@MarkKnudson41
Strike One: There are a lot of us who remain unconvinced that Colorado State Athletic Director Joe Parker hired the right man to be his new head football coach. The proof will be in the playing next fall.
But it’s looking more and more like Parker got the right guy to lead his Men’s basketball program.
Niko Medved’s Rams won their fourth consecutive Mountain West conference game on Saturday, beating what had been a red-hot Air Force team in Colorado Springs. Suddenly, the Rams – who looked like they’d be in for a ‘rebuilding’ rather than a ‘post-season’ kind of year – are 13-7 and 4-3 in conference play…and now a legit threat to contend the MW. They’ve already surpassed last year’s win total of 12 in Medved’s first season.
Medved is known for positivity. His social media and public comments exude optimism. Apparently, that approach pays dividends on the court and off…like on the recruiting…and “re-recruiting” trail.
Getting big contributions from true freshman is not unusual in college hoops these days – but the “impact” kids are typically playing at the bigger schools as they prepare to be “one-and-done” on their way to the NBA. But last spring, Medved was able to land a pair of big-time impact guys and bring them to Fort Collins. Presumably (hopefully) they won’t be leaving after one season.
David Roddy is a big bodied frosh who’s made a smooth transition from high school ball in Minnesota. A two-sport guy in high school who spurned the U of Minnesota and Northwestern to come to CSU, the 6’4” 250-pound small forward (and quarterback) has stepped into the starting line-up and given the Rams a huge boost. He’s averaging better than 11 points and just under six rebounds per contest. He looks and plays like a man.
Fellow freshman Isaiah Stevens – the point guard from Texas who turned down Mississippi State and SMU among other to come to CSU – leads the team in scoring at 13ppg. Close observers say he plays with a maturity well beyond his years. He had 11 points in a balanced scoring effort against AFA.
Those two freshmen, along with sophomore Kendall Moore, form a nice nucleus for the very near future.
Whenever a new coach comes on board, one of the first things he has to do in this age of transfers is to convince the players he’s inheriting to stick with him. Medved had to do that with seniors Kris Martin and Nico Carvacho. He essentially had to re-recruit these two key players and convince them to stay in the Fort. Mission accomplished there, too.
Carvacho is the MW best rebounder, and when he posted his eighth double-double of the season – he’s the country’s active leader in that category – he moved within one double-double of the league record of 44 for his career. Martin’s three second half three pointers pretty much sealed the deal against the Falcons.
There are still a lot of coaches out there that embrace the old-school “disciplinarian,” yell at your players kind of approach. That still works with some, but not most. Today’s young athletes are different. They don’t respond to getting screamed at, Larry Eustachy-style. The old saying is “They need to know how much you care before they care how much you know.” Medved’s focus on the positive seems to be conveying that message very nicely.
Strike Two: MLB TV announcer Jessica Mendoza raised a lot of eyebrows last week when she went on a national show and voiced disappointment about how the whistle was blown on the Houston Astros sign-stealing saga.
“But to go public? Yeah, that didn’t sit well with me and, honestly, it made me sad for the sport that that’s how this all got found out,” Mendoza said on EPSN. “I mean, this wasn’t something that MLB naturally investigated or that even other teams complained about because they naturally heard about it and then investigations happened, but it came from within. It was a player that was a part of it but benefited from it during the regular season when he was a part of that team. I totally get telling your future teammates, helping them win, letting people know. But to go public with it, call them out and start all of this, it’s hard to swallow.”
While Mendoza later amended/explained her point, reiterating that the Astros cheating was a terrible wrong, and that she was glad it came to light. It was how it came out – with former Astro pitcher Mike Fiers going on the record with the media last November, rather than through baseball channels – that was unusual and troubling to her, and some others around baseball.
I’m not saying that Mendoza’s comments were right. I can fully understand why Fiers – a former Astro now pitching for Houston’s chief American League West rival, the Oakland A’s – did what he did. But baseball people would have preferred the cheating was exposed a different way. How, I’m not exactly sure. An anonymous complaint would have fallen on deaf ears. Going to the Astros directly likely would have not gotten much response, either. Whistle blowers gotta blow that whistle, right?
I’m not sure there was/is another way. Still, this wasn’t typically how it happens within baseball.
Here’s an example from my playing days: Back in July of 1987, during the early days of my tenure with the Milwaukee Brewers, we were hosting the then “California” Angels one sunny afternoon. On the mound against us that day was former Brewer (1982-84) and future Hall of Famer, Don Sutton.
We were in the middle of what would become a 91-win season, so we were in the thick of the American League East (at the time) pennant race. Every game mattered. A lot.
We had a pair of future Hall of Famers at the top of our batting order, Paul Molitor and Robin Yount. While I wasn’t a Brewer while Sutton was, many my teammates – including Robin and Paul – had been. So, to them, Sutton was not only a former teammate (they’d gone to the World Series together in 1982) but a friend.
In the hours leading up to the game I was hearing stories in the clubhouse about how Sutton doctored the baseball. The Brewers hitters were fully expecting him to do so that afternoon. And they had no plans to complain about it. They just wanted to beat him that day.
