What he Order? Fish Filet

Louis Agudelo/ Staff Writer

My best friend and I once went to McDonald’s for lunch, and he ordered a Filet-O-Fish, his favorite sandwich from there at the time. He got fries and a drink too, and couldn’t wait to get back to my house to enjoy his meal, but there was a problem. When we sat down, and took out our food, his sandwich was missing one key ingredient; the fish.

That’s right. It was just two buns, a slice of American cheese, and tartar sauce.

The fish in the middle of FIU baseball’s sandwich is gone now, too, just like my best friend’s lunch. With four of its most productive bats from last season having graduated, in Edwin Rios, Brian Portelli, Josh Anderson, and Julius Gaines.

To put this into perspective, the lowest batting average of the four aforementioned players belonged to Anderson, who posted an average of .272 with 7 home runs in the spring, second most on the team, to Edwin Rios, who hit 18.

As a team, the Panthers batted .277 last season, which, when coupled with a conference championship, doesn’t sound too shabby at all. The problem is that, in the fall, with a schedule consisting of intersquad games and exhibitions against other schools, the team only posted a .271 average, which doesn’t sound too promising for the spring.

On the bright side, most of Florida International’s pitching will be returning, with the exception of last season’s late blooming closer Danny Dopico, who took his talents to Lakeshore Drive when he was drafted by the Chicago White Sox organization. FIU also managed to scoop up a right-handed pitcher from their most hated rival’s rotation, in Cain Spangler. Spangler was a position player very recently, but managed to finish the fall with a 1.69 earned run average for FIU.

This season looks to be a tough one for FIU, with the rest of the conference looking to dethrone the defending Conference USA champs, and the Panthers not being as poised to defend their crown as one would hope. Head coach Turtle Thomas has roughly a month to get his rotation and batting order figured out, so the pressure is most definitely on the veteran coach. He’ll have to make some tough decisions, with a lot of new faces on the field, and some standouts that, according to him, he hasn’t seen anything like in his 39 years of coaching.

We’ll just have to sit around and speculate, though, up until February 19th rolls around, and FIU travels to Ole Miss to start their season.