"Florida Gators baseball has five named to top-100 sophomores list"

Sully is 8-1 is super-regionals, so I'd never bet our boys would go down in that round. (He's also on an 8 game win streak @ defending national champions, so maybe that @LSU series will give some modicum of revenge.)

The team has a lot of young talent, so (barring injury :knock wood: ) they'll be better in June than February. A top 2 or 3 in the rotation will hopefully sort itself out. Hope Sully figures it out before 4/12 -- the "murderers' row" of USCar, Vand, Arky, UTenn start then.

 

Without looking it was easy to name Kurland, Fisher, Shelton, and Heyman but I was a little surprised by Donay. My 5th pick was Robertson since I saw him in a few other lists. I still don't know what to expect from Donay after watching him hit two over the batter's eye in BP one day and then go on a two week slump shortly after. He has shown development behind the plate under Sully's eye but i still wonder if RF might be open for him.

 

If ONE of those two has a good season- bats .280 or better, 8-15 HR, we'll have a happy season. I see it likely the others will be solid or better. Adding in good seasons from those four frosh pitchers will put us in Omaha, and if we get to Omaha, I'll take whatever happens.

 

Main guy I'm focused on and wanna see how he handles things is Fisher, if he starts he'd be the first guy in awhile in that position without that 95+ fastball. The reality is with college baseball there's almost always a mix of young and older talent Sully seems to have figured out a mix with guys coming in plus the portal which you have to navigate.

 

D1Bsb ranked the top 25 teams for incoming frosh with Gators at #10. As headliners, they named Peterson, "put himself in position to be a member of the weekend rotation right away;" and McNeillie, "isn’t far behind Peterson in terms of his stuff." As contributors, they named Rodriguez, Witmer, Menendez, Philpot, Satin and Yost. Based on my unprofessional observations during fall workouts, I saw Hunter Jones and Jacob Gomberg as guys with not much pub, but plenty of promise. I got the same impression of their potential that made me like Michael Byrne during his first fall- not nearly spectacular, but special in his way. Jones is the latest in the series of guys from Marion Co. who throws breaking stuff that's nearly as slow as Carsten Finnvold's, but he consistently got a lot more guys out.

Other SEC teams on the list were: 1 Ark, 4 aTm, 6 Vandy, 7 LSU, 9 MSU, 11Tn, 13 bama, 15 Miss, 17 Ok, 22 Tx. (Is it too early to be including those last 2?) noles and scUM weren't named.

 

Good stuff Boss, I particularly agree on McNeillie being almost as good as Peterson. I've been saying I'm waiting to see how they both come back into the spring and if McNeillie improves much. I agree Peterson could start weekends at this point. While I am also wondering if Fisher is ready for the weekend and who becomes our Friday night guy. Based on the fall game starters I believe Sully is expecting the weekend rotation to go Cags/Peterson/Fisher (LRL). But, we haven't started spring scrimmages to see for sure. That said, McNeillie is in good position for a few midweek starts early on and then become a reliable mid-reliever in SEC play. If anyone gets hurt then Sully will go to Neeley or McNeillie more often.

Thanks for the attention to Hunter Jones another of my fav Ocala kids pipeline. I've seen him more in HS than I have at practice and that concerns me. One inning at a time isn't going to get you very far in the spring.

Lastly I remind everyone how young our pitching staff will be this year. There's very little reliever experience to go around. If our inexperienced starters (other than Cags) only go 4-5 innings then it gets more difficult for the youngsters to go handle the other 4-5 innings to win us a ballgame. Sully is going to push those starting arms for 7 innings as much as possible especially in the toughest series on the schedule.

 

Where would you put Evans then?

 

Cade Fisher is our best pitcher .. He gets people out and repeats . Doesn’t matter what the gun says

 

Recall Evans was out most all of fall and only threw easy into the screen. It's unknown if he is ready to return. If he is 100% then I think he gets first shot at RF because of his play in the CWS. Also remember Hayden Yost is another possible newcomer for RF. All this to say why I am so perplexed with Donay. He's getting top 100 recognition without even knowing if or where he will play. Right now he's most likely to end up as a rotational catcher (starts behind the plate depending who is pitching) as long as his bat gets hot this spring. He can hit them over the batter's eye and he can hit nice ground balls to short more often than not.

 

Donay hasn’t played outfield yet and was battling injuries in fall so couldn’t get much work in. So be surprised if he gets a lot of time in outfield this year. There will probably be a rotation of Heyman/donay/cags 1B/c/DH.

 

He didn't work in the outfield until the last couple of weeks of fall workouts, but was a regular in RF at the end, There weren't a lot of opportunities to see how well he covered ground, played the fence, chose angles and such, but he did make a couple of VERY strong throws fom RF to 2B and 3B. Preseason website reports talk about his hitting, which I considered inconsistent, but he did well on D. I didn't know he was battling injuries, but he batted and played defense at the workouts I saw- about 3/4 of them.

 

So damn sick of reading about Gator injuries in all sports. Isn’t there enough greens , yellow and reds in our meals ??

 

Don't forget ORANGE & BLUEs as well!



Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Well played WES

 

Yeah - especially when ranked above Luke, who is a good catcher and whose batting numbers were probably better last year when correcting for the number of at bats, etc.