Baseball Recap

The Hoosier Baseball team starts it's official Spring Trip today (heading down to Florida) and I figured that now would be a good time to recap the early part of the season.

The Hoosiers right now are sitting on a .500 record and have shown eerie consistency when it comes to pitching and offense, save for two offensive explosions of 16 and 15 runs respectively (so maybe no consistency, ha). Once we get further into the season it will be fun to use some stats, even simple things like the Pythagorean Theorem to see how the Hoosiers are/should be doing but right now it's a bit pointless. Case on point, after 8 games the Hoosiers Pythagorean record *should* be 7-1, not 4-4
. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm taking the Hoosiers runs scored (60) and runs allowed (23) and doing the following forum la:

RS^2/(RS^2+RA^2), so 60^2/(60^2+23^2)= .87 - That .87 equals the projected winning percentage when scoring and allowing that # of runs. Simply multiplying the % by # of games played gives you number of wins, 6.9. But as you can tell, with such a small sample size thus far, and two outlier offensive performances it throws it a bit off.

So now for that promised recap, let's just look at IU leaders in some basic categories:

So far Freshmen Evan Crawford leads the Hoosiers in AB (32), R (8), H (16), TB (18), OB% (.514), AVG (.500), and SLG% (.563). The fact that hit slugging percentage is so high is fairly odd, as Crawford has proven himself to be pretty much a pure singles hitter, with only 2 doubles, no triples and no home runs. It is being influenced by the walks he's drawn and the sacrifices, obviously this is a stat that will even out and soon.

There is no other single Hoosier on offense who stands out like Crawford, but Indiana's "Mr. Baseball" Josh Phegley leads the team with 6 doubles, thats out of 10 total hits. Keith Haas leads the team in RBI (8) and HR (1).

Overall the team AVG is .281, OBP .345, SLG .348, with a K:BB ratio of 45:25 (that last one's not too hot...). The team has been pretty good on the basepaths, swiping 11 bags in 17 attempts.

On the pitching side, Chris McCombs is standing out, with a 1.86 ERA in 9.2 innings, going 1-1, with 10 K's, and no walks. Joe Vicini has pitched 5.2 scoreless innings of relief, and several other Hoosier relievers have tossed a fair number of scoreless innings, while all striking people out. The Hoosier pitchng squad has about 1.6 strikeouts for every walk, with a WHIP of 1.44. I'm not sure what a *good* WHIP is in college ball, seeing as there is an increased contact rate as opposed to professional baseball, but I'm guessing 1.44 is average to decent. Any help on that would be appreciated.