By Steve Habel, Senior Contributing Writer
AUSTIN, Texas — Big 12 championships in baseball used to be a given for Texas but have been maddeningly elusive over the past seven years, when the Longhorns have spent most of their time just trying to keep their respective heads above water and other league teams have improved enough to sweep past them.
If UT’s play over the final two-thirds of the 2018 season is any indication, that trend has been buried and the Longhorns are ready to reclaim their place in the front of the line and among the top programs in college baseball.
The 17th-ranked Longhorns captured their first Big 12 title since 2011 with a 7-3 victory Saturday over TCU at UFCU Disch-Falk Field that completed a three-game sweep of the Horned Frogs. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] The trio of victories, combined with Texas Tech’s three-game sweep over Oklahoma State, allowed Texas to leapfrog the Cowboys and win the league crown outright.
“I can’t be more proud of a group of guys that just fought and grinded together,” Texas coach David Pearce said. “They deserve this championship, and they went out and took it.
“This group is special, and not so much because they have talent. They have heart and they have desire. But the love that they have for each other in that clubhouse is what has made this happen. The unselfish plays and not worrying about their stats. It’s an incredible group because of that.”
Texas won six of its eight Big 12 series and had three sweeps in conference play.
The Longhorns (37-18 overall, 17-7 in Big 12 play) needed to complete the whitewash of TCU Saturday in order to take the championship, and junior second baseman Kody Clemens, as he has all year, was the catalyst.
In the bottom of the first, with David Hamilton on second, Clemens launched his 19th home run of the season over the center field wall to put Texas up 2-0. The round-tripper moved Clemens — who was named by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association this week as one of 35 semifinalists for the 2018 Dick Howser Trophy, which is awarded each season to the top player in collegiate baseball — into a third-place tie with Kyle Russell and Brooks Kieschnick for most home runs in a single season.
The homer, his third two-run dinger of the three-game series, also granted Clemens the Big 12’s regular-season home run title.
TCU managed to tie the game in the fourth inning off Blair Henley but freshman Kamron Fields, pitching for the first time since May 1, entered to escape a bases-loaded jam and preserve the deadlock.
After Fields (1-0), who picked up his first career win in the game, got out of the fourth, the offense immediately answered. Masen Hibbeler doubled off the wall to open things up before Ryan Reynolds singled in the gap to plate him. DJ Petrinsky then legged out a triple off the wall in dead-center to score Reynolds, and Texas led, 4-2.
After a groundout, Jake McKenzie drew a walk to put Longhorns on the corners, Hamilton ripped a single to score Petrinsky to make it 5-2. Duke Ellis then followed with a two-run single to make it 7-2, and handed the Longhorns a decisive advantage that would not be threatened.
“Putting up that five-spot kind of silenced TCU’s dugout,” Clemens said. “It was really good for us to put those runs up so then the guys on the mound didn’t have to worry as much.”
Fields would settle in and toss a career-high 3-1/3 innings, allowing just two hits and two walks while striking out one.
“I was just going out there to try and win one for the team,” Fields said. “I knew coming in that our pitching was kind of behind, and I knew I had to come in and pick up Blair and I think that’s exactly what I did. I was just waiting to get my number called.”
Josh Sawyer allowed one run in the eighth on a solo homer before Andy McGuire threw a scoreless ninth to preserve the win.
“Nobody was expecting this out of us,” McKenzie said. “We’ve been trying to figure out our bullpen all year. We were trying to figure out our hitting. We’ve scored runs all year but our issue was pitching. This group is very resilient. We don’t care if we’re down, 3-0, to start a game. We just know we’re going to bounce back and score some runs.”
Next up for the Longhorns is the Big 12 Conference tournament at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark in Oklahoma City, where Texas will be the No. 1 seed and play eighth-seeded Kansas at 12:30 p.m. Central Time Wednesday.
Texas began the year 9-9, but finished the season with 28 wins in its final 37 games, a run that has pushed its RPI to a season-high 14th and placed the Longhorns in the discussion to host one of the 16 NCAA Regionals that begin in two weeks.
UFCU Disch-Falk Field hasn’t been the site of a regional since the 2011 season, a campaign that ended with a College World Series appearance for Texas. The Longhorns hosted nine regionals between 2000 and 2011 (a list that includes the 2007 tournament that was at Dell Diamond), and went 7-2 in those matchups and advanced to Omaha in four of those seasons, winning a national title under the late Augie Garrido in 2002.
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