Florida State pulls away from Stetson late but fans should still have concerns

Florida State baseball (25-11, 9-6 ACC) ended a four-game losing streak on Tuesday night with a 9-2 midweek win over the Stetson Hatters. The final score looks impressive, but it was a 4-2 game going into the bottom of the seventh inning before FSU rattled off five runs to provide some extra insurance.

Stetson isn’t a good team, and Florida State played sloppily, with several issues that have plagued them all season popping up. To put it mildly, if they played a good team on Tuesday night, there’s a good chance they would have suffered another loss.

They had more baserunning miscues and committed three errors. The offense struck out 10 times and only had eight hits, and only five of the nine runs were earned because Stetson kicked the ball out for four errors.

One positive note saw Florida State pitchers strike out 12 while walking two batters. Gabe Fraser made his first start since early March and had some solid at-bats, including a hit and a walk. Brayden Dowd, John Stuetzer, and Hunter Carns delivered at the top of the lineup, with the latter crushing a three-run home run to give FSU a 4-1 lead early in the game. He had five RBI and three hits.

Good to get back in the win column, but Link Jarrett has his work cut out for him if they want to stay among the top ranked teams.

The good news is Florida State was able to get several pitchers in the game who needed to work without taxing the bullpen before the weekend series against Notre Dame.

FSU didn’t fall far in the national rankings despite getting swept by Georgia Tech over the weekend. FSU has some good components, but has a lot of warts for a team ranked inside the top 10.

Link Jarrett is trying to push the right buttons to fix things, but the same issues keep popping up. There’s still a lot of baseball left; hopefully, they can figure it out at the right time and make a deep postseason run.

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