Legge's Thoughts: Taking UGA Baseball Very Seriously Now

ATHENS - So it looks, to me at least, like Georgia baseball has turned the corner in it quest to become a program to be taken seriously. 

Real quick - I don’t know much about baseball. I understand the winning beats losing, but you could say that about figure skating, and it still be true. Having watched the UGA program last year and comparing it to now... the biggest thing that sticks out is that Georgia just doesn’t make as many mistakes as it did in the past. 

In sports that matters. 

Runs are way up for the Dawgs, errors have been cut in half and walks are down. 

If you want to know how to take a team that had a losing record last year and make it a winning one this year you might want to start with those three things. 

Hitting is up, too. Michael Curry is up to .325 from .297. Keegan McGovern has gone from .291 to .324. Adam Sasser is up to .322 from .245. Aaron Schunk has moved from .290 to .313. 

Pitching, all told, is at a 3.71 ERA right now. It was over 5 last year. 

This program is winning because of corrections to problems in the margins. The loss Friday night, a back-and-forth game that results in the Gators winning on an error, has been rare this season. For the most part the Dawgs have been playing solid baseball and letting the other team make the mistake - nearly 45% more mistakes. Last season Georgia committed 82 errors while its foes only committed 50. 

Just cutting the errors alone has explained much of the turnaround. 

I’ve been to more baseball games this year than I have been in some time. People are interested. This program, for the first time in a very long time, has the ability to grab a national seed for the NCAA Tournament. 

That was in 2008 when the program was a game away from winning its second national title. It wouldn’t surprise me if these Dawgs made it to Omaha this summer. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.