Despite Bittersweet End to 2021 Season, Alabama Baseball is Poised to Build on its Successes
On Sunday afternoon in the small town of Ruston, La., Alabama baseball's 2021 season came to its conclusion.
At the Ruston Regional in the NCAA Baseball Tournament, the Crimson Tide lost its opening game to NC State, defeated Rider in its first elimination game but then fell short against regional host Louisiana Tech. While the season didn't exactly end how the program or its fans wanted, a question that has been looming on many fans' minds all season was answered:
This program is on the right track.
Despite going 1-2 at its regional, Alabama made a lot of strides this season. Finishing 14-19 in SEC play, the Crimson Tide doubled its conference win total from 2019. The conference record earned the team its first appearance in the SEC Tournament since 2016, and its overall record of 31-24 heading into the postseason garnered it a spot in its first regional since 2014.
While the end to the season was disappointing, there's no doubt that progress was on display in 2021.
"I think maybe at some point either this summer or fall that I’ll appreciate the progress we made this year," Crimson Tide head coach Brad Bohannon told BamaCentral. "It’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow when you lose the last game — and certainly the endgame of our program is certainly not to lose the third game of a regional — but it’s the first time we’ve been here and to win regionals typically you gotta get there first."
Alabama went through a plethora of adversity in 2021. An already shallow pitching rotation was hit hard with injuries, primarily to Preseason First Team All-American Connor Prielipp and regular Sunday starter Antoine Jean. With them out of the rotation for the majority of the season, winning conference games was no easy task in a conference loaded with top talent on a national scale.
"I feel like — generally speaking, and they’re not perfect — this group gave us everything they had," Bohannon said after the loss to LA Tech. "We had more than our share of adversity — wrong guys being hurt and a lot of inexperienced players playing and we were asking some guys to do some things that maybe they weren’t quite ready to do or equipped to do and play some different positions and pitching some different roles that maybe they were ready for.
"They stayed together. They stayed together, they gave us everything they had and when things didn’t go well they didn’t make excuses and point fingers."
After a red-hot 16-1 start to the 2020 season, the Crimson Tide was aiming to make waves in the conference. However, the COVID-19 pandemic cut the season short, bringing an early end to the season and seeing key players that played a large role in the offense slip away. Players like utility Brett Auerbach departed for the MLB, solid reliever Casey Cobb graduated and infielder Kolby Robinson moved on from the program, citing scholarship and financial issues in not being able to come back for another season — an issue that Bohannon has often addressed in the past.
The start of the 2020 season was an accurate depiction of the direction that the program is headed barring injuries. In 2021, the team was off to a 14-3 start despite already lacking Prielipp. In its non-conference schedule, the Crimson Tide swept both McNeese State and Wright State along with downing South Alabama and Samford — all four being teams that made an NCAA Regional.
Along with injuries and player departures following 2020, multiple players experienced slumps in the second half of the season. After May 1, several of the team's best batters began to taper off, resulting in issues for an already troubled team. Peyton Wilson and Owen Diodati batted under .200 and .154, respectively, while Sam Praytor was four of his last 31 heading into the Crimson Tide's final game.
The COVID season resulted in an Alabama team that was younger than it typically would be. Combined with that was a sudden lack of depth that forced players to play positions that they typically wouldn't play and subsequently caused a lot of movement up and down the lineup.
“Some of the guys that we were counting on were not very good towards the stretch," Bohannon told BamaCentral. "Part of it was we were really inexperienced positionally — our lineup — and we had a bunch of freshmen and COVID freshmen that were good players that had more downs than ups through league play and that’s not abnormal. I think just playing summer baseball and getting to next year and having a whole season and a league season under their belt will be invaluable and obviously gotta continue to recruit at a high level.
"It’s kind of a combination of all that and I do think we need to coach our team better. That starts with me. We need to coach our players better and coach them harder and I need to get better as well.”
Bohannon is very much aware of the offensive problems that his team faced down the stretch in 2021. In essence, the Crimson Tide underperformed this season. However, if underperforming means two wins at the SEC Tournament and an appearance at an NCAA Regional, then just how good could this team be if tweaked in the offseason?
Bohannon says that one of the primary keys to improving in the offseason is recruiting.
"We’ve just got to continue to recruit at a high level — we’ve got to continue to build depth on the mound so we can better handle the nicks and bruises that come when playing college athletics and obviously we’ve got to get better offensively," Bohannon said. "Those are the things we’re going to work on when recruiting this summer and we’ve put together our roster for next fall.”
While next year's schedule has yet to be announced, Alabama will likely storm through its early schedule like it did in 2020. Combined with healthy players and a solid 2022 class that is headed the Crimson Tide's direction this fall, Bohannon has the pieces to build upon a season that ended in bittersweet fashion for this year's team.
All of the tools are in Tuscaloosa to build up a program that has experienced so many ups and downs over the last two decades. Additionally, an appearance in both the SEC Tournament and an NCAA Regional will no doubt go a long way in bringing back a team hungry for progress in 2022.
“We’re getting better every year and it hasn’t been as fast as we’d all like but we’ve won more games every year and we’ve finally gotten to a regional," Bohannon said. "Certainly the hope and the expectation for next year is that we win even more games and we get even further. I’m proud that we got here.”
