By no means am I an eternal optimist. In fact, I get to the point that I can’t watch when the other team is at bat. That said, it is one very bad weekend but just one of 10 in SEC play. Hogs will drop in the rankings and likely will lose first place in the West (either sole possession or altogether), but there’s still time. The team looks tired and may be. They have a big midweek series this week and a home series with Alabama, but this will be the last of the midweek games, which may bode well going into the LSU series. Yes, this team has faults, but none that can’t be fixed. If, by chance, they go 5-0 this coming week, the Mississippi State series will not look near as bad. That’s baseball.
You make a good point about the draining nature of midweek games. It’s amazing how much better teams look the final few weeks of the season when they don’t have to worry about playing on Tuesday and Wednesday, and get some practice time instead. You’ve seen a shift in Arkansas’ scheduling the past few years to eliminate those midweek games altogether after about the last week of April.
Yes, they’ve played four or five games a week for the last six SEC weeks and many of those midweek games (whether they should have been or not) have been nail-biters. That’s taxing on the pitching staff, and for the freshmen in the lineup, they may be hitting a wall about now.