Hello one, hello all. Hope your week and month have gotten off to a great start. It’s Monday, and you all know what that means, so let’s get to it.
1) The Miami Hurricanes bowed out in Gainesville in dreadful fashion.
The Canes rallied late to down Troy in their opener 10-5. As of the time of this writing, that appears to have been a good win.
But then, as I feared in this article last week, the Gators proved to be far, far, far, far, far, far, far too mighty for Miami. The Gators absolutely humiliated
the Hurricanes 22-10 to move into the winner’s bracket. The Hurricanes led off the game with a home run, but a six spot in the bottom of the first, thanks in large part to Bad News Bears-level defense, put Miami in a massive hole. They ultimately climbed out of it and tied the game at 8 in the middle innings, but then Florida just clobbered the ball over the fence over and over and over again.
And for good measure, Miami turned a 6-2 lead into a 9-6 loss to end their season the following day to those same Troy Trojans.
2) An absolute shame of an ending to a confusing season.
This team went 39-20 somehow. Which isn’t great but isn’t terrible either. They came in fifth in the ACC and had a winning record in conference play. All in all, the year wasn’t a disaster when you look at the results from a couple of miles up.
But anyone following the team more than casually saw the warts. One of the worst bullpens I’ve watched on a Miami team in a long time. I’m honestly struggling to think of a worse one. No back end reliable and/or dominant arm to turn to in a close/high leverage spot. And no one stepped up and claimed that role during the season, which speaks to a lack of development.
The defense was just an abomination as well. 90 errors on the season is just….my goodness, what a hot mess. A lack of fundamentals was painful to watch at times.
3) So, what has JD Arteaga done to warrant keeping his job? Where does Miami go from here?
I’m not sure at this point what the answer is at the top. Knee jerk on Sunday was to say fire him. And had they not made it within a couple of runs of Omaha last year, I’d say the answer was obvious.
But we’re three seasons in, and the Canes have yet to host a regional. They won last year at Southern Miss and just missed against Louisville in the Supers. But even with a better record in 2026, this team felt a bit more rudderless at the end of the season than last year. I guess I just didn’t have faith they’d pitch well enough to win, and they didn’t. I didn’t even factor in the defense in this article last week, but it cost them.
The question for those around the program is why did this happen, and what needs to be done to fix it? Can Arteaga do this job well enough to win? Why are the fundamentals on defense lacking? Why couldn’t capable arms be found in the bullpen last offseason? Why weren’t they developed during the season?
What I know is that massive improvement has to happen next season. Another regional victory and a good look at Omaha has to, at minimum, occur.
Because Miami baseball deserves far better than this. They’re too good of a program to languish like this, to look like a Division II program against Florida on national TV.
I don’t know if we need another internal come-to-Jesus moment like what happened after Kirk Herbstreit put the school on blast on College Gameday for its football woes, but SOMETHING needs to happen to rattle the cages of those with power and/or in charge of athletics.
SOMETHING. HAS. TO. CHANGE.
