With his entire starting rotation returning from a successful season, few college baseball coaches will be as comfortable as Kevin O’Sullivan when settling into the dugout for the start of weekend games.
But after Hudson Randall, Karsten Whitson and Brian Johnson, the questions begin.
Following the 2011 season, the Gators lost five pitchers — four juniors — to the Major League Baseball first-year player draft. Nick Maronde, Anthony DeSclafani, Alex Panteliodis and Tommy Toledo were all chosen in the draft’s first 11 rounds.
Together with senior Matt Campbell, the group combined to give the Gators 203.1 innings last season.
Their departures leave a pitching puzzle for O’Sullivan to solve.
“First, we’ve got to figure out who our midweek starters are going to be,” he said.
“From there, we’ll figure out our middle relief. I’m real excited about those guys that were freshmen last year: Daniel Gibson, Jonathon Crawford and Keenan Kish.”
The trio enter the 2012 campaign with green resumes. Gibson, Crawford and Kish combined to throw just 28.1 innings as freshmen and had mixed results.
Kish showed promise, allowing just one earned run over 14.1 innings of work for an ERA of 0.63.
The same couldn’t be said for Gibson, who saw his ERA balloon to 13.06 in limited action, including surrendering five earned runs in a 14-1 loss to Vanderbilt on May 14.
“It’s really going to come down to these spring practices and scrimmages to see who is outshining the others,” Randall said.
“We’ve got some good options right now.”
Comfortable with what he has at the back end of his bullpen with senior Greg Larson and juniors Austin Maddox and Steven Rodriguez, O’Sullivan’s focus has become almost entirely directed toward freshmen and sophomores.
The midweek question that could sort everything out might be coming in the right hand of a hard-nosed former hockey player from East Milton, Mass.
Johnny Magliozzi, a hard-throwing and stocky 20-year-old freshman could very well be Florida’s leading candidate for a midweek starter.
“Johnny being an older kid, he really has a sense of maturity out there on the mound,” Randall said.
“[Magliozzi] knows what he’s doing a little bit more. It’d be nice to see a little bit of improvement from the fall.
“I expected more of him, and I’m sure he’s going to deliver this spring.”
With a little more than two weeks before the Gators’ first game, O’Sullivan admits that many of these pitching questions may not be ironed out until four weeks into the season when Florida opens Southeastern Conference play.
Even then, he admits that being able to bring one of his closers in as early as the seventh inning if things get dicey is a major advantage he will not be afraid to use.
“I don’t see why we wouldn’t stretch those guys out for two innings and then we’ve got some options the next day,” he said.
Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan lost five pitchers this offseason to the MLB and is now looking to sophomores Daniel Gibson, Jonathan Crawford and Keenan Kish to lead the Gators’ middle relief.
