Everything You Need to Know about the 2016 Texas Baseball Team

What Texas hopes to be a season that results in another June business trip to the state of Nebraska begins today. This evening, the No. 23 Longhorns open their 2016 baseball season against UNLV at 6:00 p.m., the first of a three-game series.

Texas believes the 2016 team is different than the one that needed to win the Big 12 Tournament in order to reach the NCAA postseason just a year after nearly winning the national championship. Is it right? We touch on that and eight other things you need to know about the 2016 Longhorns before the season begins:

1) This Texas team is going to pitch, and pitch, and then roll out guys out of the bullpen constantly that can pitch some more. Is this going to be Texas’ best pitching staff in a while? That’s saying a lot. The recent staff 2014 staff that included Dillon Peters, Nathan Thornhill, Parker French, John Curtiss, freshman Morgan Cooper and more was really good. The 2010 staff that featured Brandon Workman, Cole Green, Taylor Jungmann, and Chance Ruffin was outstanding. There are others too.

So, it’s not quite time to get caught up in hyperbole… yet. The 2016 pitching staff will feature a lot of innings from freshmen. Very, very talented freshmen. But until freshmen get out on the mound and prove they can throw in that situation, and until they keep deep into the dog days of conference play when fatigue can catch up, it’s tough to know for certain how they’ll perform.

That being said, from a pure talent and stuff standpoint, this could be Texas’ deepest, most talented staff in a while. Best? That has to be proven. But when you combine this freshmen class with the likes of Connor Mayes (sophomore), Kyle Johnston (sophomore), Ty Culbreth (senior), Josh Sawyer (junior), Jon Malmin (junior), Cooper (redshirt sophomore), and others, the depth is impossible to ignore.

“You’ll see probably as many as 12 pitchers pitch over the weekend,” said Augie Garrido.

Remember deep into last season when Texas’ pitching staff was basically a MASH unit and it could barely find enough arms to throw all the innings in a weekend series? Barring a ton of injuries, that’s just not going to be the case in 2016. And there is a difference between depth and talented depth. Texas has the latter.

That depth is going to allow Texas to ease Cooper back as he works his strength and stamina back to 100-percent with each outing after missing 2015 due to Tommy John surgery. Look for his workload to be small early and gradually increase as the season goes on. He was up to 92 MPH in a recent scrimmage.

2) Looking ahead to when all of these pitchers meet MLB Draft eligibility, I think the following pitchers will get drafted at some point in their career:

Johnston, Mayes, Culbreth, Sawyer, Cooper, Malmin, Tyler Schimpf (sophomore), Nolan Kingham (freshman), Nick Kennedy (freshman), Chase Shugart (freshman), Beau Ridgeway (freshman), Blake Wellmann (freshman) and freshman James Nittoli is a big, tall, projectable arm that is just scratching the surface.

3) Obviously, 99 percent of Texas fans haven’t seen any of these freshmen throw yet. Let’s start with the two guys Garrido sees at the backend of games right now.

“The closer would be Chase Shugart, and then probably another one might be Nolan Kingham, another freshman,” the Texas head coach said.

Don’t let Shugart’s 5-10 frame fool you. He can bring it up to 94 MPH, and he also has the power to drill the video board in right-center field from the left side. With his delivery, stuff, and arm angle, it’s hard not to be reminded some of J. Brent Cox; the three-quarters, almost sidearm arm angle along with the swing-and-miss slider, and a heater that boasts some life profile well at the closer spot. Plus, he checks the mental box too. Texas pitching coach Skip Johnson compared him in that regard to Ruffin. And Ruffin could have been considered a wild bulldog on the mound, and off it too.

As for Kingham, the 6-3, 200-pound right-hander oozes potential in the same unmistakable way that Shaka Smart oozes enthusiasm. He’s athletic. He can repeat his delivery and hold velocity late. He can reach back when he needs to and tone it down when he needs to. He has smooth, quick arm-action. And we’ve seen him touch 96 MPH already. The scary thing is that some believe he could leave Austin touching 98, 99 MPH.

That being said, he’s definitely not close to being a finished product. The breaking ball sometimes looks like a curve, sometimes like a slider, and sometimes flashes as plus and at other times not. As for the changeup, it might emerge early as a true weapon, especially against lefthanders, because it has the same arm-side tailing action that the fastball does, and more importantly, has the fastball arm-speed too. But like the fastball, the command needs to come on, which isn’t uncommon for freshmen. If he progresses early like he’s capable of, it’s going to be hard to keep him out of the weekend rotation.

