Northwestern baseball is having a fine season right now. Sitting at 9-13 on the year, and 3-5 in conference play, the 'Cats are far from setting the world on fire, but they've also certainly fielded worse squads this decade.
With that being said, this team is actually very solid offensively, with standout hitters like Jackson Freeman and Jack Lausch delivering consistent hits, and some power as well.
Those two players alone have been good enough to power this team to wins, and others have chipped in at timely moments as well. There have been walk off wins and crazy back-and-forth games. As a result, the season has been exciting to watch, but it hasn't produced many more wins than last year.
Why? Well, yet again, the Wildcats simply cannot pitch. And it's gone from bad to just brutal.
On the season, Northwestern's pitchers have allowed a whopping 181 runs. They've played 22 games! That means that they're allowing over eight runs per contest, and that is almost unheard of. It's hard to even wrap your brain around that total.
Additionally, NU's team WHIP, which stands for walks and hits allowed per inning, is 1.75. That's squarely in the "terrible" range. Perhaps the most jaw-dropping stat, though, is that Northwestern has more runs allowed than strikeouts on the season. Yikes.
The 'Cats inability to pitch is frustrating to me on multiple levels. For one, this offense is capable of more, and the staff is holding it back. So many games this year have been lost either because the pitchers blow leads, or because they get so far behind that the offense goes into a defeated shell.
It's killing Northwestern's record, and it has to figure it out. Ben Greenspan certainly knows it's his team's weakness, and something must be done.
But the other reason it's frustrating is because we live in the modern era of baseball. We have access to so much data and information about arsenals and pitch selection and velocity and shape and cut. The list goes on. If you want to, you can analyze pitching until you're blue in the face.
Northwestern is a school with a lot of nerds. Cool nerds, but nerds -- shout out Caleb Tiernan. The fact that the baseball program doesn't have an analytics department that's been capable of making any dent in this issue is downright shameful.
These pitchers might not possess the most talent in the world, but you simply don't fall this far behind in the modern era if negligence isn't at play. I'm sorry, I don't buy that any pitchers recruited to play Division I ball could possibly combine for team statistics that look this bad.
The blame has to fall on the program. My guess? Ben Greenspan's philosophy of pitching is either out-dated, or masked by an athletic department that thinks analytics are a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Whatever the case, these numbers reek of old-school baseball, and it's not the way to win ballgames.