UConn Baseball 2017 | Page 2 | The Boneyard

UConn Baseball 2017

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Drat, no roster posted yet. Five players need to be paired from the 40 man fall roster to make it down to the 35 spot roster mandated by the NCAA for the regular season. A few of the cuts would seem to be logical, but it looks like the last cut or two could be of a veteran or two, or perhaps even one of the incoming freshmen. I'm curious to see how it will shake out.
 
No roster posted yet, but at least the preseason interviews with the coaching staff are starting to come out. Still, nothing really new in either the starting pitching or returning hitters videos that are just out.

As expected, Tim Cate and Wills Montgomerie are the Friday and Saturday starters. Doug Domnarski is the leader for the Sunday spot. Coach MacDonald feels that Domnarski is more comfortable as a starter than as a reliever, but he can do both. Zapata and Nepiarsky also mentioned as possible starters, with Nepiarsky viewed as a swing man who can both start and be effective in relief. Freshman lefty Mason Feole was also mentioned as a possible starter. He has an electric arm and is someone who could come on quickly. He could possibly see big conference innings later in the season.

As for hitters, Aaron Hill probably had the best fall of all the returning position players, and is using the entire field now in his at bats, something the coaching staff is greatly pleased to see with him. Coach Hourigan is hoping that Willy Yahn will become a bit more disciplined at the plate. Zac Susi took the summer off to get his body in better shape, which explains why he disappeared so quickly off the Mystic Schooners summer ball roster. Stefanski and Gnesda also got positive mentions, as did John Toppa. There was no mention at all of Keith Krueger, who started the alumni game in center field.
 
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Gnesda turning into a legit power bat would make a dramatic difference for this team.
 
uconnbaseball said:
Gnesda turning into a legit power bat would make a dramatic difference for this team.
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I don't know if a power surge is in the cards, but it was said that Gnesda worked hard on his swing over the summer and is hitting the ball to all fields.
 
UConn baseball preseason article from the Daily Campus. Some interesting stuff, such as Coach Penders calling the this season's offense S.A.K.O (Swiss army knife offense), high praise for Chris Winkel (he's getting looks in center field), Isaac Feldstein's power potential, and redshirt freshman infielder Jack Lambrecht being out for about 6 weeks due to an unnamed injury.

Baseball: Excitement envelops young Husky squad with season right around the corner
 
dbmill said:
No roster posted yet...
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Educated guessing (and reading between the lines w/ all the freshman talk) is that Coach Penders has some difficult decisions to make w/ those final roster cuts.
 
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huskymedic said:
Educated guessing (and reading between the lines w/ all the freshman talk) is that Coach Penders has some difficult decisions to make w/ those final roster cuts.
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Agreed. I've tried some educated guessing of my own with the roster, and it doesn't look to be easy.
 

UConn Baseball
@UConnBaseball
Part 2 of 3 with Coach Hourigan. This installment focuses on the catchers and mentality of the team going into 2017.


They love Kenny Bergmann's bat. Coach Hourigan talks about Bergmann possibly getting some playing time at the Dan Hurley spot.
 
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Massey ranked us 47 in the country, above both Texas and Boston College. Interestingly, they think more highly of our offense (ranked 50th) than our defense / pitching (ranked 59th). I would put the latter in the 30-35 range and the former somewhere outside the top 100, but we shall see where this season takes us.

www.masseyratings.com

The Texas series will tell us a lot about our team.
 
The batting practice before the storm...


UConn Baseball
@UConnBaseball
Earlier today the Huskies were getting hacks in on J.O. Christian Field.#9Days pic.twitter.com/GQgUtLZjEr
1:28 PM - 8 Feb 2017 from Storrs, CT
C4LFBYZWYAU93sF.jpg:small
 
huskymedic said:
Lot of multi-positional players..
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This is a must listen, a piece that really gets me excited about the coming season. To sum up the interview, the incoming freshmen position players (including Lambrecht) according to Coach Hourigan, this is a hardworking, speedy, athletic group. As is noted above by Huskymedic, it seems that almost all of them can play multiple positions.

As far as positions go, Hill, Yahn , Susi, and Toppa seem set at their respective positions. Prato at this point appears to be ahead of Moriarty at shortstop. Everything else is a big scramble, and it could be several weeks into the season before positions become more set.
 
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Dom Amore is writing about UConn baseball again with a season preview article in the Hartford Courant. Among other things, read about Willy Yahn playing in the Cape League with a broken bone in his hand and literally chasing after pheasants in northwestern Connecticut.

Hartford Courant
 
The season starts next weekend with a series against UMass Lowell in Florida. It sounds like that for the early part of the season the weekend rotation will be Cate, Montgomerie, and Domnarski. Since the first weekend has four games, an additional starter will be needed. It would seem that the candidates to fill that spot would be Andrew Zapata, Sam Nepiarsky, and Mason Feole. Even though I am eager to see what Feole can do and it seems likely that Feole will become a starter at some point in the future, in the past Coach Penders has usually given talented freshman pitchers relief assignments early in the season as a way to see what they can do before handing them a weekend start. It was true for Anthony Kay and Tim Cate, and I expect it will be true for Feole as well. My guess is that the senior Zapata will be the fourth starter next weekend. Given how inconsistent Zapata has been over the years, how he does could very well determine how many midweek starts Zapata gets the rest of the season.
 
zls44 said:
Ugh.

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Wonder if he reinjured/rebroke his sesamoid bone in his left hand that was discussed above?

> "He said, 'I have some bad news, I have a broken hand,'" Huskies coach Jim Penders said. "I said, 'where did it happen?' I figured he did it in the Cape League playoffs. He said, 'no, no, I did it against Florida.'" Played all summer with it. And then, 'I can't miss fall ball, it's too important.' Most kids would say, 'I'm going to take advantage and keep my feet up in the fall. He wanted to be out there for his teammates."

Yahn didn't miss an inning of the autumn practice sessions and finally had surgery in October, getting out of the cast and recovering by late December.<
 
Damn. I surmise we'll end up seeing two freshmen starting in the infield now? Not an auspicious way to start the season.
 
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