I broke down and bought some baseball tickets online last week. They are available to the general public. It's just that the purchase has to be made through the ticket icon on the ucdavisaggies.com website, you have to buy in pods of 2 or more, and there's a $6.00 fee per game you're buying tickets for. So it works out to $20 for 2 seats per game. Outside of the limited box seats not sure how they determine seat numbers but I'll find out soon. I know the allocared bleacher space for each ticket is numbered at Aggie Stadium, but didn't yhink it was at Dobbins.

When I do go in a couple of weeks I'm hoping the team will be doing better than 7-19. That has included an 11 game losing streak that was just broken up by two wins against UCR. The Highlanders are one of the weaker conference teams, but wins are wins.

I combed through the box scores to see if I could get an idea of what's going wrong. They looked like they wanted to be good last year before the season cancellation. What I determined was this-they just haven't been that good. Yeah, deep analysis I know, but it's been a lot of not horrible but not good play across pitching, fielding, and hitting just adding to a poor season. There's not a single problrm you can point to.

So let's start with pitching. The team ERA is pretty ugly. Some pitchers have done pretty well and been consistent like Zach Carrell, Nathan Peng, Nate Freeman, and Jake Spillane. This tells us that the bad and ugly performances have been pretty bad and ugly.

The team has used 7 starting pitchers. They started with a rotation of Erwin, Spillane, Carrell, and Meredith. Now it's Spillane, Riccomini, Weiser, and Erwin. Personally I think they should have stayed with Carrell. I think the reason he was demoted to the bullpen was he walked too many hitters, and that's really a bugaboo for Vaughn. Erwin was demoted temporarily to the bullpen in a week they didn't need a 4th starter and then didn't pitch for about three weeks, so that really hurt them. His two starts since have been solid. Weiser and Riccomini earned their promotions with quality long relief work. I don't know whether or not Meredith is injured but his last two starts were very short (neither lasting more than anning) and not very good, so an injury may be to blame for that. Rodriguez also got 1 start, which was kind of a head-scratcher for me. Not sure what the strategy was there. Maybe they were using him as an"opener", which is popular in MLB now. Freeman followed up with five solid innings. If Freeman were available for 5 innings, why didn't he start against PEP ?

The bullpen has been a very mixed bag. They have received some excellent contributions in long relief from Weiser, Riccomini, Freeman, and Peng, sometimes in games they were already out of. The problem has been more short relief, protecting leads late in games. Looking at the body of work from game to game this year tells you Freeman has been excellent in long relief, but has struggled in short outings. The team doesn't have what you'd call a traditional closer or even a set-up man.

Because of this Vaughn has made a few questionable late-game relief choices. He gave Nick Johnson his first pitching opportunity three weeks into the season against Cal Baptist in a save situation. Hasn't pitched since. Way to ease him into competition after that long layoff. Ouellette also received a save opportunity. These two have a lot of potential but given their injury histories they should be getting some tune-ups first in lower-pressure situations, maybe some of these junk innings in already lost games.

On the plus side lots of different pitchers have gotten work and Carrion, LaCour, and Ryder have done well in a small sample of work. Good to see that from some freshman pitchers.

Hitting has been more of a head-scratcher. They only really lost 3 starters on offense: Murray, Denholm, and Lara and their replacements (Arenado, Campagna, Brandel) are among the ones doing well

More on hitting and fielding later today.