The FIU baseball team had a subpar season last year as they finished six games under .500 with a record of 26-32. Now, the Panthers look to use the experience they gained from last year and apply it to the 2014 season.
In 2013, the Panthers started off the season on a hot streak winning eight of their first 10 games. However, due to inexperience and inconsistency with pitching, the Panthers started to fall and could never become more than a .500 ball club.
Having your star junior pitcher Michael Ellis and senior closer Mike Gomez out for the year really didn’t help the Panthers cause. However, even with those two big losses FIU still managed to find new talent and continue developing that talent.
What you have to remember is that most of the Panthers pitching staff last season where young guys. In fact, former pitching coach Drew French expressed to me that it was the first time a lot of these guys were seeing division one hitters.
With a year of experience and the help of new pitching coach Sam Peraza, FIU pitchers now looks to enhance their skills and lead a young solid rotation.
Peraza himself brings to FIU nine years of pitching coaching experience along with producing a total of four conference Pitchers of the Year and eight All-Americans as a pitching coach. Peraza spent last season guiding the pitchers at California State University, Northridge, where the Matador pitching staff had one of its best seasons in program history. Peraza’s pitching staff produced the best team earned run average in the program’s last 21 years.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy but if the season starts and the Panthers pitching begins to fall into the same trap it did last season, no one is really going to care about what Peraza did last year. The fact is that Peraza enters a team that had a total earned run average of 5.03, gave up 287 earned runs and allowed more walks than runs with 289.
However, there are some bright points to this Panther staff with one of those being the emergence of junior pitcher Mike Franco.
Franco came to FIU last season recovering from Tommy John surgery and was restricted to the amounts of innings and pitches he could do. Even with the restrictions, Franco was able to post impressive numbers with a record of 5-4, an ERA of 5.23 and 50 strikeouts to only 33 walks. Now after a year of restrictions, Franco is off the leash and can now step up and become the leader of this rotation.
Switching over to the offensive side of the ball, this was an area that the Panthers actually excelled in last season. With a total batting average of .283 the Panthers were able to knock in 312 runs, 46 home runs and 110 doubles. Most of which were provided by a man that was fighting for a spot on the team last year.
Sophomore first baseman Edwin Rios was one of four players trying to earn a starting spot at first base. The decision was made to choose Rios not because of his bat, but because of his glove. What came next was an offensive outburst nobody saw coming.
Rios ended the season with a batting average of .332, 52 runs batted in, 9 home runs, a slugging percentage of .558 and Rios’s calling card 20 doubles.
I mean that amount of doubles this guy was hitting last season was insane. I remember going to the press box and every time Rios came up to bat everyone had double written on their scorecard already.
Another key offensive player for the Panthers is located just across the diamond at third base. Junior third baseman Josh Anderson played his first year at FIU last season after transferring over from Yavapai College in Prescott, Ariz.
Anderson finished the season with a batting average of .279, 42 RBI’s, 7 home runs and 22 doubles. Between Anderson and Rios, they accounted for almost half of the extra base hits for FIU last season.
There’s no doubt that with these two guys in the heart of the order for the Panthers next season finding ways to score runs will not be an issue.
It’s now up to Head Coach Henry “Turtle” Thomas to gather this group of young and talented players and harness the potential that each have. The fact that the Panthers only finished six games under .500 with a young team, two star players out for the year and a mostly road dominate schedule makes me believe that this season can be a bright one for FIU baseball.
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