NC State Baseball Is Back, Get Ready For A Wild Ride

Buckle your seat belts, boys and girls. The 2016 college baseball season is underway and judging by the first weekend, those of us following NC State could be in for a wild ride.

Forgetting both the entire weekend’s pitching performance and Friday’s season-opening coma vs. Old Dominion for a moment, what the Wolfpack did offensively Saturday and Sunday against quality opponents was an eye-opener.

In games at 23rd-ranked Coastal Carolina on Saturday and against a tough Kent State team on a neutral field on Sunday, NC State came from behind to take a lead four times, batting .321 (25-for-78) and belting five doubles and seven home runs in the process. The Wolfpack showed resilience combined with some scary offensive firepower in both games.

The Pack fell behind the Chanticleers 3-1, 4-2 and 5-3 right out of the chute Saturday, scored three runs in the fifth to take a 6-5 lead, fell behind 7-6 after six innings, then scored one in the seventh to tie it and four in the eighth to blow it open. When NC State scored two more in the top of the ninth to take a 13-7 lead, those runs looked to be entirely superfluous. They weren’t, but the Pack held on to win 13-10 after a harrowing bottom of the ninth.

On Sunday, NC State’s Joe O’Donnell and Kent State’s Andy Ravel traded zeroes into the fifth inning before the Golden Flashes got to O’Donnell for a pair of runs in the bottom of the fifth. The Wolfpack answered suddenly with four in the top of the sixth on home runs by Brock Deatherage and Andrew Knizner. The pitching staff promptly gave the lead back in the bottom of the sixth on a three-run homer by Zarley Zalewski — yes, THE Zarley Zalewski, aka Z Squared — only to have the offense take the lead for good with three in the top of the seventh.

In the two games vs. Coastal and Kent State, NC State batted .321 overall (25-for-78), .343 (12-for-35) with runners on base, .458 (11-for-24) with runners in scoring position, and .571 (4-for-7) with a runner on third and less than two out. Preston Palmeiro, who had a monster weekend, was 6-for-10 with two doubles, a homer and five RBIs in the two games. Joe Dunand was 4-for-10 with a double, a homer and three RBIs. Andrew Knizner was 3-for-9 with two homers and four RBIs. Josh McLain was 4-for-10 with his first collegiate homer, five runs scored and three batted in. Brock Deatherage was 3-for-6 with a homer and four runs scored.

This was not a case of fluffing up the stat sheet at the expense of weak sisters like Quinnipiac or La Salle. Coastal Carolina, a legitimate Top 25 team, is heavily favored to win the Big South Conference. Kent State is similarly favored to win the Mid-American. The rallies against the Chanticleers came against Alex Cunningham and Bobby Holmes, two of the best pitchers in the Big South. The Pack roughed them up to the tune of 11 runs on 11 hits in seven innings. That’s impressive. The uprising against Kent State came at the expense of Ravel (no, not the composer, Bolero) and Zach Willeman. NC State pounded those two for seven runs on 10 hits in 7 2/3 combined innings. Ravel was Kent’s Sunday starter a year ago, with a 6-2 record and a 3.13 ERA. Willeman was their closer, saving seven games with a 2.81 ERA. Again, that’s some impressive bat work against good pitching.

All was not fun and games for the Wolfpack, however. First, there was the season-opening train wreck against Old Dominion on Friday. Forgetting for the moment that ODU is highly regarded in Conference USA and threw preseason All-CUSA starter Sam Sinnen on the mound, NC State’s performance was ghastly. The everyday lineup managed three hits and committed four errors. Seven Wolfpack pitchers combined to walk seven, hit two batters and throw three wild pitches. It’s a miracle ODU only won 5-0.

Exactly what caused this shutdown of the team’s collective frontal lobes? It would seem that more than a few Wolfpack players felt they could beat ODU just by tossing their gloves on the field. Whatever the problem was, it was gone by Saturday, at least among the position players, and did not reappear. The rest of the weekend, NC State looked like NC State, at least offensively — fighting and scratching and clawing like banshees for every pitch, every out, every run.

The offense may have returned to normal following Friday’s disaster, but the pitching was no better, at least not on Saturday. Five NC State pitchers combined to allow Coastal Carolina 10 runs on 14 hits, six walks and a hit batter. In those first two games of the weekend, the Wolfpack allowed 15 runs, 13 of them earned, on 21 hits, 13 walks, three hit batters and four wild pitches. Ouch! Only Will Gilbert looked as advertised, pitching 2 1/3 scoreless innings.

The pitching was better on Sunday — not great but better, although that’s a low bar to clear — with O’Donnell and Evan Brabrand combining to allow three runs on four hits in 8 1/3 innings.

For the weekend, the Wolfpack pitching staff was 2-1 but with a 5.67 ERA on 26 hits, 16 walks, four hit batters and five wild pitches in 27 innings. State pitchers surrendered five doubles and five home runs in the three games. ODU, Coastal Carolina and Kent State combined for a .371 on-base percentage and a .447 slugging percentage against the Pack.