What stands almost stands out more than the stuff is that Kingham can pitch; he’s able to correct beyond his years from pitch-to-pitch. Beyond those two, Kennedy is a lefthander with outstanding arm-action that can touch 92-93 MPH and possesses a sharp slider to go with it. A very strong, athletic 5-11 pitcher, the immediate impact is likely out of the pen but the future down the road is in the rotation. Ridgeway, a righthander, is a strike-thrower with all pitches that comes at hitters with a bit of a funk in the delivery and arm-angle and might remind some of the way Thornhill pitched.

Wellmann, who is 6-5, had the look of a young pitcher that might be more projectable than immediate impact early on, but that’s proving not to be the case. The righty can throw innings now. Nittoli (fastball velocity will really grow in time; curve is good enough to get college hitters out now) probably isn’t a candidate to throw significant innings right now, but down the road he’s going to look much different.

4) At this point, or knowing Texas fans it was probably when this story began, you’re probably asking about the hitting. We’ll get there. Obviously, Texas’ ability to consistently score runs is going to play a vital role in whether it has the success it wants to or not. However, what’s generally proven to be more important than that – although, it’s probably fair to make a “chicken or the egg” argument here because overall confidence is impacted by being successful at the plate – at Texas under Garrido is the mental side.

The legendary head coach believes he’s seeing and seen what he hoped to in that regard.

“I think that what they’re talking about is they’re closer and their attitude is better. Mentality and attitude are pretty interchangeable,” he responded when asked about Texas players consistently mentioning this preseason that the mentality was different than last season. “I think… they’re doing what’s right. They’re making good decisions. The objective of the program is to learn. And they’ve accepted that. I think the biggest change is that as a group, this group has done the best job recently of accepting the responsibility to learn. I think that’s what they’re talking about because they’re getting better. They’re learning how to read the situations; they’re learning how to attack the situations. They’ve accepted the responsibility for learning. They don’t wait for a signal from the coach to steal second when they see they can themselves.”

Obviously, that sounds good for Texas.

5) But what’s important than that is Texas’ ability to respond to, and grow from adversity. Whether Texas fans want to admit it or not, the 2015 Longhorns could hit some. A .259/.350/.387 slash line for a team isn’t that bad in college baseball nowadays. It’s not what should be acceptable at Texas, but if you look around the country at some big-name programs, you’ll see worse. Heck, Stanford slugged .337 as a team last year, and its team OPS didn’t even crack .700.

The problem with Texas’ hitting last year is that it was really inconsistent; as the year went on, its ability to consistently produce in run-scoring chances really fluctuated. Remember those points early in the 2015 season when Texas was near the tops in all of college baseball in doubles, and was smacking homers regularly? That proved to be something that happened at times, but not enough, especially when the ability to manufacture runs and hit with runners in scoring position proved to be like a rollercoaster. That makes winning close games difficult, and played a noticeable role in Texas’ 13-15 record in games decided by two runs or less last year.

It's not just a coincidence that adversity hit, as it always does during a baseball season, and the lack of response became the illness that affected the bats too. Garrido’s best teams at Texas have always responded to adversity well; it might be the thing that brings them together most, and plays the starring role in those successful seasons.

In 2014, the Longhorns grew from the adversity of a tough regular season, and ended up a couple of tough breaks away from playing for the national title. In 2015, Texas lost seven-straight games in March and was never really the same after a promising start, despite a desperation-fueled Big 12 Tournament title.

Again, Garrido things the necessary changes have been made.

“I think the changes have been made. It’s about teamwork. You have to have the best team, not necessarily the best players at this level because all of the teams make so many mistakes. Part of the excitement of college baseball is the imperfection of it all. So it is about teamwork. I think we have the pitching, the defense, and I think we’re doing a much better job of scoring runs, which has been the hardest thing for us. This ballpark doesn’t help that. But there’s no excuses. It’s just a responsibility. I hope I’ve always been accountable for what we do.”

But he knows that until his team gets knocked to the ground, he’s not going to know if it’s going to get back up, and how it will perform if it does get back up.

“We’ll see how it goes. It really gets down to now how do we respond to the things that go wrong? You all know that. You see that. That’s what builds teams, the good teams are motivated an inspired to do better when things aren’t going well… it’s hard in this environment to develop when you’re losing because there is so much emphasis and the expectation levels are so high. The lack of privacy sometimes gets in the way. I think when you see our pitching staff and we’ve simplified the offense to make it as easy as possible to score runs. I think we’re going to play a very high level of defense, and I think we have a good attitude. Now when we get smacked in the face, are we going to get back up and fight back? We all know that’s going to happen. When it does, how are we going to respond? We don’t know that.”

How good or bad Texas will prove to be at the end of the season won’t really be known until it responds to the low points of the season, which will be impossible to avoid. That’s just the nature of what Texas is hoping is something like a 65-game season.

