It’s been a roller-coaster ride of a baseball season so far for the Georgia Southern Eagles, but as the schedule begins winding down and GSU looks ahead to a break from Southern Conference play this weekend, they finally hit the bar.
After a three-game sweep of Furman last weekend, the Eagles got their team batting average over .300.
I’ve always said that in college baseball if you bat .300 and have a 6.00 ERA as a team, you can play with anybody, and if you bat .350 and keep the ERA at 5.00, you’ll be ranked, the coveted 40 wins will come and you’ll punch a ticket to the NCAA regionals. If the ERA goes up from there, you’ll be fine as long as the batting average goes up too. It works the same way if you keep your ERA down.
Those are the benchmarks, and that’s my formula. It really is that simple.
Take No. 4 Georgia Tech (36-9, 23-3 ACC). The Jackets are batting .328, and with an eye-popping team ERA of 3.75, it’s easy to see why they’re in the Top 5.
Then, there’s The Citadel (29-17, 17-4 SoCon). The Bulldog aren’t in the Top 25, but they’ve found the formula for success and are tops in the conference batting .306 with a 4.92 ERA.
Second in the league is College of Charleston, and the Cougars (33-12, 17-7 SoCon) are batting .314 with a 5.56 ERA – worse on the mound and a little bit better at the plate.
Next in the standings is Georgia Southern (26-19, 16-8 SoCon), batting .301 with a 6.01 ERA.
Seeing a theme develop?
Sure, my little system isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t take into account defense, unearned runs, base running, slugging, stranded runners or just plain badness.
But the system is what I use for taking good teams and finding out how “good” they really are, and teams that commit a lot of errors and can’t advance baserunners generally aren’t any good anyway and thus are irrelevant to the discussion.
Back to Georgia Southern.
To me, it’s no coincidence that just as the Eagles reached that .300 mark, they also put themselves in a position to, believe it or not, outright win the Southern Conference regular-season championship. They trail the Cougars by one game and The Citadel by 2.5. It just so happens that when GSU is off in non-conference land next weekend, those two teams are playing each other.
Because the Eagles have two SoCon series’ remaining – against a very beatable Davidson squad and the last one against The Citadel – they’ll have a very good chance leading up to the end of the regular season at leapfrogging the Bulldogs. Till then, let’s hope Charleston can keep the Bulldogs honest.
The way this young GSU squad was playing at the beginning of the season, that’s about as good a situation as it could hope for. Let’s just hope the batting average keeps going up and the ERA keeps going down just a little bit.
A sigh of relief
For a while there, it seemed like the city of Atlanta may never win another professional sporting event.
While the Hawks were busy squandering a two-game lead by dropping three-straight games to Milwaukee in the first round of the NBA playoffs, the Braves were putting together a nine-game losing streak – which included an 0-7 road trip that marked the worst such outing since 1949.
Thankfully, the Bucks remembered that they don’t know how to score without Andrew Bogut and the Braves ran smack dab into a Houston Astros club that was due for a sweeping.
It may not have seemed like it at the time, but things could have been a lot worse in Coldlanta.
It’s up to the Orlando Magic and the Washington Nationals to determine the mood in the big city this week.
Matt Yogus can be reached at (912) 489-9408.