Baseball Win, Season Outlook (updated 4.18)

04.18 update: Va Wolf at SFN has a great mid-week entry. NCSU in Top 25 of all three main baseball polls. Also the following commentary:

There’s alot of baseball yet to be played, but if you look at the this year’s national rankings from baseball and football…you quickly reach the conclusion that the ACC is closer to becoming a baseball conference than a football conference. (I don’t think that the ACC has won a BCS bowl game since FSU won the National Title in the 1999 season.) SFN post

Marcus Jones, donning the 42 Sunday in honor of Jackie Robinson, leads the pack to a blowout victory over Miami going 4-for-6, driving in 3 runs from the lead-off position, and scoring 2 runs.

With heavy winds blowing out to left field and Miami short a starting pitcher, NC State jumped to a big early lead, got five innings in to make it an official game before the rain came, and rolled to a 19-9 victory over the Hurricanes in the final game of a three-game Atlantic Coast Conference baseball series at Mark Light Field. The Wolfpack, which won the first game of the series 5-3 in 13 innings, won the series two games to one and improved to 26-11 overall and 11-7 in the ACC. Miami fell to 22-16 and 8-10. (link to article)

State has only played 3 games against the top 4 teams in the ACC. Those 3 games were against FSU in which they won only 1 of those games. The second of the 3 games they lost 5-6. Of the final 13 games of the regular season, 9 will be against UNC, UVa, and Clemson (the other top 4 teams in the ACC thus far). In conference games the offense has been a bright spot leading the ACC in OBP, Runs, RBI, HR, and BB. They also come in 2nd for Hits and 3rd overall BA, and are sporting a top tier defense. The real concern is with an underachieving pitching staff. The team ERA is 7th in the conference. Eric Surkamp has become the ace of the staff, tallying a 56 to 19 K/BB ratio with a 2.98 ERA. Andrew Brackman (see previous entry) is putting up less than stellar numbers in his 3rd year on the staff. NC State has the stars on offense [Mangum (.431 BA 5th-ACC, 14 RBI 7th), and Roskpf (.436 BA 3rd, 6 HR 1st)] and a potentially solid pitching staff to make a run to Omaha, but need to show consistency over the remainder of the season. Brackman desperately needs to establish himself as a solid #2 starter for any hope of a meaningful post-season run.