New coach hired

Greg has done it again. On paper, this seems to be another great hire. I remember some of his teams at SEMO. They were tough. Excited about the future. Now, we need to give him some help and get his budget higher.

Time will tell but he was fired at Missouri. I’m sure he will pull some players from his past team . Don’t look at this year record because you will say what I said out loud. What are we gaining by hiring him ?

I like the hire, he came from a school who we wish we were.let’s start recruiting!

I am happy for Steve. I think he will have success for you all. He did a really good job in elevating SEMO from a lower end OVC program to a very good one by the time he left Cape Girardeau. He did okay in Columbia and if you factor in the resources he had in comparison to most other SEC schools, he did reasonably well by that measure. The AD that hired him at Mizzou left within a month of the Steve Bieser introductory press conference. A bunch of our baseball alums including Max Scherzer had pushed hard for us to bring back our former assistant and Mizzou alum, Tony Vitello when the job opened up in 2016. A large portions of the baseball alumni and boosters were upset how the process played out and never really gave Steve a chance. He did his best to try and bring them back into the fold but he never had the support that he should have received. He has to be thankful to be at a place where he will not constantly be compared to Tony Vitello.

Now that I have bored you with that info, some of which has no particular relevance to Jacksonville State I will just try and briefly describe him and his good/bad qualities. He's a textbook example of a good baseball man. Marginally talented as a player he found a way to make it to MLB. He's not flashy or someone who is going to be all over the place banging on doors trying to drum up interest, he's just a good baseball coach. After retiring from MLB and before becoming an assistant at SEMO, he was a math teacher and head baseball coach at the premier private school baseball power in St. Louis at the time. He's very intelligent. He'll win the press conference but he is not the most dynamic presence. He makes up for that by being very genuine. My baseball-specific donations to Mizzou are south of $1,000 but he learned my name quickly, remembered me in banquet rooms several times when I was the least important individual there.

As much as I hate to admit, the Mizzou job is a tough one in baseball. We are paying the new guy a little bit more but we are still at the bottom of the SEC in terms of commitment to the sport. I confess that I do not know much about the status of the Jax State baseball program but I think he proved at SEMO that he can win if he is in the same ballpark with respect to resources. I will certainly be following you all this season.

Let’s hope that the case BUT the results ain’t good.

And with all the resources the SEC schools have and not to do much , that scary . We could have hire Georgia former coach at least his team was rank .


Very uninspiring hire . Y’all can be excited but his record at his last stop doesn’t give me hope . The proof is in the record . It excites you because he came from the mighty sec . It’s not like we stole him from a sec school . No he was fired . Strike two for Greg .

Maybe the Georgia coach didn’t want to come here.