10 Things to Watch in Omaha

By Christian Corona

A lot can happen in three years.

One minute, you’re among the greatest college baseball coaches in the game. The next, you’re in danger of losing your job, unable to win over a new athletics director who won’t give you the same vote of confidence your basketball contemporary earned in a similar situation.

Omaha is like a second home to Texas head baseball coach Augie Garrido, who is making his 15th trip to the College World Series this week – more than all but 10 teams – and his eighth with the Longhorns. After failing to reach the postseason each of the last two years, not even qualifying for the Big 12 tournament last season, Texas is back where senior right-hander Nathan Thornhill has said over and over again this program belongs.

Somewhere Texas is going for the 35th time in program history – nearly twice as many CWS appearances as the other seven Omaha-bound teams combined.

Thornhill will throw the first pitch of this year’s College World Series when the Longhorns take on UC-Irvine this Saturday at 3 p.m. in TD Ameritrade Park. Here are 10 things to know as you watch Texas play in the College World Series this week.

1. Payton’s, Thornhill’s experience all relative
Compared to their teammates, seniors Mark Payton and Nathan Thornhill are CWS veterans. But Payton and Thornhil don’t have extensive successful experience in Omaha.

Payton went 0-for-6 between the two CWS games Texas played in 2011, although he did draw one walk and drove in a run with a sacrifice fly. Thornhill faced five batters in his only Omaha appearance, three of which reached base – including a near-homer by Brian Johnson, who instead settled for a two-run double.

Ironically, the two guys Thornhill retired were both drafted that year, Josh Adams in the 13th round by the nearby Marlins and Mike Zunino, who was taken by the Mariners with the third overall pick and is now their everyday catcher.

Fellow senior Jacob Felts went 2-for-6 in the 2011 CWS as the Longhorns catcher but he’s now backing up freshman cleanup hitter Tres Barrera.

2. Pitching wins in Omaha
The last time a team gave up more than two runs in a game during the best-of-three national championship series was, ironically, when Texas lost to LSU, 11-4, in the 2009 title-clincher.[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

 

While more anecdotal than empirical, that stat is indicative of what’s been evident for many years – that pitching is what wins in Omaha. Fortunately for the Longhorns, even without junior left-hander Dillon Peters, they have plenty of it.

Texas enters the CWS with the nation’s sixth-lowest team ERA at 2.32. Thornhill boasts the best ERA among the weekend starters (1.57) with Parker French, who will likely start for the Longhorns on Monday, posting a very respectable but worse-than-team-average 2.45 ERA this year.

Reliever Travis Duke (0.34) didn’t surrender an earned run the entire regular season, Houston Regional hero Chad Hollingsworth has a miniscule 1.36 ERA and closer John Curtiss also has a tiny 2.06 ERA.

3. No surprise Texas is here
You shouldn’t be surprised the Longhorns earned a trip to Omaha, and not just because they’ve made the trip 34 times before. Texas added a few pieces before this year – Barrera, light-hitting first baseman Kacy Clemens, hot-hitting third baseman Zane Gurwitz, up-and-down Tuesday starter Lukas Schiraldi and team batting average leader Madison Carter (.347).

But most of the biggest pieces of the Longhorns puzzle were intact last year, and even the year before that. In 2013, Texas had a lackluster .260 team batting average but a solid 2.53 team ERA – amazingly, both better than that year’s national champion UCLA (.250 batting average, 2.55 ERA).

This year, Texas improved in both of those crucial categories as it’s batting .268 as a team and lowered its team ERA to 2.32.

4. No surprise two other Big 12 teams are, too
After TCU completed a sweep of Texas earlier this season – a skid that started a stretch where the Longhorns lost eight of 13 after starting the season losing only eight of 38 games – Horned Frogs Jim Schlossnagle made some interesting comments.

“I know everybody loves to talk about the SEC but our league, in my opinion, is just as good,” Schlossnagle said. “Nationally, the Big 12 deserves to get a little more respect.”

TCU comes in to the CWS with the nation’s best ERA (2.19) and is the No. 7 national seed, like Texas was in 2011. The Horned Frogs are making their second CWS appearances and first since 2010, when a Matt Purke-led squad beat Texas in the Super Regional to get to Omaha. Texas Tech is joining them, making their first CWS appearance and giving the Big 12 three teams in Omaha for the second time ever. Meanwhile, only one of the 10 SEC teams who reached this year’s NCAA Tournament (Vanderbilt) is in Omaha.

5. Why the huge turnaround?
Texas players and coaches have been asked this question numerous times in various forms. They would tell you that it was because they purged the unselfishness from the team, brought in talented, selfless guys to replace them and played for each other.

That’s all true, but there’s got to be some proof in the win column to back the significance of that sentiment. Sure enough, Texas has won 16 more games than it did last year to bump its winning percentage up 169 points and doing what the last Longhorns team did the year after they finished last in their conference standings – go to the College World Series.

