Baseball Advances

The GT baseball team cruised through their regional this weekend with 3 fairly easy (certainly by postseason standards) wins over Stetson and Vanderbilt, and will now face College of Charleston in a Super Regional next weekend at Russ Chandler Stadium. Beesball.com has all the details and coverage - hop on over and baseball Richard has you covered.

More pertinent to this blog, what about Matt Wieters? He's slowly morphing into Mark Teixeira 2.0, absolutely crushing the ball. Wieters was named regional MVP after reaching base in 14 of his 15 plate appearances, including 3 homers, 5 singles and 8 walks. I saw Big Tex play in person a number of times while in college, and it was his plate discipline more than anything else that I remember. To an analogy from Moneyball, it was like he was picking through fruit and only taking the ones that looked the ripest. Wieters is the same way - he simply doesn't swing at anything that isn't a ball ... and when he finally finds that ripe one, he absolutely doesn't miss (that homer to dead center in the ACC Tournament against Clemson was just crushed - 420ft to the wall and it was way over).

(Remember this guy? He was pretty good. - augustasports.com)

I haven't seen a Wieters at bat in a long time where he looks like the underdog, it's almost to the point where he appears to be toying with pitchers at times - just daring them to throw him a strike, or just accept walking him. He hasn't quite reached the same utterly dominant level that Tex did in 2000 (where he looked like one of those kids with a mustache and a fake birth certificate in little league), but with one more year left at least - he's going to leave Tech as one of the greatest players to ever play on The Flats, and that's a heck of an elite list to join.

On to the Supers next weekend - and if Tech makes the CWS I'll be driving up from the Kansas City area and providing daily coverage and photos (I've never been to the CWS, living so close I'd have no excuse if I didn't go).