Barking Carnival

Huck is going to be late. HenryJames may add some commentary. Please feel free to comment below. - S.R.
I get home form work, cut the tv on and the very first thing I see is a three home run by LSU. Damn.
Green got the first two guys before hitting the 3rd batter and [...]

With only Game Three of the championship series left to play, all games pitting an Eastern team versus a Western team have been decided…

This one’s for all the marbles. It all comes down to this. Winner takes all. To help tide us over until gametime and get through the workday, here are some videos of the runups and the final games of our athletic department’s last three chances to take home a national championship with [...]

It’s raining.
First pitch scheduled for around 7:43 Central as of now.
Ms. Andrews is sporting a more colorful ensemble this evening and the game is still scheduled to go off in around 5 minutes.
As reported, Austin Ross will start for the Tigers. He has nice peripherals but a bad ERA and batting average against. [...]

I am now home and will catch up quickly on DVR. Ms. Andrews reports that LSU fans outnumber Texas fans. We are officially doomed.
My kingdom for a left-handed starter, by the way. LSU is a left-handed hitting team and has struggled, relatively speaking, against lefties this year. I guess we’ll have [...]

After over 8,000 games this season we have now reached the Championship Series of college baseball…

Here we go. LSU obliterated Arkansas to make their way to the championship series. Texas is going with Cole Green and the Sun Devils are going with Mike Leake again. I bet Pat Murphy thinks he’s a genius after saying Leake was hurt. Ooh, we never saw that one coming.
If Leake [...]

Okay, I’m now caught up to the game on my DVR. A promising top of the first was killed by a GIDP, Ruffin was pretty sharp in the bottom of the first that was killed by a strike ‘em out throw ‘em out DP. The top of the second saw Leake refuse to [...]

College baseball tradition, that is.

As you may have read from me before, college baseball is seriously tilted to the west…

Thoughts here. I’ll keep up as best I can. Bo Davis leads off against Cole Green.
Davis puts a good swing on the first pitch, but it’s a 395-foot out to dead centerfield. Green gets a fairly liberal inside strike call to start out the second batter. Could be good for our [...]

whether to stay or go.

The 2009 College World Series features two strong favorites in each bracket along with a handful of capable challengers. Pitching and defense is back in full force in college baseball as this year’s field contains seven teams in the Top 16 in the nation at preventing runs. Meanwhile, five teams made [...]

All times local
TCU at Texas
Saturday 5 p.m. (ESPNU), Sunday 2 p.m. (ESPN), Monday 12 p.m./6 p.m. (ESPN/ESPN2) if nec.
Ratings say: Texas 52.3%
The second best super from a competitive standpoint according to the ratings. Texas is favored only because of the standard homefield advantage applied to the ratings. I haven’t watched TCU play this [...]

Wow.
Now, first things first. I like Augie Garrido, I really do. I obviously disagree with his offensive strategy and tactics fairly frequently. But what he did to Austin Wood tonight should be criminal. Absolutely inexcusable to throw a young arm for somewhere in the neighborhood of 170 pitches.
There are also beefs [...]

Essentially repeating the analysis I did for the basketball tourney, I have run the baseball tournament through the superregionals. There it gets a little trickier for my rudimentary analysis with a double elimination setup, so I will likely revisit the analysis after the supers and analyze the CWS itself.

Using my college basketball ratings, I ran an analysis on the NCAA tournament. I only used the power and standard deviation numbers, not the ones that account for wins and losses, so teams that make a habit of winning close games will not be adjusted in this run. This is the first time [...]

In my previous post on this topic, I looked at overall scoring by game situation both for the nation as a whole and the 2008 Texas team. I then looked at what we can learn from that information as far as the decisions to bunt or steal.
In the discussion that followed that post, I [...]

Having followed Longhorn baseball for most of our lives, nearly all of us are familiar with the traditional Texas approach to scoring runs. There seems to exist a segment of the fanbase that frowns upon power in a baseball lineup and will always yearn for smallball as their style of choice. Some of [...]

Noble Doss has passed away at the age of 88.
RIP and Hook ‘em.

As disappointing as this season’s outcome was when you consider the whys regarding our not appearing in the Big 12 Championship Game, which therefore cost us an appearance in the National Championship Game, Longhorn fans will always look back on this year’s squad as an overachieving group. And overachieving groups are always remembered more [...]