Reliabull

Congratulations indeed. You young'uns did miss something in not seeing the Heintz/Gload era Bulls.

-- Heintz was and is still clearly the best team leader USF ever had. His nickname was Sarge and he earned it.

-- When injuries depleted the catcher ranks, Heintz volunteered to play there. He started as a SS, played some OF and wound up at 3B -- anywhere EC needed him.

-- Set an NCAA record for sac flies in a season.

-- Hit 3 HRs in a regional game against NC State.

-- Won an NCAA postgraduate scholarship for academics.

Just a great guy and not heavily recruited -- the kind of guy some on this board would sneer at because the big boys didn't want him. In fact, I met the retired coach at U of Penn in the stands this fall during a scrimmage. He said he thought he'd recruited Heintz until the last minute (his brother Bob, the PGA golfer, played golf at Yale).

Not necessarily in the doghouse, but I think he's been playing hurt and in a slump as well. Karns has recovered pretty much from an early injury.

BIG EAST Overall  

                   W L T Pct. W L T  

JoeB: Here are the rest of the games...

West Virginia 3 0 0 1.000 13 5 0  

Rutgers          3 0 0 1.000 12 10 0

Connecticut   2 1 0 .667 8 10 0  

USF               4 2 0 .667 18 8 0  

Louisville       2 1 0 .667 16 8 0  

Pittsburgh     3 3 0 .500 9 11 0

Villanova       1 2 0 .500 9 8 0

Cincinnati      1 2 0 .500 12 12 0

Notre Dame   1 2 0 .333 9 11 0

St. John's       1 2 0 .333 8 10 0  

Georgetown   0 3 0 .000 9 16 0

Seton Hall       0 3 0 .000 5 12 0  

West Virginia 2-0

Rutgers 2-0

UConn 2-0

Cinci 1-0

USF 3-2

Louisville 1-1

Notre Dame 1-1

Villanova 1-1

Pitt 1-3

Seton Hall 0-2

Georgetown 0-2

St. John's 0-2

Not so long ago, you did NOT want to travel to the Pit. Not only was the gym sold out, but the Lobos fans were/are extremely vociferous. It was a tough place to play and not many teams went in there and came out with a victory.

UNM basketball has, until recently, been very good and occasionally excellent. For many years, UNM, UTEP (with Don Haskins at the helm),BYU and Utah made the WAC a tough conference.

Highlight of the night, besides Quevedo's great effort, goes to Yuri Higgins, who

(a) tackled Rocky when he led a small child in a race to home plate, and

( grabbed a mike and came into the stands to lead the crowd in YMCA between innings...

That's something never seen at Red McEwen before...

That's odd -- I'm looking at last year's schedule and all of those dates are included. And, in fact, I'm very sure those were included on the schedules going back to '90s.

Saturday games are at 6 p.m. now.

He pulled his name because when the time comes for him to move up, Grant's going to a much higher profile program.

We've got plenty of other possibilities out there.

As a former resident of Texas who lived in both places, let me assure you that you will want to spend much more of your time in Austin than in Waco. There's plenty of great stuff in Austin besides college sports -- I can't say the same for Waco.

Oral Roberts University has a player with probably the single greatest name in the entire history of NCAA Basketball...

Kenn Tutt (he was born in Arizona...lived in  a condo made of stone-o)

Central Michigan wins 6-2 on a 2-hitter. USF committed 6 errors and looked even worse than that.

It looked like we were suffering from a UF hangover and Central Michigan took advantage. Daniel Thomas pitched OK, but had to burn a lot of pitches to get out of lengthy innings.

2,300 of those 2,426 fans forgot to show up Friday night.

Typically, artificial noisemakers are not allowed in NCAA events. But don't tell that to the fans at Mississippi State.

It's difficult to hear other sections of fans at Red McEwen and I've sat/stood in all of them. If you're down a baseline, you can't hear the bleachers very much. If you're in the bleachers, you can't hear the USF dugout unless you go down very close to the field by the dugout. So I suspect it was really wasn't as quiet overall as you might think.

And, Collin, I loved Lollygaggers. I could stand Lollygaggers every game. And, come to think of it, you could add Candlesticks to the mix for mound conferences as well.

Thoughts from the game:

Great crowd and a great game with an ending that wasn't what we wanted.

JoeB, I thought the pitch to LaPorta was a good one, but like the great player he is, he went down and got it.

To me, the play that sent us off-kilter was the walk and so-called wild pitch. Everyone, including Prado, thought the umpire had signaled a balk and that would have nullified the pitch. It looked screwy and I think the umpire did the equivalent of swallowing his whistle.

I've seen coaches that want their kids to be vocal like Prado and I've seen others who wanted less rah-rah and more focus on the game like Cardieri (though his later teams were more vocal than they were in the '90s). Neither system is wrong. But when things go south, a change always seems to help.

Someone please let the support staff know that if you get 2,400 for a game, you need more portapotties.

