Diamond Ducks No. 10 in the Nation...Why? So Many Surprises...

Up to No. 10 in D1Baseball rankings, the only B1G team ranked...Our Beloved Ducks have more surprises than I want to list here. Two of them were B1G Freshman of the Week last week, Burke-Lee Mabeus, and now B1G Player of the Week in Dominic Hellman.

Mabeus is one of the heralded freshmen who are already performing, while Hellman is a great development story.  I wrote him off, just as I did Collin Clarke, our Saturday night starter, but both have improved beyond what anyone anticipated.

While the numbers are inflated a bit, we do have eight players batting over .300 at the moment!  And that does not include Chase Meggers, one of last year's best still not back from injury. Ditto for Parker Stinson, a transfer that Coach Waz said was the best hitter in fall camp.

Burke-Lee Mabeus

A new OBD member, sports fan, noted that our Friday night starting pitcher and first relief pitcher have fallen off last year's results. I felt that two games was too soon to make an assessment, but both came up short of their best this last weekend as well. Grinsell, I sense, will recover.  Featherston? I don't know...so that was a great observation by our new member.

But boy...so many great pitching surprises and faces. We have a JC guy, Santiago Garcia, who had some scoreless innings, and while I was chortling about our four surprising freshman pitchers....Waz trots out another one, Tanner Bradley, who looked good.  We DO have a lot of arms to turn to!

We have a game at 4:00 PM PST Tuesday night at PK Park against Utah Tech on B1G+, and I suspect that the "Pride of Sherwood," Ian Umlandt, will be the starter.

Fine surprises, and we DO have a shot at Omaha!