Welcome to the Boneyard with Steve Robertson. As always, I am your good friend and host Steve Robertson here on the Hump Day edition of the yard.

A lot to talk about today. It's going to be a quick turnaround for Bulldog baseball. You know, we won a game against Sanford last night. We'll recap that shortly.

We'll look ahead to a Thursday, Friday, Saturday series against a very good South Carolina team.

But how good are they? The record says they're exceptional.

Non-conference play has been maybe a little bit less and challenging, but they've only lost

a couple of midweek games on the year. So Mississippi State's got their work cut out for them,

but here's the deal. It doesn't matter who's in the other dugout.

Our biggest opponent is the strike zone, period. Now, a lot of people have theories about why we're

seeing so many walks in college baseball. A lot of people wonder why there's an up kick in

offense. But I tell you, there's a lot of factors

involved. And, you know, I would say from a macro level, you look at it and say the trackman

technology is giving you a truer zone. So there's more balls across the plate. There's more

pitches to hit. The problem is that's not our problem. You know, sure, it impacts you a little bit. But the reality of it is that if you thought a ball in the dirt or over somebody's head or you hit somebody with a pitch, that's got nothing to do with software, right? But bottom line is, state's got to go out there and throw strikes. They did last night, you know, with rare exception. And granted, it's Sanford. I get it. And I tell you, it's almost impossible these days to have a discussion about Mississippi State baseball. You just can't. You wrote an article the other day about, you know, Connor Heizak. Had a good weekend. Could he be the answer at third base? Very first comment immediately comes to pitching. Because we're all frustrated.

We are. And we don't always know how to voice that maybe in a constructive way, because the

bottom line is there's not much to be positive about. Let's just be honest. We endured a very

difficult season last year. It was very embarrassing. And yes, you could kind of excuse and

explain some of the way to do some major injuries to pitchers we were counting on. But we hoped and felt that would be an anomaly. We went out, we're aggressive in the portal, really chase some guys. Felt we brought in a really good portal class. And on the offensive side, we have. Where would we be without a Monty, Larry, Colton, Ledbetter? Now you see Connor Heisag beginning to show some flashes. So offensively, yeah, we did a good job going out and finding some guys, but clearly we didn't do enough on the pitching side. Yeah, because here we are. And then, of course, Nixon comes in, and he's been banged up a little bit. He pitched last night, his best outing since opening weekend. Then there's Tyler Davis, a guy that we were expected to eat up big

endings for us.

He just struggles to get outs.

Last outing, he didn't get a single player out.

Those are the things like you look at that and you say, you know what?

Some of that obviously his own coaching and evaluation and development,

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