These are the growing pains you go through when you invest so heavily in raw power arms — walks, hit batters, wild pitches, blown leads. The pitching will no doubt get better, but just how much better remains to be seen. Developing pitchers when the games count against the head coach’s won-lost record and the head coach works for a demanding AD who expects to win, well, that’s a tough sell.

Pitching coach Scott Foxhall is really good and managed to fashion a 2.93 ERA a year ago out of a staff afflicted with many of the same command issues. If he can work similar magic this year and give this offense a chance to do its thing without feeling the imperative to score in double figures every game, then this could be a wild, fun ride, with some tight hair-pin turns on two wheels, an occasional spinout on the far turn, and some wide-open, high-speed dashes down the straightaways.

But you’d better buckle that seat belt.

The Ties That Bind: Remarkable Or Just Recycled?

A week ago today, on Dec. 4, Bruce Springsteen released The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, an elaborate box set commemorating the 35th anniversary of the release of The River, Springsteen’s fifth album.

This is Springsteen’s sixth box set or multi-disc set dating back to 1998. He previously released box sets commemorating the anniversaries of Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town; plus Tracks, a collection of outtakes from the first quarter-century of his career; and The Album Collection Vol. 1, which included remastered versions of his first seven studio albums.

The Ties That Bind features four CDs, three DVDs, a replica notebook of song lyrics, and a glossy hard-cover coffee-table photo book. It retails for somewhere north of $100, depending on where you buy it, and is either an essential purchase or a dubious waste of money, depending on how serious a Springsteen collector you are.

At first blush, The Ties That Binds includes an eye-opening array of music from The River recording sessions and the ensuing tour in support of the album. On CD, we have: a.) the remastered album The River, b.) the one-disc album Springsteen turned in to Columbia Records in 1979 only to pull it back at the last moment, and c.) 22 outtakes from The River recording sessions. On DVD we have d.) a documentary about the making of The River, e.) a five-song video from the rehearsals for the tour, and f.) three-quarters of a professionally filmed concert from Nov. 5, 1980, in Tempe, Ariz. If you don’t have any of this, then your decision is simple. The Ties That Bind will blow your mind.

Unfortunately, there is little here that breaks new ground, at least not for the avid Springsteen collector. The remastered album was included in 2014’s The Album Collection. Ten of the 22 outtakes were released 17 years ago on Tracks and do not appear to have been remastered for The Ties That Bind. The one-disc album and most of the other 12 outtakes have been widely circulated as bootlegs, as has the audio from the Tempe concert. The documentary aired on HBO several times the week prior to the release of the box set. The coffee-table book and the replica notebook are nice but entirely superfluous. This collection is about the music, and most of it is recycled.

So what are we to make of all this? The four CDs offer very little by way of encouragement. The previously bootlegged material now has been professionally mixed and mastered and represents a significant sonic upgrade over the bootlegs. That’s a plus. Then there is the documentary, which is very good but hardly as good, as informative or as entertaining as the documentaries that came with the Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town box sets. The rehearsal video is fun but we only get a 20-minute snippet.

What sets The Ties That Bind apart, really the only thing that sets it apart, is the Tempe concert video, which is a revelation. Shot by a four-camera crew with excellent camera location and direction, this remarkable 24-song video document shows Springsteen and the E Street Band at work onstage like no other concert video. Visually and musically this video is nothing short of astonishing.

As previously stated, The River was Springsteen’s fifth album but was the first that came close to capturing his onstage sound. Listen to the album, though, and then watch the video and you realize that no studio album could ever properly capture the magic of Springsteen in concert.

The setlist from Tempe was 35 songs. This video captures 24 of them — with the audio professionally mixed and mastered for the first time — and lasts 2 hours and 38 minutes. It’s not quite the entire concert but it’s more than enough to convey the idea of what Springsteen was like onstage at his peak. And words can only understate just how electrifying his live shows were. You had to be there.

I saw Springsteen live for the first time on Feb. 28, 1981, at the Greensboro (N.C.) Coliseum, 115 days after Tempe. Like everyone in attendance, I was completely blown away. The Tempe concert is pretty much what the Greensboro show looked, sounded and felt like. The setlist was a little different. Springsteen opened Tempe with “Born To Run,” which was part of the second encore in Greensboro, and there were a few other differences but these are minor details. The meat and potatoes from both shows were the same. Oh yeah, our seats in Greensboro were in the right rear corner of the arena, nowhere near as close as producer Thom Zimny’s camera crew was in Tempe, which makes the video even more of a treat.

