Welcome back, college baseball postseason. And welcome back, full capacity UFCU Disch-Falk Field. Unfortunately, we must also welcome back Longhorn-branded panchos because weather is likely going to be a pain in the you-know-what this weekend. Fingers crossed.
But hey, The Texas Longhorns are hosts of the Austin Regional and No. 2 overall seed of the tournament. Their impressive consistency rewarded them with the possibility of home postseason baseball until a trip to Omaha. What will they need to do in order to emerge victorious from their home regional? I’m glad you asked…
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TEXAS CAN DO THIS WEEKEND?
Texas needs to be Texas. Period. There haven’t been many times all season when the Longhorns have gotten away from who they are and tried to do too much. There was some of that going on in Oklahoma City, but given the circumstances, I doubt we’ll see it this weekend. When Texas does its thing, it’s able to win baseball games in multiple ways and is often the mentally tougher team when it matters most. David Pierce agrees and explained at length his reasoning:
“I think the first thing is to not look at it as we have to do anything different,” responded David Pierce when asked what tops the list of things Texas needs to do in order to be successful. “I think that’s when we get in trouble when we feel like we’ve got to drive the run in or we’ve got to make the pitch. For me, the biggest thing is getting back to slowing the game down. That’s when we’re our best and having that mechanism to make sure that we can just step out of the box, control the box and that if the game speeds up defensively, that we control it because we have the ball in our hand. And I think those emotions for really a young postseason team, which we are, are going to be very critical.
“I don’t look at any of our young players as freshmen or COVID freshmen at this time of the year, because they have so many at-bats. But they’ve never played in the postseason game. We have two players that are on the active roster that have played in a postseason game, and that’s DJ and Zach. And so, I don’t think it’d be a factor with this team. I told the team earlier today that this offense or the position players – I wasn’t with the pitchers at the time – but this group of position players are equipped to play in postseason as well as any team that I’ve been associated with, maybe other than our national championship team in 2003. Because there were so many returning players that played in Omaha.
“I also think that when you don’t have experience, and you’re not successful, you use that as the reason why you weren’t successful. I’m not going to let them go there. And we’re not going to go there. I think we’re a very good team. But for us, we need to just go out and perform and do what we’ve been doing, and understand and communicate with each other of what potentially the hitting issues are, what type of things we can pick up on the field, and continue to be good communicators on the field.”
While this team, as Pierce noted, lacks postseason experience in a major way, it’s shown a consistent maturity all season, strongly suggesting it can handle postseason baseball fine.
BY THE WAY…
Guys and gals, this isn’t the first baseball regional that’s going to deal with rain. And it won’t be the last. It’s probably going to be annoying, but they’re going to figure out a way to play the entire thing. Plus, things are looking much better today than they were yesterday.
THE MOST IMPORTANT POSITION PLAYER FOR TEXAS…
I think it’s Mike Antico…
READ THE REST OF OUR PREVIEW AND DISCUSS TEXAS BASEBALL INSIDE THE 40 ACRES