PurpleBlood87
Active Member
And just think TCU moved this game up to suffer this beatdown.
The schadenfreuede of the Good Olde Days was engaged so easily in because we generally had a team that was good, but not expected to really compete for Championships. The stinking Longhorns were the big winners each and every year. Reveling in their occasional misery was fun. However, those days are past. The Frogs have been fabulous for a good decade, and while it is still amusing to watch the confusion and misery of the stinking Longhorns, they are not the Big Deal they used to be.
The collapse of the Frogs this season has been a painful thing to watch, and especially so coming on the heels of last year's mid-season collapse, too-late resurrection and the subsequent dalliance of Schloss with MS State. This team seems to lack the basic fundamentals that we used to exhibit as a strength, and opposing teams have easily scouted our weaknesses and regularly exploit them. Past the starters, there is evidently no one who can throw strikes. Confidence was shaky at best, and the Saturday collapse may have pushed things over the edge and into the abyss.
Ugh.
There's something else that is quite noticeable and it has nothing to do with their play in the field (and it was quite noticeable last season as well - and perhaps the prior one although I don't recall it as much) -- this program used to have a standard of intensity, excellence, and hustle that extended far past live ball situations. Players sprinted to their positions and engaged quickly in their between inning preparations, they hustled down the line at all times...not just when they believed they had a chance to make it safely, and they got into and out of the dugout (and cleared the field) with an urgency that was quite uncommon. I'm not sure when this style of professionalism and intensity and focus left the program but it is markedly absent and has been for a while. Players ground out and lolly-gag around first base. Players strike out and saunter back to the dugout. Players are late arriving for between inning preparations. It used to be that you'd rarely (if ever) see a Frog player walking or lightly jogging between the lines. Now it's the norm. And this was true for game situations and in-and-outs.
I've mentioned this before but I knew (and know) many Okie Lite players and their parents. Going back to 2011 I was told by Okie Lite players, parents, and two coaches that the way TCU approached the game was intimidating as hell. One player told me directly that when you saw TCU show up and saw their non-game hustle and their focus and intensity, it made him wonder if he had prepared enough to play against a team that seemingly wanted it more than he did. This was immediately after TCU took 2 of 3 against Okie Lite and then turned around and beat Baylor for the second time that year.
And, I think that signature endeared this program to a certain segment of baseball fans. I hope we're not losing that.
how much of this comes from the inclusion of transfers who sign with the thought they are here for a season to get drafted and move on?
i am not advocating recruiting solely high school kids who are brought in and indoctrinated to the culture of the program.
as has been discussed on this board a number of times the frogs are at a big economic disadvantage compared to their peers with who can afford to come play baseball at tcu as opposed to just 8 years ago and schloss has commented that the transfers allow for some economic flexibility when recruiting them as opposed to high school players.
...this program used to have a standard of intensity, excellence, and hustle that extended far past live ball situations. Players sprinted to their positions and engaged quickly in their between inning preparations, they hustled down the line at all times...not just when they believed they had a chance to make it safely, and they got into and out of the dugout (and cleared the field) with an urgency that was quite uncommon. I'm not sure when this style of professionalism and intensity and focus left the program but it is markedly absent and has been for a while. Players ground out and lolly-gag around first base. Players strike out and saunter back to the dugout. Players are late arriving for between inning preparations. It used to be that you'd rarely (if ever) see a Frog player walking or lightly jogging between the lines. Now it's the norm. And this was true for game situations and in-and-outs.
I have no idea. I expect that it boils down to the character of players and peer leadership. What I do know is that fans tend to look at Bryan Holaday as a standard of clubhouse and on-field leadership and likely rightly so. What may be missed is that Bryan was himself a transfer from NCTC. There's also little doubt that asking a kid to "pay" TCU prices for two years instead of four or five makes sense economically.