The gold standard of Springsteen tours was the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour in 1978, perhaps the most palpably intense tour in rock history. The River tour may have been a close second. I saw both the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead four times in the 1970s. Mick Jagger had a well-earned reputation for his frenetic stage performances, and the Stones were smoking hot in concert. The Dead were renowned for playing until the wee small hours of the morning. When they got a groove on and moved past all the sloppy noodling, they were mesmerizing. Neither had anything on Springsteen.

The longest Stones concert I ever saw was about 90 minutes. When I saw them in 1972 on the infamous Exile On Main Street tour, the show lasted exactly 70 minutes, six minutes less than Springsteen’s first set on New Year’s Eve 1980 at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum. At the other end of the spectrum, I twice saw the Dead play shows of more than five hours — including a 1973 concert and jam session with the Allman Brothers in Washington, D.C., that was pushing seven hours when I was forced to leave — but at times they were as immobile as cigar store indians onstage. They could have been sleepwalking.

Springsteen was the best of both worlds. His shows on The River tour lasted close to four hours, occasionally longer, and, as the Tempe video clearly shows, he was every bit as wild and unleashed onstage as Jagger ever was. Springsteen bounced around the stage as if his hair was on fire, climbing on the amplifier stacks and dancing on Roy Bittan’s piano, sliding on his knees across the stage to play a guitar solo at Clarence Clemons’ feet, wading out into the crowd in mid-song and even body-surfing the crowd through the arena. Four hours of this was exhausting just to watch. Mick Jagger likely would have been gasping for air midway though a Bruce Springsteen concert. The Grateful Dead never would have made it that far.

So, does the Tempe video by itself make The Ties That Bind worth buying at a hundred bucks a pop? Probably not but that’s entirely in the eyes and ears of the beholder. Of course, there was a brief window of time when you could have had the Tempe video for pennies on the dollar. You had to be on your toes, but on the morning of Dec. 4, the Tempe video was available for download on the iTunes store for $1.99. That is not a typo, boys and girls. $1.99. Whether that was just a limited offer or a mistake by Apple, that link was taken down within a few hours of going up. There’s no question that was value for the money. Not so sure the same applies to The Ties That Bind.

Another Name Scratched From The Concert Bucket List

The wife and I went to see Brian Wilson in Durham the other night, a thrilling and genuinely great concert, two exhilarating hours that flew by in what seemed like about 30 minutes.

Wilson doesn’t sing much these days — they say the legs are the first thing to go, and the voice is no doubt second — but he’s surrounded himself with a jaw-dropping collection of musical talent, a 12-piece backing band built around fellow Beach Boys founder Al Jardine and the spectacular LA group the Wondermints. When Wilson did take his turn at the microphone, especially on the half-dozen or so songs from his new album Pier Pressure, his voice may have sounded a bit worn in places, but was always warm and oh-so familiar and comforting. If Wilson doesn’t hit all the notes any longer, he doesn’t have to. He leaves that to his incredible band, spreading the wealth around much as he did back in the day with the Beach Boys.

Jardine’s son Matt handled Wilson’s falsetto vocal parts flawlessly (he absolutely crushed it on “Don’t Worry Baby”). Wondermints co-founder Darian Sahanaja sang the lead part on “Darlin’ ” and turned in a stunning cover that rivaled Carl Wilson’s original lead vocal from 1967’s Wild Honey album. The elder Jardine took the lead on most of the rest of the vintage Beach Boys material, of which there was an abundance. The backing ensemble was flawless instrumentally, and performed sheer magic on all those signature Beach Boys vocal harmony arrangements. It was, simply, a phenomenal concert.

And so I got to scratch one more legend from my bucket list of concerts to see before I hit life’s exit ramp. And with Brian Wilson’s name removed, the remaining list suddenly isn’t all that impressive. Six weeks from my 64th birthday, I’ve seen most of the great musical acts of my lifetime. Most of the rest are either dead or no longer playing. What remains is a rather skimpy list of performers, few of whom I’d characterize as must-see.

Van Morrison, Neil Young and Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra are probably the top three names here, each of them a heavy hitter, and I’d especially like the chance to see Morrison and Lynne. John Fogerty, Patti Smith and David Bowie also reside in rock’s high-rent district. I hope to see them all, but it’s funny how that works. I’d love to see Crosby, Stills & Nash, too, but I’ve passed on multiple opportunities to see them in the past, so what does that say? I’ve also passed on Ringo Starr more than once, but probably will break down and go the next time he plays within driving distance. He is a Beatle, after all.

All in all, it’s a lightweight list compared to the names on the stubs in my ticket-stub box — Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan & the Band, Eric Clapton, the Who, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, the Grateful Dead, Fairport Convention, Joni Mitchell, the Allman Brothers Band, and now Brian Wilson.

If there’s a moral to this story, it escapes me. I started this to pay tribute to Brian Wilson’s greatness and genius, so let’s leave it at that. Bruce Springsteen is, for me anyway, the greatest musical artist this country has ever produced, but Brian Wilson’s is one of the few names also in that conversation. And Wilson’s all-time masterpiece, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, is easily the greatest record ever made by an American act.

