With the regular season now over and the SEC Tournament probably done in the next couple of days, it’s time for the Missouri Tigers to look at what’s next for a program that has spiraled the past few years.
“You’re constantly evaluating right?” Missouri coach Kerrick Jackson said. “Be it, knowing that you’re gonna lose guys to the draft, or realizing that certain guys aren’t good enough or realizing that this guy’s good, but he’s probably better at this position, or here’s some adjustments you need to make. So that’s always been going on. … We do stay focused on the task at hand, but at the same time, recruiting is a 24/7 deal, right? Like, it never stops.”
The biggest place the Tigers could find some help to improve a team that lost more SEC games than any team in conference history, is the transfer portal, which will be open from June 2 through July 1.
The Tigers will lose graduates James Vaughn, Xavier Lovett and Ian Lohse and seniors Jedier Hernandez, Pierre Seals and Isaiah Frost.
Seniors Kaden Jacobi and Cayden Nicoletto were both JUCO players who could be eligible for the NCAA’s waiver year and senior Javyn Pimental should likely be able to get a medical redshirt after not pitching this season.
There are also 15 juniors on roster who are potentially eligible to be drafted, though Jackson Lovich is the only one I would enter MLB’s two-day draft on July 13-14 worried about getting drafted high enough to leave.
“When you talk about the conversations with the players, they happen when the season’s over,” Jackson said. “... You should never stop evaluating yourself. Even if we were the No. 1 team in the country right now, I would still be in a situation where I’d be looking and saying, well, how can we get better? We’re going to lose these guys and we need to do this. So we should always be looking to improve.”
But after a season where the Tigers had a team ERA of 9.28 (and no pitcher who threw more than 5.0 innings had an ERA under 5.87), the biggest aspect of the coming changes has to be on the mound.
Primarily, the Tigers will have to focus on holding on to a couple of their best pitchers, namely Wil Libbert and Sam Horn (who’s not going anywhere since he also wants to be QB1), while focusing on the recovery of the many pitchers who missed time with injuries throughout the year.
But Missouri will have to bring in some SEC-quality arms, especially as it replaces Lovett - who ended fourth on the team with 45.2 innings pitched - and Lohse - who, even though he missed time with an injury, threw 33.1 innings for seventh on the team and regularly operated as the team’s Friday starter.
Jackson mentioned after Saturday’s game that the pitchers who stayed healthy got worn out through the season because of how many pitchers were unavailable for long segments of the season.
But no matter what specific moves come for the Tigers, the biggest thing has to be learning from the mistakes made this season so this type of year doesn’t happen again.
“If our guys learn from the things that we didn’t do well, but more importantly, from the mistakes that they repeatedly made without making adjustments, then we’ll be in a good situation,” Jackson said. “If they don’t, then it won’t be beneficial for us. … What I tell our guys all the time is, I can handle mistakes, I can’t handle bad decisions. And so we have to put ourselves in a spot where we’re making better decisions, because mistakes are going to happen. We can live with those, but not bad decisions.”
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