Ole Miss is three days away from beginning its postseason run in Lincoln, Neb. And starting to answer some important questions.
For starters, how good are the Rebels? What version of the offense will show up? Was the 10-day break between games good or bad?
Questions like that won’t be answered until Friday and then we can look back, analyze things and draw conclusions and whatnot. It’s what fans and us in the media do.
But there are is one question we know we’ll get before Friday.
Who will start Friday night’s game against Arizona State?
On Monday, Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco didn’t have answer.
“We’ll decide that probably later tonight or tomorrow,” he said. “ (Pitching coach) Joel (Mangrum) didn’t get a chance to see too much, so we’ll reconvene again. We talked a little bit about it right before practice, but we’ll talk more about it and promise to try to get it out to everybody as soon as we can.”
As of 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, we had not yet received any news about the starting pitcher for Friday.
For most of regular weekend series, Ole Miss has handed the ball to Hunter Elliott first. The senior lefty has a 5-3 record in 14 appearances with a 5.07 ERA and 1.42 WHIP. He also has a team-high 96 strikeouts.
However, Elliott hasn’t been the Rebels’ best starter this season. That would go to Cade Townsend, a right-hander with a 3.81 ERA and 1.12 WHIP in 59 innings of work. He has a crazy strikeout-to-walk ratio (10.1) too.
Taylor Rabe has been just as good this season, too. He didn’t become a weekend starter until the second half of the season and posted a 4.08 ERA with a 1.03 WHIP in 57.1 innings.
All three have good arguments to be the Rebels’ first starting pitcher of the Lincoln Regional and it may come down to the teams they’ll face. That can be boiled down to a simple question: who is the best matchup?
Arizona State is up first and in the postseason you can worry about the next game the next day. As Bianco said, the Sun Devils are a challenging opponent.
“They have a big ace on the mound and one of the best offensive players in the country,” Bianco said. “They have a really good offense, 108 home runs. We play a lot of people that have more home runs than us, so they’re a team that’s certainly going to be a big challenge.”
So, if the Rebels want to put their best chance to win on the mound, who will it be?
The answer may be in the splits for Arizona State against right- and left-handed pitchers.
Arizona State as a team is hitting .320/.415/.558 overall and .321/.414/.560 against right-handers. But those numbers drop to .318/.403/.515 against left-handers. That may seem like a tight margin that doesn’t clear up the picture.
But the Sun Devils have had 1,487 at-bats against righties and only 437 against lefties. That’s a huge disparity. Would the stats be better for Arizona State if it had more at-bats against left-handed pitchers and could grow more accustomed to seeing pitches form that side?
Or would it be worse because the flaw in the lineup is exposed more often?
Either way, the answer is simple.
Ole Miss should send its best, left-handed starter to start against Arizona State. That would be Elliott.
He’s the ace and the veteran with a national championship ring, too. Things like seniority and deserving don’t matter much in the postseason, but Elliott has earned the honor to be the first to throw a postseason pitch for the Rebels.