I will respectfully disagree with Bulliever here. The history of USF baseball has been until last May an indictment of an athletic department that never put more than a nickel into the baseball program than it had to. It probably has been better than it should have been, though not as good as it could have been.

The short version: Robin Roberts basically brought them to an NCAA level program in the '70s and '80s. EC had some very good teams from '86 through '94 and a Top 20 level group from 1995-97. The team struggled for a year or two after in rebuilding, but got back to the regional level in 2000-01 in a much more competitive league than it had played in before.

And somewhere after that, something changed (and there's plenty of speculation why). One of the most knowledgeable baseball men I've met in 30 years of following the sport told me last year that the difference over a five-year period was like night and day. And he was right.

If you want more input on EC as a coach, ask jg or EXBULL21, who played for him and can give you their perspective. As a recruiter, he did OK but missed on too many big-name players. It seemed that U of Tampa always managed to snare a big prospect every couple of years that he should have snagged. But this also has to be said: EC's players were almost always good representatives of USF on and off the field and in the classroom.

The biggest problem was the lack of support from the athletic department. Even in the Top 20 days with Gload, Dellaero and Heintz crushing the ball, there was never a chance of getting to host a regional (back then, six teams, double-elimination) because of the complete absence of marketing to build crowds. And in the six-team regionals, you basically had to go into a Top 10 team's stadium and win a grueling tournament where one loss meant you had to go 5-1 over four days to win. Home-field advantage was a TRUE home-field advantage on those tournaments.

The hiring of Prado at a considerable salary was the real commitment ever to this program. There will be a new stadium and there is the first real attempt to add some pizzazz to the experience. Like everyone, I'm very pleased so far.

I'm not interested in a debate here. I know Bulliever has strong opinions on the topic. I have a different perspective than he does: If University X commits 250 percent less money than does a university that is regularly considered a Top 20 baseball team, then even if it's located in a goldmine of high school talent, I don't expect University X to finish .500, much less get to Omaha. And that's the real history of USF baseball.

This was a great pitchers' duel between Otero and Josh Santerre of Manhattan. Both pitchers had great stuff. Otero's 3-0 with a 0.41 ERA.

I know the common perception on this board is that a non-headline school like Manhattan from the North can't compete, but last year Manhattan marched into the Lincoln, Neb. regional and whipped Nebraska in game 1 and got to the finals before losing to Miami. This isn't a walkover weekend.

To pitch a book that explains the complexities and intricacies of draft preparation, try Pete Williams' The Draft, which goes into great detail about what players like Nicholas should be doing.

For example, he should not only be receiving interview coaching, but should have been on an individualized training regimen that worked on his weakest areas (whatever they may be) and Combine training (how to maximize a standing jump, for one) at a Bolliterri-type facility. One of the tricks is that only certain agents can get their clients into the most respected of these facilities...

Understanding that this is a very busy time of year for sports departments, if the baseball team can't get even a paragraph in the sports section on game days, then the beat writers need to find a way to cover the team into a weekly notes column. The beat writers in Gainesville and Tallahassee and across the street from the Trib don't have a problem doing this.

Don't kid yourself about Jacksonville -- year in and year out, that's a solid baseball team.

The best thing about today was that the Bulls didn't give up. USF survived an umpire who took Chris Delaney out of the game with an incredibly tight strike zone. Sanford came in and did a great relief job. Bilardello was incredibly unlucky in giving up two hits - a nubbed chopper into no-man's land and a 2-RBI pop fly that was aided by the wind and fell fair by inches.

But after JU reliever Dunlap hit three batters on his first three pitches (2 rightys, 1 lefty), we battled to get 2 RBI groundouts and Dexter Butler had the at-bat of his USF career. At 2-2, he held his swing against a nasty curveball and then pounded a single up the middle for the winner.

Yuri Higgins dominated them in the 9th 1-2-3 and we're 6-0 going into Stetson, which apparently took 2 of 3 from LSU in Deland this weekend.

Shoop:

The team wore those uniforms in your picture Friday and Saturday night. They then wore a different green jersey on Sunday -- that one is pictured on the schedule poster available at the field.

Today, the Bulls brought out a second green jersey. This one is made by Adidas and has the 3-stripe pattern at the top of the shoulder with a white mesh strip running from shoulder to shoulder across the back where a nameplate would typically go. Gold numerals trimmed in white with the Bull symbol on the left chest and a gold/white trimmed number on the front right.

Wags gets the save and the best part was that he wasn't rattled when his infield let a sure DP get away on his first batter. He came back and got the next three batters.

Good job, Wags.

One thing that hasn't changed is that we still struggle against junkballers. The High Point starter could have been timed with a sundial but held us in check for 5 innings.

However, we got a great relief effort from freshman Matt Quevedo who gave up no hits in 4 innings and we got big RBI hits by Walter Diaz and Josh Leroy in the 7th.

Go for the sweep...

I think it's great. I'm trying to imagine another coach doing that and can't come up with any.