Cajuns to face potent Bobcats pitching staff

[NewsCopy]

UL — When Louisiana baseball coach Tony Robichaux looks at scouting reports for Texas State, he sees the ghosts of Ragin' Cajuns past. The Bobcats, in their first year in the Sun Belt Conference, come to M. L. "Tigue" Moore Field ...

The rest of the story ...

[DaddyCajun]

Dan McDonald, one of the voices of the Cajuns in years past. Great voice, great articles, but your big Wigs must have your perverbial Quill & Ink controlled if you have to UL-Lafayette us throughout every article. Pretty sad and redundant. Wish you were back helping the Cajuns as a voice on the Radio or at least doing your own show on KPEL!

[basinbear]

Dan McDonald, one of the voices of the Cajuns in years past. Great voice, great articles, but your big Wigs must have your perverbial Quill & Ink controlled if you have to UL-Lafayette us throughout every article. Pretty sad and redundant. Wish you were back helping the Cajuns as a voice on the Radio or at least doing your own show on KPEL!

The Advocate would change what Dan writes regardless......on a second note....he was a great SID for over 20 years at UL and when at the University fought constantly to have the sports media use USL or Southwestern Louisiana instead of the constantly used SWLA and SW Louisiana.....the name changed but the fight remains the same......

[Cajunjeb]

Good article about the Cajuns playing Texas State this weekend. Stay focused guys...

[basinbear]

Troy?????

[RaginDave]

Quick scouting report on The Bobcats of Texas State:

They only have one regular day player that is batting over .300, and that is Garret Mattlage, he is batting .310 with a couple of homers. As a team they are only batting .252 and only have 7 hitters with HR, with Granger Studdard leading the way with 5. As a team they have hit a total of 18. So not much pop in the bats. Mattlage is the key to the offense, leading the team in batting average, doubles, RBI's, Walks, Stolen Bases and OBA. They don't run much but when they do they are effective. Mattlage has only attempted 12 steals, but has been successful in 10 attempts. If we can keep Mattlage off the bases you can get to TSU. To compare this the Cajuns have 4 players with more attempted steals than Mattlage of TSU. But the Cajuns are only effective on 71% of the time, while TSU is effective 82% of the time. The Cajuns have attempted twice as many steals as a team than the Bobcats.

Defensively they have not been that good, the Bobcats have a fielding % of .963 committing 62 errors, compared to the Cajuns 39. Mattlage as good as he is on offense is not that good on Defense. Ryan Leonards is the only player for the Cajuns with double digit errors with 10, Mattlage alone has 13 at SS, while Blake Trahan our SS has only 8.

But where they are good is on the mound. They have a staff ERA of 3.51 with all 3 weekend starters with Sub 4.00 ERA's. In fact they have 10 pitchers on the staff with Sub 4.00 ERA's and 4 with Sub 3.00 ERA's. Austen Williams leads the way with a 6-1 record and a 2.58 ERA in 10 starts. Taylor Black sports a 3-4 record with a 3.22 ERA in 10 starts and Lucas Humpal has a 3-3 record with a 3.59 ERA in 10 starts. They have many options out of the pen, Cory Geisler ahs a 3-0 record with a 1.84 ERA, Hunter Lemke has 9 saves with a 3.55 ERA and a 5-3 record. They had 2 games this week where they went against Baylor and threw 3 arms Tuesday night, Tyler Davenport, Dylan Bein and Ross Goebel and then came back and threw 4 arms Wednesday including Chad Young, Andrew Boes, Cory Geisler and Hunter Lemke, so they need a great start by Williams tonight so that they don't have to dig into a very used pen tonight. Meanwhile the Cajuns used 2 pitchers Hicks and Carter Tuesday night, so they should have a very rested pen ready tonight.

Tonight will be a challenge as a starter for the Cajuns getting his first start in quite some time, goes up against a very good Bobcat starter. If we can get to there pen early, we could be in good shape, what we can not have is for Williams to sit in a rocking chair and just get comfortable, he is good, he has not gone less than 5 innings in any of his starts, including 9 vs USA, and 8 vs Georgia State, as well as 7 plus vs Air Force and Washington State. He also has gone 6+ vs UC Riverside, WKU, ASU and ULM. His worst outing was vs UTA where he went 5 innings giving up 6 hits, 3 runs all earned 5 walks and 6 K's and 5-2/3 innings vs Wagner where he gave up 8 hits 6 runs and 4 earned, while waling 1 and striking out 5. FYI, he has struck out at least 5 in each of his 10 starts. He has walked 16 and Stuck out 69 in 66.1 innings pitched.

Tonight is going to be a good pitchers duel if Austin is pitching well.

[CajunEXPRESS]

IMO the pre game hype about the Bobcats leads me to think they are stiffest competition the Cajuns will have faced in conference this season to date. Will be had to win the series and even harder to sweep, but we need to sweep.

[campo118]

Next two weekends in a row will be the two toughest tests since Bama came to town… but nowhere near as good as Bama FWIW

[cajunfan337]

Next two weekends in a row will be the two toughest tests since Bama came to town… but nowhere near as good as Bama FWIW

Agreed, this will be another good gauge of this team against, I believe, postseason pitching

[BirdofParadise]

Dave, if you look, their conference numbers offensively are quite a bit better than their overall numbers. Mattlage is hitting almost .380 in league play and Geisler isn't far behind. Their leading home run hitter with five has hit all of them lin league play.

They have some holes in their lineup, but you can't discount the first five guys or so. They don't swing it like UTA, but they aren't donkeys, either.

I agree with you about getting rid of the starter. IMO, that bullpen, outside of Lemke and Geisler, is just okay.

[RaginDave]

agreed Jay, I was just looking at overall numbers, not conference numbers. I appreciate your input on this. Yuenlings all around.

[Ned Clampett]

Damn Dave, that took some work. Thanks for the info!