6) As for the hitting, Garrido and Texas players have mentioned that they’re taking a Kansas City Royals-like approach to offense this year. It’s not simply because the Royals won the World Series. Offensively, Kansas City was good at a few specific things: hitting fastballs, making contact consistently and not striking out (lowest team strikeout percentage in baseball), manufacturing runs, and being aggressive on the bases and with aspects of offense like hitting-and-running.

It's going to take some time for Texas to really expand its offense to incorporate aspects like hit-and-run, fake steals, slash, fake bunts, and more because it only gets a few weeks to practice before the season. But look for the Longhorns to work towards that, to be aggressive on the bases, to try to put the ball in play consistently, and to attack fastballs in any count.

“It all starts with being able to make contact of course,” said Garrido in reference to the Royals-like approach to offense. “I think we’re heading in the right direction. We batted 219 times last week in scrimmages against our pitchers and struck out 29 times. One year when Workman, Green, and Jungmann were pitching we struck out 29 times in the first 31 hitters. There’s a mentality. So we’re putting the ball in play a lot better. That will allow us to run the bases more aggressively and do more hit-and-runs and things like that.”

7) Oh, and the Longhorns are going to bunt too, of course.

“Of course we’re going to bunt the ball. It’s part of our game,” said Kacy Clemens. “There’s a lot of things that can happen on bunts that not many people understand and a lot of people don’t understand how big this ballpark plays. This plays as big as any ballpark in the country, I’d say it plays very similar to TD Ameritrade, which is to our advantage. You can’t play the home run ball here. You can play it at other parks. You have to use this field to our advantage and the bunt helps us out there. I think we’re going to have other things with hit-and-runs, fake-bunt steals and that stuff for offense.”

8) This is the lineup Garrido listed on Wednesday:

CF - Zane Gurwitz (junior – R)
SS - Bret Boswell (redshirt sophomore – L)
RF - Patrick Mathis (sophomore – L)
C - Tres Barrera (junior – R)
DH - Michael Cantu (sophomore – R)
1B - Kacy Clemens (junior – L)
3B - Kody Clemens (freshman – L)
2B - Jake McKenzie (sophomore – R)
LF - Tyler Rand (freshman – R)

Joe Baker is probably the normal second baseman, but Garrido said that he’ll probably be out all of this weekend with a leg issue. It didn’t sound serious.

Barrera was singled out by Garrido as being the leader, and is poised for a big season, especially if he does what he showed in the fall – try to hit the ball where it’s pitched instead of always swinging to pull out of the yard. He’s probably the safe pick to lead the team in homers with around 12, but Mathis, who possesses the most bat speed of anyone, is my pick. Speaking of power, Michael Cantu showed a swing adjustment in the fall that resulted more lift and carry when he made contact. He might have the most raw power on the team, and it never truly showed last season. Look for that to change.

A finger issue kept Boswell out for parts of the preseason, but he’s ready to go now. And he should have an improved season at shortstop, where he’s more comfortable.

During the fall, the first fall that he was actually able to hit and focus on hitting, Kacy Clemens’ swing looked different. It looked more fluid and quicker. We’ll see what it looks like in games, but a slash line similar to .245/.350/.390 is totally possible. As for his little brother, you could wake him up at 6 in the morning, hand him a bat the moment he rolls out of bed, and he’d probably go 1-for-3. He’s just a natural hitter, my pick to lead Texas in batting average, and probably won’t be near the bottom of the order long.

Rand can absolutely fly, should put the ball in play at a solid rate, and is a Connor Rowe-like glove defensively that will be in center in the future. Another freshman outfielder, Brady Harlan, probably receives some at-bats early on as well, and looked to be a solid hitter from the left side. Sophomore Travis Jones showed signs recently of taking a step both defensively, at third, and at the plate. McKenzie's tools won't wow, but he makes the routine plays and is confident in the box.

9) Is this team good enough to make a run at Omaha? Yes, and the Big 12 isn’t exactly loaded. It’s a much deeper team than 2015, and will probably have better leadership too. Will it get there? A lot of factors play into that, but Texas won’t truly know what kind of team it has until it encounters a rough stretch of losses and either responds to grow from that, or allows it to keep it from reaching its potential.

UNLV (25-31 season record in 2015) SERIES INFO
PROBABLE STARTING PITCHERS
FRIDAY (6:00 p.m. on LHN)
UT – So. RHP Kyle Johnston (2015 stats: 1-1, 2.21)
UNLV – So. RHP Christian Myers (2015 stats: 1-0, 6.48)

SATURDAY (2:00 p.m. on LHN)
UT – Sr. LHP Ty Culbreth (4-5, 3.95)
UNLV – Sr. RHP Kenny Oakley (4-5, 3.18)

SUNDAY (1:00 p.m. on LHN)
UT – So. RHP Connor Mayes (2-4, 2.58)
UNLV – Sr. RHP Ben Wright (1-2, 3.83)