Coffee and Magnolia: July 10th

Good morning. It was a pretty slow news day yesterday for Auburn.

The three Tiger representatives for next week's SEC Media Days were announced Wednesday. Center Reese Dismukes, quarterback Nick Marshall and defensive lineman Gabe Wright will be hanging out at the Galleria on the opening day of the annual gathering of coaches, fans, journalists and select players. Marshall is the first Auburn quarterback to attend since Chris Todd since Brandon Cox in 2007.

It kicks off Monday the 14^th with Mike Slive's State of the Conference speech at according to the SEC's website half past midnight. I assume that they mean closer to lunch, but maybe they're just trying to spice things up.

Ryan Black continues his series highlighting some talking points he thinks we'll be hearing a lot of discussion around come next week. Yesterday he hit on the recent dominance of Auburn and Alabama in the conference.

Black also has some interesting numbers about Auburn tickets and their value.

Jay G. Tate has been ranking his top 40 Auburn players currently on the roster heading into this season. Yesterday at #26 was backup quarterback Jeremy Johnson. Tate talks about the potential upside and downside of what Johnson's season could hold, with his ceiling only becoming an option if something unspeakable happened to Marshall and his floor being what appears to be a fairly competent executer of Gus Malzahn's offense.

Since summertime should really be about baseball, here's a little news from some of our baseball players taking part in summer leagues around the country. And a lot of it is excellent news. Righty Jacob Milliman has racked up a ridiculous 44:2 strikeout-to-walk ratio in his 42 innings of work for the Florence RedWolves of the Coastal Plains League. That number is tops in the league by a lot, as you'd expect. Another righty, Cole Lipscomb, has a 1.74 ERA in his 20.2 innings over four starts and three relief appearances. His teammate on the Florida league's Winter Garden Squeeze (whose logo is sweet) is shortstop Damon Haecker, a .348 hitter through nearly 100 at bats, good for sixth in the league. His two home runs lead the team, his 17 walks are second most in the league and he also has 11 stolen bases. Plus, he leads the league in runs created if you're into that. However he does have a league high 13 errors. Also swiping bags at a speedy rate is outfielder JJ Shaffer who's got 18 in 20 games, and has also shown impressive discipline drawing a walk in 14 of his 65 plate appearances. Blake Logan is looking great behind the plate having two pickoffs and throwing out 12 of 26 stolen base attempts in 19 starts for the first place Amsterdam Mohawks of Perfect Game's league. The premier collegiate league, the Cape Cod League, is home to two Tigers for the summer, right handed pitcher Trey Wingenter of Cotuit and outfielder Sam Gillikin of Falmouth. These guys are seeing much stiffer competition than those previously mentioned, and it is usually a pretty high compliment to get an invite to this showcase of a lot of future draftees. Gillikin is batting .246 in 17 games, while Wingenter has one start under his belt along with six other outings. He sports a 4.86 ERA with 18 strikeouts in 16.2 innings.

Also on the diamond, though a slightly different one, Branndi Melero's softball World Cup journey with Mexico (1-1) wound on with a 7-0 five inning loss to Japan (2-1) in front of Tigers head coach Clint Myers in Irvine, Calif. Tomorrow El Tri (can that work here?) take on 0-2 Chinese Taipei, or Taiwan.

And last but not least, a sad story from the Plainsman that I was a few days late to. The Checkers at Gay and Glenn caught fire. Six months removed from Auburn I missed Checkers for the first time, mostly because I would never even think to crave it outside of 36830, but partly because I felt bad for whatever poor souls that are there now who may be without those delicious fry-burgers for however long they take to clean up. Which may have only been a few hours, I'm not even sure. I do know I ate there way too much.

That's all, and for a slow news day I see I still managed to ramble a bit. Hope you all have a marvelous Thursday.