There is a rival band out there — fronted by Wilson's cousin and fellow original Beach Boy Mike Love — that goes by the name the Beach Boys, but don’t be fooled. Love may have won the legal claim to the name “Beach Boys” many years ago, but Wilson and his touring band are superior by a factor of about a thousand.

Brian Wilson may prove to be the last legend I'll get to scratch from my bucket list. If so, no complaints here. There’s something to be said for saving the best for last.

Upstaged By The Opening Act

Rock ’n’ roll concerts have evolved over the years. There was a time when rock shows were traveling revues of five or six or more bands, playing 20-30 minutes apiece before a headline act capped off the evening with maybe a 40-minute set of its own. This was especially true of soul and rhythm and blues revues on the Chitlin Circuit during the 1950s and ’60s, but it was true for early rock shows as well.

At some point, demand for an extended set by headliners led to fewer and shorter sets by opening bands. Nowadays fewer concerts than ever feature an an opening act, which is just as well. Most people only care about seeing the top name on the marque, and since most musicians tell time about as well as your average 3-year-old, the last thing we need to do is give them another reason to start their set two hours late.

While we’re on the subject of opening acts, we should note that there have been instances over the years when an opening act badly upstaged the headliner. Such a mismatch occurred on Oct. 16, 1971, at Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke. Yes, boys and girls, there once was a time when Cameron hosted rock concerts. In fact, Cameron used to be one of the best concert venues in the Southeast, and a sound engineer’s dream acoustically. The Duke Union’s Major Attractions committee took advantage by booking some of the best shows ever during the 1970s.

This was before Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski as basketball coach. It didn’t take Coach K long to have all the acoustic tile removed from the ceiling at Cameron, turning a sonic dream into one of the worst echo chambers in the country. You can’t blame Krzyzewski. He’s a basketball coach, not a concert promoter. He wanted it loud in there and that’s exactly what he got. But it was ruined forever as a concert venue.

Pardon the digression.

Now, where were we? Oh yes. On Oct. 16, 1971, Traffic played at Cameron Indoor Stadium. This was a pretty big deal at the time. Touring in support of its most recent and arguably most successful album, Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys, Traffic was pretty much at its peak as a commercial enterprise. Dave Mason was long gone from the lineup, but Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi still gave the band a star-studded nucleus, and they had a succession of critically acclaimed albums to their credit.

Unfortunately for Traffic, Duke Major Attractions booked the English folk band Fairport Convention as the opening act. Not as widely popular as Traffic but with a devoted fanbase, Fairport was coming off an extended period of upheaval in its ranks. In the previous two years, three of its most important players — vocalists Iain Matthews and Sandy Denny, and guitarist extraordinaire Richard Thompson — had departed, yet still the band soldiered on. With a stellar lineup that included Dave Mattacks, Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg, Philip Stirling Wall and Dave Swarbrick, Fairport Convention electrified the Cameron crowd with a mostly acoustic set that nonetheless had far more rocking energy than most rock shows of the day.

Traffic, not noted for its stemwinding live performances to begin with, never stood a chance. Maybe without the over-the-top opening act, Traffic might have been able to satisfy the audience that night, but Traffic’s more subtle and nuanced material was overmatched. Fairport Convention’s rave-up performance blew them away.

Two years and four days later — Oct. 20, 1973 — Duke Major Attractions again badly mismatched opening and headline acts, this time with Commander Cody & The Lost Planet Airmen opening for the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

The New Riders (aka NRPS) were riding a small wave of popularity generated in large part by the fact that the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia played pedal steel guitar on their debut album. Playing a laid-back brand of lightweight country-rock, NRPS was a solid unit but not a likely candidate to set the world on fire, far better suited for a 500-seat theater show than the 7,000 or so rowdy fans who showed up at Cameron that night.

Commander Cody, on the other hand, was a powerhouse outfit with a well-earned reputation for incendiary, scorched-earth live performances. Their most recent album — Live From Deep In The Heart Of Texas, recorded at Austin’s famed Armadillo World Headquarters — was a dynamo of a live record, one of the best and most underrated live records of the decade. Their show at Cameron that night was even more raucous and frenzied than the record, non-stop roadhouse intensity. By the time the boys from Texas finished their 40-minute opening set, NRPS was toast. Commander Cody wore the place out.

Whoever thought Commander Cody would be a good opening act for the New Riders definitely owes the New Riders an apology.

The moral of the story thus far is not to book high-energy acts as openers for low-energy headliners. That’s definitely a formula for disaster, but what happens when the headliner conspires to make conditions even worse?

On Feb. 15, 1974, Kris Kristofferson played at the heinous Dorton Arena on the North Carolina state fairgrounds. The opening act was an unknown country veteran by the name of Waylon Jennings. You can probably see where this is going already. Despite having more than 20 albums to his credit at the time, Waylon still was so unknown that he was listed on the ticket and concert poster as Maylon Jennings. That would soon change.

