Is now the time to press the panic button?
Analysis by Carl James @jovian34 March 15th, 2024
Wednesday night was the tipping point of fan frustration with Hoosier pitching. Indiana is now 9-8 overall, but 3-7 in the last ten games. Two of those losses include home midweeks against Purdue Fort Wayne and Illinois State. On Wednesday night the Redbirds put up 15 runs (12 earned) in the first four innings. And it wasn’t “lucky” hits. A lot of these balls were absolutely smoked.
The last couple of weeks have been a shock to the system, after a relatively strong couple of weeks that saw Indiana rise to number 20 in D1Baseball’s rankings. D1’s Aaron Fitt specifically cited the opening weekend pitching performances as their reason for making the move to rank the Hoosiers.
Coming into the 2024 season, pitching was the big question mark holding this talented Indiana team out of the D1Baseball Top-25. In 2023 Indiana won 43 games and managed to do so with only one true starting pitcher, Luke Sinnard. Sinnard went down with a UCL tear in the Lexington Regional, but the Hoosiers still won the first two games by stacking a group of good arms including Brayden Risedorph, Ty Bothwell, Ryan Kraft, Craig Yoho, and Connor Foley.
Yoho was selected in the 8th round of the MLB Draft and signed with the Milwaukee Brewers. Sinnard was replaced on the 2024 roster due to his recovery from Tommy John surgery. Without those two Indiana needed to add some key pieces and depth to pitching via the transfer portal.
Two proven pieces pitching coach Dustin Glant picked up were Boston College’s Julian Tonghini and Lipscomb’s successful closer Matt Bohnert. Glant also identified three pitchers who had clear talent, but needed some adjustments to make successful: Jack Moffitt from Gonazaga, Ben Grable from Northwestern, and Drew Buhr from Bellarmine. Glant’s other big D1 transfer pickup was Ty Rybarczyk from Illinois, who went down with a UCL tear during Illinois’ first game of 2023. Rybarczyk was the Illini’s opening day starter but only got two innings in. The Hoosiers also dipped into an often-used successful pipeline bringing in lefty Brandon Keyster from John A. Logan Community College, the same school that brought IU Tanner Gordon.
January brought some unwelcome news as Bohnert was reported to be out for the season with injury and was replaced on the roster. While still on the roster, Grable also has been down so far with injury. As expected, Rybarczyk’s Tommy John recovery timeline would have him seeing game action in roughly mid-March.
Even with the injury situation, and at least partially thanks to being able to replace Sinnard and Bohnert with Freshman players on the roster, Indiana still has 5 lefty and 17 righty pitchers on the 2024 roster plus a position player in freshman infielder Jasen Oliver who can also shove at 93 mph if needed.
I went into detail above to show that head coach Jeff Mercer and Glant hit the portal hard to fill holes and extend the pitching depth. The problem with a lot of depth is also that there are a lot of options in how to deploy these guys and determine where they are going to get experience. College baseball has only two fall ball games against other teams, no spring training like major league baseball. Sometimes you just don’t know how stuff will play until you pitch it a few times to hitters from a different team.
The first two weeks went well. The key weekend arms of Foley, Bothwell, Risedorph, Phillips, and Tonghini were pitching in the zone and keeping some potent offenses like Duke and Coastal Carolina to under 7 runs (the mark set because this Hoosier offense scores at least 7 runs two-thirds of the time).
Starting with Purdue Fort Wayne, things have gone south. How has been interesting. Most of the scoring has happened in a small number of snowball innings. Cooper Katskee gave up three to Purdue Fort Wayne in the third and Evan Whiteaker gave up four in the fifth. Brayden Risedorph should have been out of the first against Alabama but defensive issues extended his inning and he got hammered at the end of it for five runs. Seti Manase was brought in to eat innings and gave six runs. One inning equaled 10 runs against Arizona where Holderfied was wild and ineffective and Tonghini saw ground ball after ground ball find holes. Against Troy, Risedorph gave up four in the second, then shut the Trojans down in two more. Holderfield had another bad outing as the Hoosiers gave up 6 in the fifth. Vanderbilt saw Manase get rocked in the first for 6 runs. Freshman Seth Benes coming off arm tightness gave up three and was replaced by Whiteaker who gave up 9 runs to Illinois State.
Obviously, this staff was hoping for improvements by Katskee, Manase, and Whiteaker but those haven’t yet materialized. Once those games were out of hand, they got other arms in there and saw some promise. Holderfield made a huge adjustment and suddenly looked like his freshman self for two innings against Vanderbilt. Redshirt Freshman Jacob Vogel pitched a solid inning and true freshman Ryan Rushing pitched three impressive innings at Vanderbilt. Sophomore Aydan Decker-Petty pitched three solid innings against Troy.
So what is changing? First, Jack Moffitt (at least this week) is going to be first out of the gate instead of Brayden Risedorph. Risedorph is an important piece, but the margin for error on Friday is slim. It’s possible he gets split into more frequent shorter stints or even possibly a “fireman” role to plug an inning before it gets out of hand. Next Katskee, Manase, and Whiteaker are going to the back of the list of options I would guess, until they show something different in midweek live practice. That was how Bothwell got right late last season. Holderfield, with one tweak is already looking much better. Then using the young guys who have shown real promise more like Ryan Rushing. Finally, adding Ty Rybarczyk who had a decent 1-inning open on Wednesday and hopefully stretching him out to 4-inning starts.
So, can they fill the innings without using Katskee, Manase, and Whiteaker? There are 16 pitchers with real innings outside that group. They key will be getting more outs efficiently with that group like they did in the first two weekends. Moffitt starting makes that more likely I think. The other thing is they will all have to get into the strike zone more on the weekends. Throwing balls not only allows free runners, but drives up pitch counts. They have already shown they can do this. It is just an execution piece.
The execution piece is the big question mark. The cupboard is full. The recruiting saw to that. Now the pieces need to fit into place, and they need to all pitch at a better level. There are no guarantees. However, even with a thin cupboard in 2022 Glant had the pitching staff doing impressive things in April and May. After turning over 80% of the pitchers in 2023 Glant lead a pitching core that had a solid year. The talent level still has the potential to be better than even last season with improved execution.
With this, I do not think this is the time to panic. A weekend (set-up well by making the mid-week crew eat innings Wednesday) against a relatively week hitting Belmont team will be telling on if they can get back on track.