I was puzzled. If you know someone was actively cheating, wouldn’t that need to be reported?
Not in baseball. If the other team is doing something nefarious, in most cases you have to find a way to counter it.
When the game started, Paul led off the bottom of the first inning with a base hit. One out later, Robin followed with a smash at Angels second baseman Mark McLemore. McLemore’s throw to second forced out Molitor, but the relay throw from shortstop Gus Polidor sailed into our dugout. I picked up the ball.
As I examined that baseball, I discovered a very small scuff mark, about the size of a dime, on the narrow part of the ball between the seams. This is exactly what I’d been told Sutton was going to do several times during the game to get more movement on his less-than-overpowering fastball.
When Robin and Paul were back in the dugout, I heard Robin tell the bench, “Ya, I hit a scuffer, but it didn’t do much and I hit it pretty good…” No complaints or any sort of emotion from anyone. Just matter-of-fact information sharing.
As the game wore on, I collected several more game ball’s that Sutton had thrown – each had that same small scuff mark on the same place on the baseball. No Brewer said a word about it to umpires or anyone else.
Sutton ended up pitching 5 2/3 innings, giving up six runs including a pair of homers to our catcher Bill Schroeder. The Angels still beat us 12-6 (and no, I didn’t pitch in the game.)
Fast forward to now. Last week I spoke with a friend of mine who’s also a good friend of Washington Nationals star pitcher Stephen Strasburg. A few weeks ago, he’d spoken to Strasburg and brought up the Astros scandal. My friend told me that while Strasburg didn’t come right out and say it, he hinted that by the time the World Series rolled around, the Nats had figured out what the Astros were doing and taken countermeasures. That could have been something as simple as changing the catcher’s signs – which is typically done with a runner on second base – every inning, or even every batter. All teams have multiple sets of signs from the catcher that they use to prevent sign-stealing.
Whatever the Nationals did worked like a charm. The Astros vaunted offense scored a total of 11 runs in four home losses, and Washington won the World Series.
The Nationals response was a much more typical baseball response to allegations that the other team is cheating.
Maybe what Fiers did – which took a lot of nerve on his part – will become more typical moving forward. Maybe not.
Strike Three: We’re about six weeks from the start of high school baseball season. This will be my fourth year as a high school head coach. I’m getting more anxious by the day.
Recently, I got an email (part of a mass email group thing) about a California spring baseball league offering an alternative to playing for your high school. Why this came to me, I’ll never know or understand. It was from a group called “Blue Chip Baseball.”
Coach,
There are a lot of players that don’t play for their HS team in the Spring. There are a variety of reasons why. If you know of players that are not playing HS ball but still want the opportunity to be placed into college baseball, PLEASE pass this information along to them.
Our Spring League teams will play 20+ games. Players just attend one of these tryouts. No cost to tryout.
All I could do was shake my head in disbelief. (First of all, why would this be sent to a high school coach?) I think this is disgusting and wrong. (And btw, there most certainly IS a cost for doing this. The exact figure wasn’t on the web site, but it will be well into four figures.)
Now, I’m on record defending “club” and “travel” sports for kids. Many of these organizations can and do help young athletes further their playing careers, especially in light of budget cuts that schools are constantly dealing with. There are some excellent coaches in club ball who have the athlete’s best interest at heart.
Clubs have become increasingly important for kids at the middle school level, where some school districts have eliminated middle school sports altogether in order to save money. If not for organizations like Bill Hanzlik’s Gold Crown Foundation, a lot of middle school aged kids wouldn’t have a place to play sports like basketball and volleyball during these formative years.
Of course, these clubs don’t stop after middle school. Some of the more expansive club organizations have teams in age groups from age eight to 18. They offer kids a chance to compete in their favorite sport during what would normally be an ‘off’ season. Historically, the good organizations – like Gold Crown – don’t have teams or competitions that overlap with the high school season of any sport. The quality clubs consider high school season off limits.
And it very much should be. The high school sports season should be sacred.
We can argue the merits of playing a single sport year ‘round all day. Some guys I respect a lot will argue with me that a young player who wants to play baseball at the college level needs to give up playing other sports and play/practice baseball all year ‘round in order to develop the necessary skill set. I vehemently disagree with that. I’ll go to my grave believing that young athletes are far better off participating in multiple sports all the way through high school. Statistics about those who gets drafted into the NFL, for example, back me up.
But one thing we ALL should agree on is that playing for your school should be sacred. There’s nothing quite like pulling on a uniform and representing your school in athletic competition. It’s a thrill we remember our entire lifetime.
As I tell my players when we’re talking about club/travel summer baseball: If the coach/organization you’re considering is more about making money, then stay as far away from them as you can. But if the coaches for a particular club are quality people who truly have the player’s best interest at heart (and not what kind of money they’re going to make from coaching) then we can all work together to help that player achieve his goals.
The good club organizations I know understand that the high school sports season is something special, something to be relished, remembered and revered…not something they can be a $ub$titute for.