FSU baseball: Why did FSU offense explode against Louisville?

The FSU baseball offense has been one of their biggest flaws this year. While their pitching is good enough to beat any team in the country, their lack of offense has made them susceptible to lesser teams.

However, I felt like they had a shot to get things going against a Louisville pitching staff allowing batters to hit .253, 36 home runs, and an ERA over five.

They also walk tons of hitters, and all of those things came to fruition in the three-game series. So what did FSU hitters do differently to explode for 27 runs?

I’m glad you asked, but it’s much more to it than they just decided to play better likes some folks will say. I wrote about some adjustments I’d suggest before they went 4-0 last week. You can read it here if you haven’t, but it consisted of simplifying things.

Here’s an excerpt:

"Where do I begin? First of all, stop guessing and taking fastballs for strikes. I understand the need to get pitcher’s pitch counts up, but you’re only going to get 1-2 pitches in an at-bat to do damage. I always looked first-pitch fastball, and if it was in the zone, I was swinging. If the pitcher threw something offspeed for a strike on the first pitch, I tipped my hat and made a mental note.FSU batters have to take advantage of hitter counts, 2-0, 2-1, and 3-1 are prime opportunities to look for a fastball to crush. However, I’ve watched time and time again at FSU batters looking at fastballs on these counts. If you get two strikes, simply choke up on the bat and put the ball in play. It’s not like there are a lot of home run hitters on this team anyways."

As I’ve mentioned, Louisville doesn’t have an elite pitching staff which helped quite a bit. They issued 17 walks and hit another 10 batters, and their defense committed five errors in the series. FSU added another 27 hits on top of that, so there were plenty of run-scoring opportunities.

FSU batters cashed in, and here’s how they did it. They were much more aggressive at the plate, swinging at fastballs early in the count. They also took advantage of hitter counts much better and took advantage of Louisville pitchers making mistakes when they were ahead in the count. Here are the counts of which hits took place(counts home runs took place are in parenthesis):

• 3-2: 5 hits (2 HR)
• 0-0: 4 hits (1 HR)
• 1-1: 4 hits
• 1-2: 4 hits
• 2-1: 3 hits (1 HR)
• 1-0: 2 hits
• 0-1: 2 hits (1 HR)
• 2-0: 1 hit
• 2-2: 1 hit
• 0-2: 1 hit

So 19 of the 27 hits took place in what I’d call hitter favored counts. Then five took place in what I’d refer to as pitcher favored counts, which leaves three in what I’d call neutral counts.

The number of hits in pitcher favored counts points to Louisville pitchers making too many mistakes when well ahead in the count.

Credit to FSU hitters for making them pay, but that’s more difficult to do against top-level pitching. That’s why it’s good to see FSU hitters attacking early in the count and hitter counts.

FSU batters struck out 29 times(30.8 percent) in the series. That’s about two percent less than their season average. Good things happen when you consistently get runners on and put the ball in play. A lot of balls were hit up the middle and to the opposite field, which is a good sign of not trying to pull every pitch. Here’s to hoping they continue this approach and have that success against Georgia Southern on Wednesday night.