Stupid use of Ruffin

T

Truck's Son

500+ Posts
We've tried using our Friday starters in relief in previous seasons. It doesn't work. I don't buy the argument that 'they'd be throwing a bullpen anyway, so why not get them some work on the mound?" Sorry, doesn't work that way - pitching in a game does not equal throwing a bullpen.

As someone around here wisely pointed out to me last year, Chance Ruffin would pitch every inning of every game if you let him. The guy lives for competing. Our coaches have to reign in Chance. He's our Friday starter, not a middle reliever in midweek games.

These are the games when guys like Sam Stafford, Andrew Mckirahan, Keith Shinaberry, Riley Boening, Hunter Harris can get valuable innings of work. Every year I hear that we'll have the deepest pitching staff in the country, and every year for the past three or four seasons, we end up relying on just 6 or 7 guys to pitch 99% of the innings.

It doesn't make ANY sense to bring in Chance Ruffin in relief tonight. Those innings should have gone to an unkown quantity. We may have the next Joseph Krebs waiting in the wings but it's hard to know if they don't see the mound.
 
Well, much of that I agree with and some I don't.

While I have always preferred not to throw guys on off days simply because it's their throwing day, I can understand if a guy is in the bullpen, completely warmed up, and you put him in for ONE inning of work before giving others a chance. Especially if you put him out there and he struggles.

I don't know who you're been listening to every year saying that we have been deep pitching-wise, but it sure isn't anyone here for the last few years. As for this year, we're deeper than we've been since 2005, but we still have some issues. Most of those issues should go away as we move through the season and more of the freshmen get experience (like last year). Last year, our best pitchers were our freshmen class (Skip's first real recruits). That might happen this year toward the end of the year, though Green, Workman, and Ruffin won't be as easy to push aside. And BTW, take Boening off your list. We might see him this year, but it's doubtful.
 
I agree with Orangeblood...the fact is that if Ruffin would have had his best stuff last night and pitched better then there might not even be a discussion here.

And I just don’t think that this much to do with depth, the bottom line is that this is something the Coaching Staff has done in the past and they feel that it is beneficial for the pitchers, and as much as I like to think I know about the game of baseball I will defer to the guy with 5 National Titles on this one.

And as far as getting some of the other guys work, with a condensed schedule of 52 regular season games in 86 days, those guys are going to get plenty of innings.
 
Bullpen vs. Pitching live. Big difference. Pitchers arms are to be used determined by their classification. SP usually go on 5-7 days rest. RP usually can go for an inning quite often. Closers are for just that, closing. SP usually have more than 3 types of pitchs. It's important to give bullpen time to all pitchers. We should have SP for each beginning day of a game. That would be Fri, Sat, Sun and Tues. Develop a Tues SP as soon as possible.
 
Well, given the 4-game series starting this season, we currently have 5 SPs. Ruffin, Jungmann, Green, Workman, and Dicharry. We'll see where we go from there, but I expect that our starting weekend rotation 3 weeks from now will NOT be our starting rotation in late April/early May.

Yes, I know, I'm going way out on a limb with that one.
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At first I was like, "Yes! Ruffin's coming in to mow these scrubs down!"

Afterwards i was thinking, "Oooh. Bad idea!"

Glad Im not a coach.
 
I'm not sure that we can all agree on anything, but I'm thinking that most of us agree that a good use is as the Friday starter, like in today's solid outing over the Nittany Lions.
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