Waylon’s most recent album was Honky Tonk Heroes, his stirring tribute to the legendary Texas songwriter Billy Joe Shaver, and it proved to be his breakthrough album. As a live act, Jennings had long ago established his bona fides, thanks to more than a decade of playing the rowdy roadhouses of the South and Southwest. He and the Waylors were a formidable live act and they were sensational on Feb. 15, 1974.

Kristofferson was already an established star by 1974, a huge star, in fact, and for good reason. His first several albums were masterpieces of songcraft, yielding such classics as “Me And Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever do Again),” “The Taker,” “Why Me” and “From The Bottle To The Bottom.” That last number proved to be autobiographical, unfortunately, and by the time Kristofferson came to Dorton Arena, his out-of-control alcoholism was a poorly kept secret.

Adding to Kristofferson’s problems than night, he was more of a folkie, singer/songwriter type than anything else. He was not known for high-energy concerts. So when he hit the stage that evening at Dorton Arena, with the building still smoldering from Waylon’s incredible blowout show, the combination of Kristofferson’s obviously drunken state and his abysmal sleepwalk of a performance was embarrassing and painful to witness. He had to stop his band in mid-song several times because he couldn’t remember the lyrics, and even when he did manage to stumble through a song without interruption, his performance was wobbly and unfocused at best. It was an outright disaster.

Happily, Kristofferson kicked his drinking habit a few years later, and even expanded his creative outlets to include a successful acting career. Nowadays he commands the respect and admiration he so richly deserves as one of country music’s all-time great songwriters, but it wasn’t always the case, especially on that 1974 evening at Dorton Arena when he aided and abetted to help an opening act blow him right off the stage.

In Praise Of Ticket Stubs

There was a time, before home computers allowed us to print our own, when an event ticket really meant something. Nowadays, most of us just print our tickets on an 8-1/2-by-11-inch sheet of paper that has all the sentimental value of a college term paper or a form letter from the DMV.

An actual ticket was something else entirely. Usually printed on slick card stock and measuring about an inch-and-a-half wide and about five inches long, a ticket carried the name of the event and venue, the date of the event, the price of the ticket, the location of your seats (on each end of the ticket), and occasionally a distinctive event or venue logo, all on no more than seven square inches of paper.

When you went to the event in question and entered the venue, a ticket taker would tear your ticket in half, keep half of it for the house to count and give half of it back to you. This was your ticket stub, which served multiple purposes. The most immediate use for your ticket stub was to let you know the section, row and number of your seat. Ticket stubs had a more sentimental use, however, especially if the event was a rock ’n’ roll concert. Assuming the name of the event was on your half of the ticket, the stub made for an easy-to-lose but occasionally valuable souvenir of the event.

Few people hang onto ticket stubs, of course, especially from rock ’n’ roll shows from decades ago. We’re talking about an inch square piece of paper, after all. Most people lost them before their first trip to the bathroom. Some people kept their stubs as bookmarks and lost them when they lost the book. Others used them as drug paraphernalia. Almost no one bothered to keep their ticket stubs for posterity’s sake.

I did.

Using an old Disc Washer box for storage (if you don’t know what a Disc Washer was/is, then you’re not the vinyl snob you think you are), I managed to keep the ticket stubs from about 125 concerts, dating back to a 1970 Led Zeppelin concert at Raleigh’s heinous Dorton Arena. That Disc Washer box includes ticket stubs from rock ’n’ roll concerts, folk revivals, country shows and bluegrass festivals. It includes tickets from clubs seating fewer than a hundred to stadiums that seat 60,000 or more. It does not include stubs from dozens of club shows that either did not involve a ticket stub or involved printing your own tickets at home.

In that last category are at least three great shows by the Flatlanders and several by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, one of which, in 1997, featured a total unknown named Patty Griffin as the opening act. Likewise, I have no ticket stub from a Charlie Daniels Band-Ozark Mountain Daredevils show at Elon College in April 1975. That show was significant because the opening act was Emmylou Harris, another total unknown whose limited following at the time included a handful of Gram Parsons fans (only a handful of people even knew of Gram Parsons in 1975) and no one else. There was the Kris Kristofferson show at NC State’s Reynolds Coliseum in 1971 when the headliner was so drunk that he literally fell off the stage. No ticket stub from that one either, but the memory of Kristofferson’s pratfall is one that keeps on giving.

I’m also missing ticket stubs from several outdoor spring festivals held in the early 1970s on the campuses of NC State, Duke and North Carolina, festivals that included acts as varied as James Taylor, Pacific Gas & Electric, Canned Heat, the Steve Miller Band, Joe Cocker, the Byrds, the J. Geils Band and Hot Tuna. But rather than focus on what’s not in my Disc Washer box, let’s focus on what is.

