5 Days 'til Aggie Baseball: 2021 - Year of the Unknown
It’s that time of year! The Texas Aggie baseball team is set to open up the 2021 season one week from today against Xavier at Olsen Field at Blue Bell Park. Over the next week, be on the lookout for daily content from the TexAgs baseball coverage team. You can keep up with the full series here: 2021 Aggie Baseball Preview Series.
It’s an understatement to say our world has been turned upside-down over the past year. At this time last year, while there were whispers of some mysterious virus breaking out in China with cases popping up in California and New York, Aggie fans were basking in the sudden turn-around of the Aggie basketball season that saw first-year coach Buzz Williams squeeze a 10-8 SEC record out of a team with little expectations just a month earlier. Aggies were also anxiously awaiting the upcoming 2020 baseball season with a bevy of quality arms on the mound led by arguably the best college pitcher in the land, Asa Lacy.
Three weeks later, there was nothing.
No postseason basketball. No SEC conference baseball.
COVID-19 spread like wildfire and shut down almost every public aspect of our lives, and that included all sports. For Aggie baseball, that meant the 2020 season was permanently shuttered after only 18 non-conference games. It’s been since World War II in 1945 that Aggie baseball has played fewer games in a season.
For college players, not only did they lose three months of the spring collegiate season, but most also lost the summer ball season as well. For hitters, that’s 300 valuable at-bats gone. Pitchers likely missed 100+ innings of work. For players ranging in age from 18-21, that’s critical development missed at a crucial point in their baseball careers. Add in the difficulties in finding facilities to simply workout at during the pandemic, along with very little competitive baseball played in almost a year, and you have a lot of young players missing a significant amount of development and game time.
College basketball lost March Madness to the pandemic last spring. While it was a significant impact on the fans, TV networks and sponsors, the impact on the players was minimal. Teams had played a full regular season, and for most teams, the season was truncated by 1-2 games. Coaches did lose the 2020 offseason, and the impacts on the current 2020-2021 season have been very significant. National powerhouse Kentucky is currently sitting with a 6-13 record, and Duke under Coach K is fighting for their lives to sneak into the NCAA Tournament at 8-8. Arguably the two most consistent and dominant programs in the last 40 years have a combined 14-21 record. North Carolina and Michigan State are a combined 22-15. It’s just a crazy year. Take away an offseason and a daily routine, and the results sometimes are anything but routine.
These issues are magnified in baseball. The players lost 75 percent of the 2020 season. For Power 5 programs like Texas A&M, that’s the most relevant portion of the schedule against higher-level competition. It’s common for Power 5 teams to ease into the 56-game schedule with a few “warm-up” games in February. The Aggies were no different, playing Miami (OH), Army and New Mexico State in a three-game weekend series. They did face ranked UCLA and Oklahoma State, but many of the few games played came against lesser talent.
Let’s look at this from another angle.
Of the 38 players on the current roster, only 10 have played an SEC game in their careers.
I know the 2021 narrative around college baseball is the over-abundance of experience across the board with the shortened 2020 MLB Draft and the NCAA’s decision to give all players an extra year of eligibility. However, when you consider that last year was essentially scrapped after three weeks of non-conference baseball, you have second-year players that have never taken the field in a conference game. You have returning second-year JUCO’s that have never played a conference game, and of course, the incoming freshmen haven’t played a collegiate game at all. In baseball, that’s a significant portion of the roster. For Texas A&M, that’s roughly 80-85 percent of the current roster.
Where am I going with this? Well, in the weeks leading up to Opening Day at Olsen Field, I have a lot of posters on the boards and people around town asking me about the upcoming Aggie baseball season. In the past, I would pontificate about the various returning veterans and the impressive-looking newcomers. I followed that up with something like, “This team has the arms to go to Omaha” or “If a couple of these young hitters can’t fill the void in the middle of the order, we’ll be scratching to make a regional.”
If people were patient enough, I could discuss the upcoming season for an hour.
It’s been strange this year. When people ask me if this team has the potential to reach Omaha, I say I don’t know. Then they ask me if this is a Super Regional caliber team, and I simply say I don’t know. Others will ask if this team can win at least 34 games and squeak into a regional, and I again say I don’t know. Then they ask why I’m not so talkative about this year’s team, and I say, “Because I don't know. I don’t have a clue how this team will perform. Your guess is as good as mine.”
I get very strange looks because I’m usually very confident and verbose when I talk about a program that I have religiously followed for over 36 years.
There are simply too many unknowns for the many reasons I listed above. It’s a pandemic season. Strange things will happen because, across the nation, different players will react to the changes in routine in different ways. Players with a great resume and big career stats will struggle this season. Guys that have a history of hugging the Mendoza Line will break out and have a surprise season. Like I said earlier, take away the daily routine of sports and expect the unexpected. And if you drill down into the Aggie roster, there’s even more uncertainty in this upside-down pandemic season.
I can realistically provide you with a plausible scenario where this Aggie team competes for an SEC title and knocks on the door of the College World Series. I can also give you a series of events where this team struggles and misses the NCAA Regionals.
Let’s start with a best-case but very realistic 2021 scenario.
