FSU Baseball Preview: Noles Hit the Road to Face Jacksonville

FSU baseball will have their first road game of the season as they make the trip down I-10 to face off with the Jacksonville University Dolphins.

We’re just over a week into the 2017 college baseball season. FSU baseball has given us a couple of surprising results along with some of the domination we expected from an elite roster. FSU’s record improved to 5-2 after their weekend sweep of Samford. The Noles still sit at No. 3 in the d1baseball.com poll.

To date, FSU’s starting pitching has exceeded expectations. While they’re yet to face a great offense, sophomores Cole Sands and Tyler Holton seem to have taken a step forward from their freshman seasons. Drew Parrish impressed in his starting debut after Drew Carlton’s move to the pen and Andrew Karp was terrific in his lone start of the young season.

The FSU starters are eating up innings and throwing strikes. Through seven games, the FSU pitching staff has 46 strikeouts to eight walks in 42.1 innings; those numbers are impressive no matter the competition.

It’s been an up and down start for the FSU offense. When they’re hot, they’re on fire – but there have been a couple head scratchers so far. Stars Dylan Busby and Cal Raleigh have gotten off to a slow start but seem to be finding themselves a bit lately. New comers Rhett Aplin and JC Flowers have shown that they can be valuable to the FSU lineup.

Last Time Out

As discussed in our series recap, FSU baseball bounced back nicely from the USF loss to sweep Samford with relative ease last weekend. The Noles offense woke up and the starting pitching was phenomenal. The Noles won the three games with final scores of 16-3, 8-0, and 13-4.

FSU’s starting pitching continued to impress as Drew Carlton moved to the closer role; moving up the starts of Cole Sands and Tyler Holton while providing freshman Drew Parrish with an opportunity to become the third weekend starter. Parrish more than held his own when he put up a line of 6 innings, 1 earned run, 6 k’s and 0 walks. The trio combined to go 18 innings, allowing 3 ER, totaling 24 K’s to just 5 BB on the weekend.

After being one-hit in the mid-week showing, it was an offensive explosion for FSU against Samford. The Noles put up a total of 37 runs through-out the three game series. Offensive stand outs for the weekend were Rhett Aplin (4-8, 1 HR, 4 RBI, 6 R), JC Flowers (4-9, 4 RBI, 4 R), and Quincy Nieporte (4-10, 6 RBI, 5 R).

Opponent Preview

On Tuesday, FSU baseball will make their first road trip of the season as they head to Jacksonville to take on the Jacksonville Dolphins of the Atlantic Sun Conference. The Dolphins go into the game against FSU with a 5-2 record.

No doubt the biggest win of the young season so far for JU is their walk-off home victory by a score of 3-2 against Florida last week. In that victory against UF, redshirt senior pitcher Casey Kulina had a great outing going seven innings, allowing one earned run on five hits while recording six strike outs to one walk.

Presumably Kulina will get the start against FSU on a week’s rest and look to replicate his impressive performance from the previous week. Andrew Karp will be on the mound for the Noles a week after his stellar performance against USF.

The Dolphins have struggled some offensively with a team batting average of .228 and have put up 36 runs in seven games. For perspective, FSU put up 37 runs in just three games against Samford this past weekend. Leading the way at the plate so far is senior outfielder Nathan Koslowski.

Koslowski is hitting .308 with an on base percentage of .455. As of late, freshman infielder Scott Dubrule has impressed. After a walk-off single against UF and a 3 RBI game this past weekend, Dubrule was named the ASUN player of the week.

How to Watch

Unfortunately the Noles won’t be at Howser for this one but the game can be seen on ESPN3. If you prefer a radio broadcast, the game will be carried by 106.1 FM in Tallahassee.