Baseball Lays an Egg — Sign of Bigger Problems?
Mean reversion is an inevitable part of baseball, but you'd expect it would come against an ASU, Stanford, et al, not Washington. Washington has now fucked up the Beavs football and baseball seasons.
Beavs are fielding .970, which is ~40th percentile. Ideally you want .975 or better. For reference, Oregon leads the NCAA at .987. You know the old saying "strong up the middle"? Well the Beavs have Max Gordon (.960 with 0 assists), Tyler Smith (.955) and Andy Peterson (.960). Beavs are 93rd in runs scored and 92nd in batting average. They're getting by on pitching (#2 ERA heading into the weekend), but that pitching has been betrayed by the .970 fielders behind them. You could make the point that a lot of these errors were committed over a few games. Fair enough, but elite teams don't have multiple games like that.
Something else to keep in mind: there are many ways to hit .300. For example, a player might go 3 for 10 every series with a hit in all 3 games. Or, they might get 3 hits in one game and go 0-7 the next two games. Ideally you want players who contribute each game, rather than have big games then disappear. I feel like the Beavers who do hit for average do so in clusters. A 3-4 type game followed by two 0-4 (Danny Hayes?). I'm not going to look through each box score to see if that's true, but it feels that way.
Are these issues the pitching can overcome, or will the Beavs fade down the stretch and into the post-season?