Countdown To First Pitch
Feb. 19, 2008
The Miami baseball team opens the 2008 season this Friday Feb. 22 against Cincinnati. A countdown to the first pitch has begun. For the next few days UM players will blog about the upcoming season. Today’s blog is by junior center fielder Blake Tekotte.
Heading into the week before our first game and our first series at home versus Cincinnati, the expectations and the excitement are getting higher and higher.
As we get closer, we’re finding out who are going to be the guys to play key roles for us this year. We have a lot of returning veterans back this year, and they will definitely contribute to this team’s success.
This year’s team is lead by captains Dennis Raben and Carlos Gutierrez. Very key players this year, Carlos will be starting off as our closer this year. He will be a great pitcher for us, and it will be a great role for him.
We have more games a week this year than in previous years because of the shorten season, which I think will help us out; because we will have more pitchers that will pitch and we will be more dependent on our bullpen.
It will help us in the playoffs, because you need four or five starters anyway, if you want to make it to Omaha. The more pitchers we can have on fire towards the end of the season, the better chance we have of contending for a national championship, which is what our expectations are this year.
We definitely are looking forward to having a great year. We have a couple of new freshmen that will contribute. We will have a left-handed starting pitcher, Chris Hernandez. He will probably start out as our Sunday pitcher.
Again, we have Easy. I mean we have Eric (Erickson). He should be our Friday guy and Enrique Garcia starting out as our Saturday guy. Then for our weekday pitchers we will probably start off with John Housey and either Jason Santana or Michael Rudman.
In the bullpen, we have a lot more depth this year than we did last year. We got Kyle Bellamy and David Gutierrez, and Alex Koronis should be back to pitch for us. Then we have a couple other guys who will step up – a couple of transfers – and hopefully they can contribute.
We have Ryan Jackson back at shortstop this year, the slick fielding middle infielder, who hit the crap out of the ball in the fall. So if he could carry it on to this spring, we expect a lot of big things.
This past weekend was great with fan fest. We got a chance to play under the lights in front of some fans. This was good. It gave us a little bit more of a gameday feeling so that way we can get ready for Cincinnati.
We just pretty much expect a lot out of this season. Not to put too much pressure on ourselves, we just know what we are capable of. As long as we play our game we will be looking to have a very good season. Thanks for reading, and we’ll be seeing you at Mark Light.
