaced by two guys who were on the roster last year and rarely played who combined are hitting about .230 right now
John Wuthrich, senior who hit .267 but hit 14 homers: gone, we still haven't figured out his replacement in RF yet
Wes Faison, senior who did struggle a bit last year but had a good career overall: gone, mostly adequately replaced by Ramirez at DH
IOJ: senior who hit .287: gone, replaced by a .222 hitter right now
Tristan Stivors: a CONCENSUS all-american which is unheard of at TXST who is pitching big league spring training games as we speak with success: gone, we really don't have a closer this year, we just try to close games on the fly with what's available
I'd agree that other than replacing arguably the best pitcher in TXST history there wasn't much drop-off pitching-wise but anytime you have to replace 5/9 of your lineup with returners who never played, freshman, and JUCO guys there should be some expected regression. I'm actually a bit pleasantly surprised your expectations aren't to actually be better this year than last as you always seem to compare success YOY and expect it to continuously improve. That's not really realistic with what we lost and with the success we had last year. Winning 40 games is a fine goal. This team should expect to compete for another regional berth. I don't disagree with those levels of expectations at all, though winning 40 games will always be an extremely lofty goal. Just keep in mind this is baseball. We're going to lose games we shouldn't to bad teams, that happens in this sport (last year we lost games to Utah Valley and Incarnate Word). When those losses inevitably happen the sky isn't always falling and its not indicative of some nefarious thing like "Trout losing the team" like you said towards the beginning of this thread. We still got our RPI up to 20 last year with those 2 losses to sub-180 RPI teams. SBC is 5th in conference RPI right now, we're basically in a power conference in baseball. Our conference SOS will keep our RPI afloat if we're winning games.