On the mound, the Aggies return the core of pitchers from that fantastic recruiting class three years that included highly-rated guys like Jonathan Childress, Chris Weber and Moo Menefee. Childress was inserted into the weekend starting rotation early in his true freshman year. Weber sported a nice 2.35 ERA in 2020, and he threw 7.1 innings of hitless ball against Georgia in the 2019 SEC Conference Tournament. Menefee showed electric stuff his freshman year and has the potential to be a lockdown reliever. Then you have veteran Bryce Miller who would have been drafted last year in regular times. He can hit the upper-90’s and has looked good so far in preseason workouts as the likely Friday night ace. Chandler Jozwiak and Dustin Saena are experienced veterans with 184 innings pitched between the two. Several newcomers look promising, including freshman Nathan Dettmer from San Antonio and a couple of impressive transfers.
At the plate, the NCAA eligibility changes allowed long-time veterans Hunter Coleman, Bryce Blaum, Mikey Hoehner and Will Frizzell to return to the program in 2021. That’s 1,352 combined at-bats returning. Each of those four hitters has delivered in critical moments and won baseball games for the Aggies. Having that kind of veteran leadership and presence in the lineup will be significant. Three JUCO newcomers also stepped in last season and got off to a hot start before the plug was pulled in 2020. Logan Sartori was turning heads as a starter, hitting .364, while Zane Schmidt and Austin Bost were seeing increased playing time, batting .394 and .353, respectively. Graduate transfer Ray Alejo was hitting a solid .300 as the starting centerfielder. He returns as a steady, experienced leader. The preseason's whispers seem to indicate that second-year freshman Logan Britt and true freshman Ryan Targac are smashing the ball and working themselves into the discussion.
As you can see, there are many paths and options both on the mound and at the plate for this team to come together and have a great year. This isn’t the usual early-season optimism and wishful thinking. If just a couple of the 5th year players can come through with a good (not necessarily great) season at the plate, and a couple of the returning JUCO’s that hit well above .300 last season can replicate those efforts, the Aggies can have a very potent lineup. And a majority of that lineup will be players in their 4th or 5th year of college ball with a ton of experience.
With that said, every single one of those positives mentioned comes with legitimate question marks.
Bryce Miller has all the makings of a Friday night ace, except that he’s never been a starting pitcher at Texas A&M. Can he make that transition? It’s one thing to be a good reliever with great stuff coming out of the bullpen. It’s a completely different mindset being THE guy everybody is counting on to deliver on Fridays. Also, taking him out of the bullpen leaves a void that must be filled. Jonathan Childress burst onto the scene as a freshman in 2019, but he tore a ligament in his arm that required reconstructive surgery just a couple of weeks into the season. He had some success last season in a limited time frame. However, there are still question marks after the surgery, and the fact that he’s never faced SEC competition in his two years at A&M. After earning All-SEC freshman honors in 2019, Menefee really struggled in 2020 before the virus hit. In addition, those three combined have thrown only 121 innings. That’s not much for six years of action. That’s the dilemma with projecting this team. On paper, the most talented arms may technically be veterans, but they are still relatively young in terms of game action. For example, Asa Lacy and Christian Roa alone accounted for 28% of the innings pitched last season. That’s a lot of lost innings pitched, and those innings came on critical Friday and Saturday weekend starts. Chandler Jozwiak and Dustin Saenz are long-time relievers who have registered a bunch of innings in their careers. But it should be noted that both experienced lefties have been inconsistent at times, sporting career ERA’s of 4.42 and 3.95, respectively... solid but not exceptional.
At the plate, the experienced returning core of Coleman, Blaum, Frizzell and Hoehner all have career batting averages between .260-.277. Again, solid but not exceptional. For the 2021 offense to be above average, those numbers and the overall production must improve significantly. On paper, that goes against history. On the flip side, the hitters that did deliver last year did so in limited at-bats against early-season competition. Sartori, Alejo, Schmidt and Bost all hit over .300 in 2020, but they did so in just 155 at-bats. None of those AB’s came against SEC competition. In comparison, Braden Shewmake registered 860 at-bats in his three-year career at Texas A&M.
So overall, Texas A&M’s best pitchers and hitters on paper are also the least experienced on the team in terms of numbers, even though many are fourth and fifth-year players. The most experienced players with the longest resumes are guys that have been solid throughout their careers, but the production has not been exceptional.
That leads me back to the expectations for this team.
I know most of you reading are looking for answers. That’s what Gabe, Brauny, Richard and myself try to do. We usually can give you a pretty specific blueprint for success and where we think this team can finish in June.
In my 36 years of following the Texas Aggie baseball team, I'm telling you that I’ve never been as confused as I am this season.
I honestly can see this team in Omaha. The pieces are there, and if they come together, this can be a really nice unit.
But I can also see a scenario in this crazy pandemic season where question marks never get answered and the team is scrambling at postseason time to make the NCAA Regionals.
With all of that said, what’s my take on where this team finishes? Honestly, I don’t know. When it comes to Aggie sports, I rarely say that. Chalk it up to COVID-19 yet again.