Auburn baseball is looking to increase its pitching stamina and depth at catcher ahead of its first game of the season next Friday.
According to coach Butch Thompson, the pitchers are still building up strength. He and his staff would like the pitchers to “play a few more innings,” but he went on to attribute much of that to the team’s offensive performance during scrimmages.
“Our players are having good at-bats, longer at-bats and getting the pitchers to ramp up,” Thompson said.
He expects to “really push the start-to-start program” now that the second weekend of practice games is over. He wants his pitchers to “dig in and work like none other” in order to set a course for the season.
Thompson also mentioned Cody Greenhill, Richard Fitts and Mason Barnett as pitchers to watch closely going forward.
When speaking of Barnett, Thompson said that he looks at Barnett as a potential closer, but he could begin the season as a starter.
“Mason Barnett, that’s a guy that’s we’ve probably advertised to you guys and to our fans and to our team as a potential closer type,” Thompson said. “His innings are progressing so well that I think it’s up for discussion and won’t be decided until after this third round. Next week’s game week. I could almost see us really trying to commit to him getting a starting spot.”
The main reason for this is that pitcher Jack Owen, a previous starter, is now injured with a dislocated thumb, Thompson said.
“No broken bones, anything like that, and again, I don’t want to play doctor, but we think it’ll be a couple of weeks for some ligaments to heal,” Thompson said. “That’s probably a pretty painful thing with your throwing arm and how important that that first finger the index and middle finger are throwing a baseball. I don’t know if it really forced us to make adjustments, but we’re really looking a little bit closer at Mason at being in the starting rotation with Fitts and Greenhill, potentially for opening weekend.”
The most improved player, by far, is true freshman pitcher Jack Sokol, according to Thompson.
“He’s getting ahead and staying ahead,” Thompson said. “He’s creating tough at-bats and looks like a completely different guy, coming back from the break.”
The eleven month break from games due to COVID-19 last year might also have an effect on the starting lineup.
“I still think there’s some players in our program that people don’t know yet,” Thompson said. “That’s probably going to be the case and happen in other programs around, but when you say you got to go out and play a few games to start figuring your team out and what others look like, I mean it more than ever. In some regards, there’s been a long break in between evaluating teams and players. We’ve been in this deal for 11 months. Who’s invested the most? Sometimes, in a practice setting, you can’t always tell.”
Thompson believes once the bright lights start shining, fans will see certain players step up and show off their improvement from last season.
“These lights will start turning on, and I’m telling you, you’re going to see some players that were All-Americans that are not going to look like it,” Thompson said. “You’re going to see some players you’ve never heard of that are going to look like All-Americans. I think that’s going to be because of this unique time that we’ve just experienced. It’s kind of something intriguing that’s right around the corner to start figuring out."
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Kristen is a sophomore majoring in journalism with a minor in business. She is also the host of our sports podcast, Page 8, that can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud.
Twitter: @kristencarrau