Among the highlights: I saw one fairly historic concert — the Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers Band at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., in June 1973. I attended concerts from three legendary tours — the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street tour in 1972, the Bob Dylan and the Band tour from 1974, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s River tour in 1980-81 — and have the ticket stubs to prove it. I also have recordings of the Stones and Springsteen shows, which were spectacular, even if the recordings aren’t.

I saw the Who on their 1972 Who’s Next tour, which should rank up there with the Stones, Springsteen and Dylan & the Band, but doesn’t, for reasons we’ll get into later. There are ticket stubs in that box from a handful of shows that I vaguely remember, and a few from shows I don’t remember at all. Two or three shows I’d rather just forget, but I kept the ticket stub nonetheless.

The ticket stubs in that box evoke enough stories and memories — some happy, some not, some funny, some sad, some legal, some illegal — that they’ll be the subject of a series of future posts on this blog, beginning in the weeks ahead. I’m not sure where I’ll start, but the possibilities are almost limitless.

Remember: Old guys rock!

A Look Ahead: NC State To Omaha In 2016?

For the second time in four years, Kendall Rogers — with Perfect Game USA in 2012 and now with D1Baseball — has looked into his crystal ball and chosen NC State as one of his “Eight For Omaha” for the upcoming college baseball season.

Rogers was right the first time, in July 2012, based in large part on the presence of All-Americans Carlos Rodon and Trea Turner, backed by a deep, talented and veteran supporting cast. Rogers didn’t venture too far out onto that proverbial limb to make that prediction, and the Wolfpack rode a razor’s edge for most of 2013 before ultimately advancing to the College World Series for the first time in 45 years.

Rogers’ prediction for 2016 is much more complex, much more nuanced, and much less of a sure thing. That’s not to say the 2013 Wolfpack was a sure thing, nor is it to say that Rogers is wrong about 2016. Let’s just say that if NC State wants to advance to Omaha next June, several key pieces will have to fall into place, all of them well within the realm of possibility but none of them a sure thing. Rogers briefly addressed three of them in his capsule look at the 2016 Pack.

First, he said that head coach Elliott Avent’s team will be stronger moving forward because of the 2015 team’s epic meltdown in the 2015 regional finals at TCU. Second, he noted that Avent will have to replace senior hitters Logan Ratledge and Jake Fincher. And finally, he assumed a major fact not yet in evidence (sorry, been watching too many Perry Mason reruns lately) when he asserted that a much more consistent Cory Wilder will team with rising sophomore lefthander Brian Brown to give NC State “two big-time arms in the weekend rotation.”

Let’s take these in reverse order of importance. As much as NC State will miss Ratledge and Fincher’s offensive production, it’s their leadership that Avent will have the most trouble replacing. This is especially true of Ratledge but it applies to Fincher as well. Together, they gave the Wolfpack its best team leadership since Tarran Senay, Grant Clyde, Bryan Adametz and Brett Williams led the 2013 team to the College World Series. It was Ratledge and Fincher who steered this year’s team through some tough early losses. It was Ratledge and Fincher who kept the team together through an awful losing stretch in April. And it was Ratledge and Fincher who kept the team between the ditches and barreling straight ahead as it gained momentum during its red-hot run through the month of May.

No question, Ratledge was NC State’s best player, an All-America-caliber middle infielder who got shafted by the coaches in his own conference, relegating him to third-team All-ACC. But the Wolfpack returns plenty of potent bats in 2016, led by catcher Andrew Knizner and first baseman Preston Palmeiro, but also including catcher/outfielder Chance Shepard, third baseman Joe Dunand and outfielders Tommy DeJuneas, Josh McLain and Brock Deatherage. Of that group, Shepard is a rising senior, and Knizner and Palmeiro are rising juniors. The rest will be sophomores. Add incoming freshman infielder Xavier LeGrant, an exceptional hitting prospect, to the mix and NC State should score its share of runs in 2016.

The unanswered question is who will assume the mantle of leadership, and the easy guess is Knizner and Palmeiro. Knizner was a 2014 Freshman All-America third baseman, then seamlessly moved behind the plate this year. His leadership of the pitching staff was a team strength. Palmeiro, meanwhile, grew up in major league clubhouses, tagging after his father, 20-year big leaguer Rafael Palmeiro, in late-career stops with the Texas Rangers and Baltimore Orioles. Preston Palmeiro may have the best baseball IQ on the NC State roster, and you would be hard-pressed to name one instance during his first two years with the Wolfpack when he let the game speed up on him. He and Knizner would appear to be 2016’s natural team leaders.

Next up the list is the pitching staff. I’ve earned a reputation as something of a scold on the subject of pitchers who don’t throw strikes, so I’ll try not to dwell too long on the subject here. It is an issue, however, and it’s not just about Wilder, whose upside is so off-the-charts that even an incremental improvement in his command could turn him into a potential All-American and first-round draft pick in 2016.

