Non-returning baseball players

Quote:

Originally Posted by lifetimecajun

I think its 35 on roster. 27 can only be on aid. Remainder are walk on/preferred walk on. Redshirts count towards your 35. That's the biggest hit i think. A coach is gonna have a hard time redshirting a kid that's counting towards his 35 man roster. Ty days of holding 6-8 kids back in the spring to develope, grow, mature, and work on there game for a year....are over. Kids better be game ready as freshmen. and that's ashame. This is gonna put an even a bigger emphasis on signing kids that can come in and play immediately. Misses in recruiting are gonna be magnified. And roster moves like what's happening now....can probably be expected year in year out. I think coaches will reevaluate harder and harder after each season and get rid of dead weight

On top of that, with the compressed season you have many more weeks where you play two mid-week games to keep your 56 game season. That puts a larger emphasis on pitching, so you have to keep a larger pitching staff on the roster to not over-pitch players. Over-pitching leads to arm injuries, and you can't bring in a redshirt to help out with injuries.

The end result is less position players. Last year the Cajuns had about 15 position players on the 35 man roster. You had two catchers on the roster. These two have to catch bull pen for 20 pitchers, daily. This makes them much more susceptible to injury as well. When Strentz went down early to the arm issue, you had infielders having to catch bull pen sessions. Not a good scenario. We were lucky to have Adam Todd willing (and eligible by the NCAA) to help out while Chris Sinclair had back issues, or we'd have had infielders having to catch in regular games.

As an aside, the APR also came in about the same time, which had it's own set of restrictions.