Texas baseball team reflects on season that got away

By Steve Habel, Senior Contributing Writer

AUSTIN, Texas — The Memorial Day weekend is upon us. For Texas baseball fans, that usually means that a big part of the three-day ‘it’s-almost-summer” respite is spent watching the Longhorns battle for the Big 12 Tournament championship as a prelude to a trip to the NCAA playoffs and, eventually, a berth in the College World Series.

That’s not the case in 2019, a calamitous season filled with key injuries, lack of player leadership and endless disappointment.

When Texas lost, 13-0, at home May 17 to Oklahoma, the Longhorns’ opportunity to[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] play in the postseason officially was squelched and guaranteed that the team would finish dead last in the conference race.

Eight of the nine teams in the 10-school conference make it to the Big 12 Tournament. The Longhorns were the only one left at home, with plenty of time to scratch their collective head and wonder how it all went so wrong so fast.

It is the first time Texas has failed to earn a berth in the conference tournament since 2013. Somewhere in Baseball Heaven, the late Augie Garrido is pounding on a couch and yelling in complete meltdown over the Longhorns’ … well, meltdown.

It was just last year that the Longhorns made an inspired run to Omaha, but those memories are fleeting. The Texas team that is done playing for 2019 is the same one that swept then-top-ranked LSU back in March and climbed to as high as No. 12 in the polls.

The Longhorns’ history of success and the stirring beginning to the season is what makes the end result so surprising and hard to swallow.

“We looked like we were not ready to play,” head coach David Pierce said after the Longhorns were officially eliminated. “We’ve got to start preparing for next year.”

UT finished the year by losing 12 of its final 15 games, including five that were dropped in the ninth inning. The Longhorns played a total of 27 contests that were decided by two or fewer runs, with a 13-14 record in those outings; 10 of their losses in Big 12 play were lost by one or two runs.

Texas entered the season knowing that it would be without shortstop David Hamilton, who suffered an Achilles injury; just a few weeks into the season it also lost catcher DJ Petrinsky to injury.

Hamilton and Petrinsky were expected to provide defensive prowess and some pop in the top half of the order this season. Texas went 8-3 early in the season with Petrinsky in the lineup and went 19-24 in his absence.

Junior outfielder Duke Ellis lamented that the Longhorns just needed to be better on a day-to-day basis this year.

“Some days, we were up and down with our hitting and stuff like that, but that’s baseball,” Ellis said. “Honestly, (the team needs to) just come out every day and be more consistent and work harder in practice. We work hard, but you can always work harder.”

The Longhorns regressed on defense, falling from fourth in fielding percentage last year to 170th this year, eighth in the Big 12. The Longhorns never settled on an effective third and fourth starting pitcher and led the conference in walks allowed with 257.

Texas also never found a consistent run producer and recorded just 27 home runs as a squad this year, only three more than Kody Clemens racked up by himself last year.

Several Longhorns already are on the way to their summer league teams, while the staff is off on the road for recruiting and getting ready for camps, normal offseason procedure, but two or three weeks earlier than usual.

Despite the team’s disappointing performance and a 27-27 record, Ellis called UT’s overall result “a fluke.”

“If we re-run this season with the same team,” Ellis said, “I don’t think it happens like that again.”

In his seven previous years as a head coach at Texas, Tulane and Sam Houston State, Pierce never had missed the NCAA tournament. Pierce said his biggest frustration was that the team “never got over the hump.”

Pierce has a list of 20 things that he thinks will improve the team, a self-evaluation routine that he has used before to great success. On Monday, two days after their season ended, Pierce and his staff conducted individual meetings with his players, with everything on the table as far as suggestions and tweaks to their games.

“I’m not going to sit here and be 27-27 and not make some changes,” Pierce said.

Texas will lose senior starters Michael McCann, Masen Hibbeler and Tate Shaw, while Ellis, Hamilton and fellow juniors Blair Henley, Ryan Reynolds and Austin Todd are eligible for June’s Major League Baseball draft. Expect the Longhorns’ roster to look very different when the 2020 season begins.

“It’s a really young team so they can only grow from here,” Hibbeler said. “It can only go up. That’s how you can look at it. I know there are some stud recruits coming in, so we should be fun to watch in years to come.”
[/s2If] [s2If !current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] [habeabk] [/s2If]