Siena comes into town tonight as classic small northern school fodder for a big southern team to feast on. La Salle this weekend will be the exact same. Northern schools generally play around 40% of the games at home and 60% of their games on the road, including usually a lengthy road stand to start the season. Siena plays 21 of their first 23 on the road, while La Salle plays 16 of their first 17 on the road.
For years the NCAA has jerked around the baseball schedule trying to create some kind of parity between northern and southern schools in baseball since a vast majority of NCAA baseball national champions are from warm weather locations. Mostly it is because in the south you can play baseball year round, I know I did. I think this is pretty dumb. It’s like us here in Florida arguing that we aren’t good at hockey because the lakes won’t freeze. Spring training happens in Florida and Arizona for a reason, because where many of the pro teams are located there is still snow on the ground. The best ball recruiting states are Florida and California. You think those kids want to go play for a Big Ten school with no baseball tradition?
Sienna comes in at 1-3 after taking the opening day game at Stetson 8-4 before losing the final three of the four game series 8-7, 13-10, and 10-3. Taking the mound for the Saints will be RHP Robert Tedesco (0-0, 4.76). He started Saturday’s win against Stetson and went 5.2 innings, allowing 6 hits and 4 earned runs.
For Florida, Tommy Toledo (0-0, 0.00) will make his second start of the season. Toledo went 3.1 innings in the season opener against South Florida. Two years ago Toledo beat Siena in his first ever start for Florida. It was the third game of a three game Florida sweep. In that Sunday contest on 2/24/08, Toledo went 5 IP, with 5 hits and 2 runs allowed while striking out 5.
This is a one game stint with Siena, who travels to UCF for a three games series this weekend. This should be an easy victory over an overmatched team. The probable lineup for Siena is
1: Anthony Giansanti (RF)
2: Mike Fish (CF)
3. Dan Paolini (2B)
4. Kevin Quaranto (1B)
5. Gary DerHagopian
6, 7, 8 has been a combination of Kyle Barbato (DH), Andy Carucci (LF), William Cardona (3B), Kyle Hudson (LF), Larry Balkwill (C, DH), Mike Allen (3B)
9. Andrew Sawyer (SS)
La Salle coming in this weekend should be even worse. The series opener with the Explorers has been postponed until Saturday because of inclement weather in the northeast preventing them from traveling tonight. They will fly in tomorrow (hopefully) and will play a double header on Saturday. La Salle went to North Carolina State last weekend and it wasn’t pretty. The Wolfpack hammered La Salle 32-3 on opening day. NC State followed that up with 18-3 and 15-9 victories over La Salle as well. NC State isn’t a good ACC team, they are in the bottom third of the conference. Their biggest problem coming into this season was how poor their offense was last season, when they were last in the ACC in batting average. That bodes badly for La Salle. I’ll do a little bit more tomorrow once I know who the starter will be for Florida, but this will be a glorified scrimmage this weekend. If Florida doesn’t hit like 10 homers as a team this weekend, I’ll be disappointed.
