[flameshaw]

It's more about being at games and pre-games on the field and seeing the details of Quinn working with the pitchers. Go for the negative, I'll listen / read. I know it and see some of it, I just choose to find the positive.

Since we are pointing out flaws, How about your disdain for Toman? Wonder if that spills over to Quinn?

If you're willing to listen, I'm willing to talk. I'll answer your last question first: Part of my disdain for Toman has to do with what Quinn is allowed to do.

Here are the reasons I don't think Quinn is a good pitching coach:

1) We don’t know how to manage the staff. Our preseason work is horrible because we don't prepare guys for roles. In the fall you can mix and match and roll guys out and see where the chips fall. Once you go into the winter you should have an idea of who your candidates are for each role. Then you prepare them over the winter accordingly. We are still running guys out in spring scrimmages to find out who the best guy is. And then we ask that guy to go 8-9 innings once the season starts. Then, to top it off, we move the Friday night starter to a mid-week game and totally mess up his routine because we don't trust or develop our mid-week guys. We react to others instead of having a plan that drives what we do.

2) We abuse arms by overthrowing (i.e. Constant complete games, over using guys in the tournament, having guys in the bullpen warming up multiple times in a game and not bringing them in). There are multiple major league teams that won't draft our pitchers because they know their arms are over used and under taught. You can also see this in the fact that we only use 6-8 pitchers each year while having twice that amount on the roster. In 2013, Josh Richardson was our closer for most of the year and then we threw him for 25 innings in ten days for the conference tournament and regionals. Even in our best time results wise, we used six pitchers to throw 50 innings in four days. We rolled out Ashton Perritt four straight days.

3) We abuse arms by throwing way too many breaking pitches way too often. Quinn uses the slider to set up the fastball and not the other way around. Watch us when a guy gets in trouble. It's spinner, spinner, spinner. It's well known throughout college baseball that we have a ton of talent but are sloppy and not coached. Better coached and prepared teams are rarely worried because they know we are going to make mistakes and turn to off speed in jams.

4) We don’t develop talent but rely on how good players are when they get there and what they learn in summer ball. It's why Bean has gotten worse. Baseball guys who know what they're doing watch Bean and can tell you what the problem is. Bean has more raw talent than all of our weekend guys but he hasn't been developed. That's on the pitching coach. They (he and Toman) truly don't believe in coaching kids up. If they miss on a kid, they write him off and go recruit someone else. I know it's business but they take it to extremes and don't try to develop guys. If guys get better it's because they play and get more innings or because they were very well coached in high school and understand the game.

Also, let me add this: I have nothing against Garrett Quinn the man. There is nothing to say he's not a good dude, a good husband, or a good dad. Everything I'm saying is fully, 100% on-the-field.

At the end of the day, here's what we have to expect under a Toman/Quinn coached team: We will have loads and loads of talent on our roster each and every year. We will be knocking on the door of a regional each year because our talent will always be better than 3/4 of our conference. We will always have trouble with well coached teams (i.e. Coastal and Radford currently) because they out coach our talent. When our talent clicks, we see the magical runs of late 2013 and early 2014. When it doesn't click, you see close losses to top 50 teams and wondering what it's going to take to get over the hump.

You know in the past I had some serious issues with Toman. However, you have to give credit where it is due. He is doing a very good job of coaching our team. I personally know some major league scouts who would disagree with most of your comments. In fact, they have sent us some players to see how they develop at D1. Toman speaks to scouts on a regular basis and does a good job of following up on prospective players. We have some good players in the pipeline and I am excited for the future. It is easy to say it now, but I did not think we were going to have as good a year as last year because just too many things fell in place for us last year.
Bottom line I believe past negativity may be clouding your thoughts regarding our present situation. I have watched almost every game this year and rarely, if ever disagree with the X's and O's deployed by the staff. I do think it was a mistake to try to make Perritt a starter and believe it has hurt his performance as a reliever. However, it didn't take long for the staff to see their mistake and reverse their decision. MAYBE there was a good reason they tried it in the first place, maybe not, but we will never know. Personally, I hope he stays on as our coach for the foreseeable future. Peace out.