If this was a matter of one pitcher fighting to find the strike zone, then we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, but as a staff — as a staff! — NC State averaged 4.62 walks per nine innings in 2015. Five Wolfpack pitchers averaged more than 5.0 walks per nine innings. Pack pitchers walked six or more 20 times in 59 games. They walked five or more 30 times. Lack of command is usually, although not always, incurable, at least in college where winning matters and the leash is subsequently short. The light may turn on for one pitcher, but the odds of several figuring it out at once, well, that’s a long shot.

With all that said, there is hope for this staff, but also considerable work still to be done. The Wolfpack held opposing hitters to a .215 batting average, second best in the conference, but erratic control — 274 walks and an ACC-worst 79 hit batters — led to a .335 opponents on-base percentage. Sixty-four wild pitches, two shy of the league lead, led to at least that many free extra bases (probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or more extra runs, but that’s an educated guess). Deep pitch counts by starting pitchers forced the bullpen to throw 35 more innings than the starters for the season.

Despite this wild ride, NC State finished the year with a remarkable 2.93 staff ERA, second in the ACC and a tribute to first-year pitching coach Scott Foxhall, who took over a young and inexperienced pitching staff and deftly guided it all the way to the finals of an NCAA regional. And despite the meltdown in the regional finals in Fort Worth, NC State still might have beaten TCU and advanced to a Super Regional except for one of the worst balk calls in the history of the game.

Speaking of the meltdown in Fort Worth, how NC State recovers from that has to rank at the top of any list of questions facing the Wolfpack in 2016. Rogers assumes that the Pack will be stronger for it, another fact not yet in evidence (objection overruled!), yet Rogers is likely right. One thing is for certain — the 2016 Wolfpack will either be defined by that meltdown or will return to campus in the fall with a steely resolve not to let that happen ever again. This goes back to the leadership issue discussed above. With a strong and deep nucleus of experienced position players back next year, it only stands to reason this team could be one of the best and mentally toughest late-inning teams in the country.

Does all of that add up to a trip to Omaha? Not necessarily, but it should put NC State on the short list of College World Series contenders.

Leggett Firing Sends A Chill Though College Baseball

The news release arrived via email at 11:33 a.m. on June 4, with the stunning headline:

“Clemson Parts Ways with Head Coach Jack Leggett.”

Twelve days later, the brain still won’t wrap itself around the fact that somehow, a featherweight bean-counter of an AD named Dan Radakovich got away with firing a Hall-of-Fame baseball coach like Jack Leggett. It just doesn’t compute, and for those of you who don’t believe that college athletics is royally fucked up from the top down, this is Exhibit A.

Read Radakovich’s on-line bio, and then read Leggett’s. The inescapable conclusion is that Leggett’s professional body of work is more impressive, by a factor of about 10,000, than that of the man who fired him. Welcome to the Bizarro World of college athletics in the 21st century.

By all measures, Leggett was a great coach at Clemson. He won 955 games in 22 years as the Tigers head coach. He led them to six College World Series appearances and seven top-10 finishes in the national polls. His record in the NCAA Tournament was an exceptional 68-47. For his career, he ranked among the five winningest active coaches in college baseball with 1,332 victories, although Radakovich killed that one by making Leggett inactive, at least for the time being. Leggett coached the Tigers to 40 or more wins 16 times in 22 seasons, and to 50 or more wins six times, including a school-record 57 victories in 1994, his first year on the job. He sent countless players on to professional baseball, including several who excelled in the big leagues. Leggett was inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame on Jan. 3, 2014.

Radakovich, by contrast, can proudly claim that in his previous stints as an AD — at American University and at Georgia Tech — he left both programs more or less exactly as he found them. His six years at Georgia Tech (2007-12) read remarkably like the six years that preceded him, except that Tech’s employees were probably much happier before he got there and are no doubt much happier since he left. Still, there’s something to be said for maintaining the status quo. Of course, it’s hard to escape the fact that “Georgia Tech Athletics: We Still Don’t Suck” isn’t exactly the most effective marketing slogan.

In fairness, Radakovich didn’t create the current environment in college athletics, but he is a product of that environment, perhaps the inevitable, quintessential product. His background is in finance, after all. That’s an all-too-attractive trait these days, given that the cost of doing business in college athletics is rapidly approaching a level that would appear economically unsustainable.

Despite huge TV and online media contracts, ultimately the money that drives the engine comes from boosters (a word that should make all of us want to take a hot shower). The internet has given fans (i.e., boosters) far too much access and immediacy, and consequently they want results now, now, now. And unfortunately, the typical college administrator would rather kill his or her own mother than ever offend one of the booster club’s heavy hitters, no matter how stupid, petty, small-minded and self-serving that booster may be (as far too many of them are).

