“Our goal is to become good hitters and then the home run comes with it if you’ve got your timing and got some power.” “They don’t work every day for pull-side home runs,” he said. Generally speaking, Pierce said, his players’ goal is to hit line drives up the middle or in the gap. He noted the program record would have been broken even if Melendez’s homers were subtracted. Longhorns coach David Pierce said his team’s prodigious total surprises him. Melendez is among six CWS players in Omaha with at least 20 homers. Texas comes in with a program-record 128 homers – 47 more than the previous mark – and has the national home run leader in Ivan Melendez, whose 32 homers are the most in Division I since 2003. “I think you have some teams that are just, ‘We’re going to strike out a bunch and we’re going to hit home runs and we’re not going to worry about it,’ just like a lot of teams in the big leagues do,” said Auburn hitting coach Gabe Gross, whose seven-year major-league career ended in 2010.
Pitching staffs for Mississippi, Notre Dame, Arkansas and Auburn each have strikeout rates of better than 10 per nine innings. In Division I, home runs per game per team since the start of the season are at 1.02, the highest since the record of 1.06 in 1998 and only the second time the figure has been 1.0 or higher.Īll those uppercut swings Keilitz referenced create more home runs but also lead to more strikeouts.ĭivision I strikeouts per nine innings are at 8.48 per team, the second-highest ever behind last year’s 8.60. In the regionals, Arkansas had a seven-homer game against Oklahoma State and Auburn hit seven against Southeastern Louisiana. Stanford hit eight in the opener of its super regional with Connecticut – and lost. The first two rounds of the tournament produced some eye-popping homer totals. But they’re on it, and when they hit it, it seems to go a long ways.” … If you watch the games, home runs hit off a guy throwing 95 to 100 miles an hour is absolutely amazing.
But the metrics are able to break down the pitching weaknesses. “I think the swing plane has been a big difference. “I guess the philosophy on that is takes a little bit more time for hitters to mature,” Keilitz said. Players are older and more developed at the plate because the NCAA offered an extra season of eligibility to athletes whose 2020 seasons were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.Īlso, fewer juniors have left to play professionally over the last two years because the Major League Baseball draft was reduced to five rounds in 2020 and now is at 20, half as many as there were from 2012-19.
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