But how? Garrido said on multiple occasions that Texas “mastered the art of losing the one-run game” last year and he was right. The Longhorns went 9-10 in one-run games in 2013, accounting for nearly half of their defeats. This year, Texas won just as many one-run games – nine – while losing half as many – five.

6. Longhorns are the favorite
According to boydsworld.com, Texas is the heavy favorite to win its seventh national title this year. The Longhorns have a 41.8 percent chance to reach the championship series and a 23.1 percent chance to win it. TCU and Virginia (17.7 percent) are the teams with the next-best chance.

That’s a big improvement from the initial 3.5 percent chance boydsworld.com gave Texas to win it all before the NCAA Tournament, although they did correctly predict the Longhorns would win the Houston Regional, giving them a 46.9 percent chance to win it and host Rice a slightly smaller 45.1 percent chance.

7. UC-Irvine the biggest underdog
Boydsworld.com, on the other hand, lists UC-Irvine as the biggest underdog in the College World Series. The Anteaters have an 11.7 percent chance to reach the title series and just a 4.0 percent chance to win a championship in their first ever CWS appearance.

The lowest-seeded team remaining, UC-Irvine, started the NCAA Tournament with just a 3.0 percent chance to reach the College World Series and an infinitesimal 0.1 percent to win it all. Yet here they are.

8. Chance of an All-Big 12 final not bad
Texas is on the opposite side of the bracket from fellow Big 12 CWS participants TCU and Texas Tech. According to boydsworld.com, the Horned Frogs has a 31.2 percent chance to get out of that side of the bracket and reach the best-of-three championship series while the Red Raiders have just a 14.6 percent chance to reach the title series.

Coupled with the fact that the Longhorns have a tourney-best 41.8 percent chance to reach the final series, that means there is a 19.1 percent probability the championship series will feature a pair of Big 12 teams – a near 1 in 5 chance – something that’s never happened.

Texas Tech is making its first CWS appearance while TCU went 3-2 in its only other appearance four years ago. The Horned Frogs beat Florida State twice, 8-1, before being bumped to the loser’s bracket by UCLA in a 6-3 loss. They beat the Seminoles again, 11-7, before taking down the Bruins, 6-2.

That forced a decisive elimination game for both teams but UCLA came out on top, 10-3, leaving TCU a win away from the title series.

9. Andrew Morales is the real deal
UC-Irvine likely lacks the pitching depth and hitting power to make a deep run in Omaha, but they have the ace to give the Longhorns plenty of problems.

Morales tossed a complete-game shutout to knock out Big 12 regular season champ Oklahoma State in the Stillwater Super Regional and is 11-2 with a 1.53 ERA heading into the Anteaters’ CWS opener against the Longhorns. He’s 2-0 with a 1.33 ERA in the NCAA Tournament so far.

The 71st overall selection in this year’s MLB Draft – four rounds before any Longhorn was taken – Morales allowed just two earned runs over seven innings of UC-Irvine’s tournament-opening win over UNLV. Then, he went on to start against the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed, Oregon State, on two days rest, giving up one run over 4 1/3 innings to help knock out the Beavers on their home turf. Texas will have its hands full with Morales.

10. How Texas stacks up to 2002, 2005 champs
You can look at it about a dozen different ways but comparing this year’s Texas team to the title-winning Longhorns squads from 2002 and 2005 boils down to two things – this year’s team didn’t nearly hit as well but it pitches marginally better.

Both Texas teams to win it all under Garrido batted higher than .300 as a team (2002 hit .304, 2005 hit .302) and had more pop in their lineups. The Longhorns hit 68 homers in 2002 and 56 in 2005 while this year’s team has hit just 21 – one fewer than Jeff Ontiveros hit by himself in ’02. Both the ’02 and ’05 teams were faster, at least in terms of stolen bases – 100 in 2002 and 103 in 2005 – with only 74 this year.

The Longhorns did not have a team ERA below 2.80 in either ’02 or ’05, with this year’s squad posting a 2.32 team ERA so far. This year’s Texas team also has a lower opponents’ batting average (.228) than the ’02 (.233) and ’05 (.234) staffs, although there were three pitchers on those championship teams with at least 10 wins while this one has none. Same goes for closers, as Huston Street saved 14 games in 2002 and J. Brent Cox tied a school record with 19 saves in 2005. John Curtiss has nine this year.

One peculiar difference between this year’s Texas team and the two title-winning teams before it is in its strikeouts. This year’s Longhorns seem more disciplined at the plate, striking out 323 times, 5.2 times per game while they struck out nearly six times per game in both 2002 and 2005. The pitching staff also struck more batters out in 2002 (7.5 K/9) and 2005 (7.3 K/9) than this year (5.7 K/9) as this year’s less-overpowering staff focuses more on pitching to contact than the other two.
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