This has led to a widespread corporatization of administration throughout college athletics. As the need to raise tons of money has risen along with the demand to win immediate championships, wearing a tailor-made suit and tie has become far more important than ever having worn a jockstrap. This is how someone with impeccable credentials like Leggett came to be working for someone with no apparent credentials whatsoever like Radakovich.

The fact that Leggett’s last College World Series appearance was in 2010 seems to be his greatest offense, which is ridiculous. Many great coaches have gone more than five years between trips to Omaha, including Jerry Kindall (Arizona), Ray Tanner (South Carolina), Jim Morris (Miami) and Mark Marquiss (Stanford), each of whom won two national championships. Meanwhile, none of the coaches (zero, not any, the null set) being rumored as Leggett’s possible replacement has ever been to the College World Series as a head coach. It just makes no sense.

South Carolina’s back-to-back national championships in 2010 and 2011 (and a near three-peat in 2012) certainly played a role in Leggett’s demise, but since Tanner stepped down as head coach to become AD in the summer of 2012, his successor, Chad Holbrook, has presided over a full-scale regression of the South Carolina program, to the point that the Gamecocks lost a regional at home to Maryland a year ago and didn’t even make the NCAA Tournament field in 2015.

South Carolina’s demise no doubt will help Leggett’s successor, even if it did nothing to save him. In the end, Radakovich, who famously trashed his Hall-of-Fame coach in an infamous newspaper interview a year ago, apparently had far less trouble walking Leggett to the gallows than his public pronouncements to the contrary would indicate.

The implications of the Leggett firing go far beyond Clemson and its rabid and often mentally unhinged fanbase. In firing Jack Leggett, Radakovich sent a deep chill throughout college baseball. There’s not a coach anywhere in the country who didn’t stop at some point over the last two weeks and ask himself, “If Jack Leggett can be fired, can I really be safe?”

The answer to that, unfortunately, is a resounding “No!”

Which brings us closer to home. NC State’s fanbase shares the same demographic DNA as Clemson’s. Wolfpack fans can be every bit as demented, delusional and irrational as their cousins south of the N.C.-S.C. state line. There is a large and loud segment of haters within the State fanbase that wants to fire somebody each and every day — be it the coach who doesn’t go undefeated every year, the AD who can’t seem to win because he’s being heavily outspent by every other school in the conference, or the poor media relations director who did nothing wrong but made a convenient target for whatever crazy reason. There’s a small subset of the aforementioned segment of haters that follows baseball, and that subset has grumbled about Elliott Avent for years. They’re grumbling louder than ever since the Wolfpack’s collapse at TCU in this year’s regional finals, but instead of grumbling they should stop and admire one of Avent’s very best coaching jobs.

Think back to February. Neither Baseball America nor D1baseball.com picked NC State to earn an NCAA at-large bid, and why would they? The team was coming off a disappointing 2014 season that began with great expectations and ended in the play-in round of the conference tournament. Lefthander Carlos Rodon and shortstop Trea Turner, first-round draft picks and among the very greatest players in program history, were gone. The Pack also lost catcher Brett Austin and pitchers Logan Jernigan, Eric Peterson, Patrick Peterson and Andrew Woeck to the draft. The incoming recruiting class had talent but not elite-level talent. Several newcomers contributed, but only freshman lefty Brian Brown made a significant impact.

With a young and inexperienced team in an unforgiving conference and facing low expectations, Avent used a positive and upbeat approach to navigate a turbulent up-and-down season to a 36-23 final record. He deftly steered the ship through a deep slump in April, then went to the whip to bring his club down the home stretch with a red-hot month of May. Yes, the clock struck midnight six outs and one horrific balk call shy of an NCAA Super Regional. Still, who expected NC State to reach that point in the first place? Certainly, no one did back in February. Or April.

In a sane world, Avent wouldn’t have to worry about his job. His 19-year body of work at NC State is impressive — 14 NCAA regional appearances, 11 NCAA regional appearances in the last 13 years, four NCAA Super Regionals and a College World Series berth. He was national coach of the year in 2003. He’s coached 21 All-Americans, including six first-team All-Americans. He coached NC State’s only Golden Spikes finalist, and its only Brooks Wallace Award winner. He fields competitive teams year after year, and no one is more loyal to NC State than Avent. No one. Despite some flaws, Avent is an excellent baseball coach, especially on the field where his game-management skills are constantly overlooked and underrated.

Judging by the Leggett firing, however, this is not a sane world. Despite multiple years remaining on his contract and an excellent record of success, Avent works for a demanding and difficult AD (to put it kindly) who did not hire him and who already has fired and replaced eight head coaches since arriving in 2010.

So maybe Avent has good reason to worry about his job. He shouldn’t. A good reason to worry is not the same thing as the right reason to fire him. That reason exists only in the minds of the crazies on the online  message boards and the drive-time radio talk shows. Let it stay there and die there.