Kansas Baseball Update With Jimmy Waters

Welcome to the Kansas Baseball Blog.  In today's first entry senior outfielder Jimmy Waters gives us an update on the benefits of the new turf at Hoglund Ballpark and a quick preview of this weekend's series at #1 TCU.

Right now we are thankful for the renovations to Hoglund Ballpark. The new AstroTurf that was installed in the summer has already helped us in preparing to play this season. If you have been anywhere around the Midwest you know how miserable the snow and cold temperatures have been the past couple weeks.

In previous years there is no chance we would have been able to practice outside at all due to weather conditions causing the field to be wet and unusable. This new turf field has allowed us (mostly pitchers) to shovel off the infield and practice and play against each other. It is important for the hitters to see live arms and pitchers to face live hitters so that we are not behind other schools that have been outside in nice weather.

With that said, we have gone outside to practice the past three weekends, even with some of the temperatures in the 20’s. Even though it seems like playing baseball outside in that type of temperature would not be very nice, we actually prefer it to always practicing indoors in Anschutz Pavilion. Whenever we use Anschutz it’s usually at night because of the busy facility schedule with a lot of teams needing to practice indoors. Every practice we had in Anschutz was productive but we were limited in what we could do as a team.

We all have been waiting for this season to start for some time now. It only seems like a couple of days ago that everyone was reporting back to campus to start the fall semester and begin playing fall ball.  With the season just around the corner the team is excited to get the season underway.

This season will begin with a trip to Texas Christian University who is the pre-season #1 team in the country in several polls. This is a great challenge for us and we have been looking forward to playing TCU since the schedule was announced in the fall. This marks the second straight year we have gone on the road early in the season to face the #1 ranked team. Last season we took 2 of 3 from #1 LSU.

This series will help prepare us for the type of pitching we will face once Big 12 Conference play begins in March with the likes of facing TCU’s Matt Purke, Steven Maxwell, and Kyle Winkler, who all are All-American players. This should be a great weekend of baseball.

You can follow this weekend's games at TCU on Gametracker and listen to the audio broadcast with the Voice of the Jayhawks, Tom Hedrick on kuathletics.com. Mountain West Sports Network will be televising the Friday and Sundays games.  That network is available on Direct TV.  For those in the local area, Biggs BBQ will be showing those games.