Last year, Tulane finished with a record of 41-21 with an RPI good for 33rd place in the country. We won the AAC regular season title and finished in 24th place in the Coaches’ poll. We were also ranked #19 by Baseball America after being eliminated in the Oxford Regional. This year, we finished with a 27-31 record and an RPI of 77. We weren’t even close to being ranked or getting a bid to the NCAA regionals. What happened? What caused the 44-place slide in RPI?
To some Tulane fans, the reason is obvious. Andy Cannizarro is coaching at Mississippi State and our inept Athletic Director, arrogant and determined to show his independence, continued a series of poor coaching selections in choosing a career assistant coach who some claim is “clueless” and “doesn’t know what he is doing?”
No one could argue that the team’s record this year was comparable to that of last year and coaching certainly must be considered in the calculus. But, I’m not sure Coach Jewett (or the AD for that matter) should carry quite the burden of blame being placed on them. I think the stronger schedule, the loss of Rogers on defense, and the near total collapse of the remaining half of our pitching staff were very important factors. Add to that the inept recruiting of the past two years and we got what we got—a disappointing season.
But, let’s look at coaching. All manner of complaints have surfaced from various fans but several continue to arise. The first, and to me, a legitimate concern, was the poor start to the season. Was the team unprepared as some would suggest? Hard to argue; they played very poorly. Did Coach Jewett prepare them differently than his previous teams, coached by some of the finest coaches in college baseball? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Was it simply a chemistry problem between a new coach and a mostly veteran team? Possibly. Was it a team-wide slump from a team packed with notoriously “streaky” players? I doubt we’ll ever know. It was what it was and it wasn’t good.
The second major complaint is his handling of the pitching staff. Two of the three pitchers we really expected to perform, Merrill and Massey, pitched worse and horribly worse respectively than they did last year. And beyond Merrill, France, Solesky, and Colletti, why did our other ten pitchers perform so poorly that even our most ardent fans held their breath whenever one of them took the mound? In my opinion, some (maybe a great deal) has to be laid at the feet of the coaching staff and, in particular, the pitching coach. Another complaint is that Coach Jewett did a poor job of managing pitching changes. This is a common refrain across baseball at every level, but how true is it? To be honest, why would anyone replace Merrill, France, Solesky, or Colletti on the mound with anyone on our pitching staff other than one of those four. Sure, Merrill or France got tired and didn't have the same “stuff” as they did earlier in a game. But you can’t replace them with the pitcher they were earlier in the game. Most of the time you have to bring in guys named Andrews, Issa, Gillies, Price, Hogan, etc. Talk about a “Hobson’s choice!” Outside of the Santa Barbara series, I watched almost every pitch of this past season and, without benefit of hindsight, wouldn’t have changed much in regard to pitching changes.
The most recent accusation regards the decision to pitch Merrill rather than France to open the AAC tournament. Frankly, with what I know, I’d have pitched France in the opener also. But, of course, I don’t know what the players and coaches knew at the time. But, some of the “rationale” for pitching France first doesn’t face reality. The least credible is that Merrill pitched so much more than France this year and through his career and was simply tired. But, on further examination, prior to the tournament, France actually pitched slightly more than Merrill (1434 pitches to 1419). He even threw over 120 pitches three times to Merrill’s twice. And, of course, France pitched an entire season last year while Merrill was injured and out for much of the season. The reason to start France was simple. He was pitching better. And, in my view, barring information not available to me or any other fan, that should have been the choice. As it happened, neither guy had much success so it probably didn’t matter.
So, what’s the verdict on coaching? I think it’s an incomplete. We started poorly which may or may not have been on coaching, but probably some. At least some of the blame for poor pitching has to be placed on coaching. I’d be surprised (and disappointed) if the pitching coach returns. But, even that assumes we can hire a better coach as a replacement. Personally, I’d give it a shot. As for managing of the pitching staff? Considering what he had to work with, I don’t have a problem with Coach Jewett on that score.
Next, let’s look at the schedule. Last year our SOS was #61. This year as it stands, it’s # 8, undoubtedly the toughest schedule in Tulane history. Had last year’s team played this year’s schedule, they’d have finished with the same RPI (#33) if they had gone 32-30. Hmmm!?! With this year’s schedule, five more wins would have taken us to #39 in RPI and six more would have taken us to #32 (one ahead of last year). For interest, had we not played our first 15 games (but, of course, we did), our 24-19 record since then would have been good for an RPI of .5659 or #31 in the country. Yes, the losing record is hard to take and very disappointing, but against this schedule, many of our past “regional teams” would likely have also sat home in the post season. Of course, that’s not any consolation.
Pitching: At the beginning of the year I thought we had three proven starters and nothing but question marks for the rest of our pitching. I was concerned that having lost half of our pitching staff from last year and needing at least seven pitchers to be competitive, we could be in trouble. As it has turned out, we had one solid starter (France), one who was up and down (Merrill), and one, Ross Massey, who seemingly has lost all confidence and rhythm to his pitching. Eventually, we found one solid short guy (Colletti) and one (Soleski) who was up and down in both starting and relieving rolls. Everyone else was bad most outings with a rare good one. We walked more batters than any team in the history of Tulane baseball and struck out fewer than any team in the last 27 years. Our team ERA was 5.72, the worst since 1990, during the era of “gorilla ball,” and the second worst on record. You can’t make do with that. Was that coaching? Maybe. I pitched a great deal in my youth and like to think I know something about it and some of these guys were just really bad. Better coaching should help, but we need better talent.
Offensively, we lost two of our best players and a third starter. We returned a bunch of guys (Williams, Kaplan, DeHart, Montalbano, Willsey, Hope, Brown, Rowland, and Witherspoon) who had a combined career batting average of .251 at Tulane. In 2016, they hit .260 as a group; nothing to strike fear in the hearts of opposing pitcher, but they had good power numbers a total of 56 HR’s. This year, despite periods of slumps from virtually all of them, they hit a combined .285 with 69 of the team’s 70 HR’s, far and away their best season playing for the Wave. The five youngsters who have played the most (the Gozzos, Hoese, Heinrich, and Owen) had a combined batting average of .219 with one HR. Those are the guys replacing Alemais, Rogers, and Carthon, who hit .282 between them with 8 HR’s. Our problem at the plate wasn’t lack of hitting from our returning players; it was lack of hitting from our “new” guys. How much did coaching play in the improved hitting from the returnees? As much as poor coaching affected our pitching? Who knows? But I think it unfair to blame coaching for poor performance by the pitching staff and suggest it has nothing to do with improved performance by the hitters.
Defensively, we lost our most important two defensive players, Alemais and Rogers. Despite some egregious errors from Hoese and Gozzo at shortstop, percentagewise they fielded better than Alemais. He made a lot of egregious errors also. But, I don’t think either of them has his range, so that’s a minus, but not a glaring deficiency for this team. The loss of Rogers is a different matter. His presence probably helped our pitchers last year. His absence hurt—a lot in my opinion. When Montalbano was in there, he did a great job, however. Through the first eleven games he played, we obviously didn’t win much (3 - 8), but defensively, he made no errors and had no passed balls. He also threw out 8 of 17 baserunners trying to steal; not Rogers’ type numbers (only 16 of 43 were successful in 2016), but damned good. For the rest of the season we had 19 passed balls, two catcher’s interference, and threw out only 16 of 73 (21.9%) runners attempting to steal. Those are truly terrible numbers. Worse, I think lack of confidence in the catchers could well have affected our pitchers. Our outfield was adequate defensively, but certainly not “stellar.” And Williams, Hope, and Willsey have been fine, though both Williams and Hope are not fielding nearly as well as last season. Willsey has made a couple more errors than normal but has been a magician on the double play. He may be our best defensive second baseman since Holland, over a dozen years ago. But other than catcher, our defense has been OK. Catching, despite the effort, has been woeful. Did coaching affect our defense? Probably not, though somewhere among Tulane’s undergrads there must have been a kid who played catcher in high school who could have spelled Gozzo on occasion. I think we should have found him.
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). He's a 3-star on Rivals (and #47 in the state according to them) but has not been rated by other services.