Series Preview: Texas A&M faces Auburn in all-important road series

Who: Auburn (18-10-1, 3-6 Southeastern Conference)
Where: Plainsman Park – Auburn, Alabama
When:

Thursday: 7:00 p.m. CT (SEC Network)
Friday:  1:00 p.m. CT (SEC Network)
Friday: 45 minutes following the conclusion of Game Two (SEC Network+)

Pitching matchups

Thursday: Nathan Dettmer (RHP, 1-3, 5.66) vs. Will Cannon (RHP, 2-0, 2.28)
Friday: Justin Lamkin (LHP, 1-3, 4.88) vs. TBA
Saturday:  TBA vs. Tommy Vail (LHP, 2-1, 4.28)

Scouting Auburn

It’s tough to be in the SEC. The conference isn’t just the best baseball league in the nation, it’s outright dominant. Not only can the SEC claim the No. 1 (LSU), No. 3 (Florida), No. 4 (Vanderbilt) and No. 5 (Arkansas) teams in the nation, but it’s an incredibly deep group as well.

Take Auburn for example. At first glance, you see Auburn on the schedule, and teams see the weekend as an opportunity to gain ground in the standings since the Tigers aren’t a top-10 team like half of the SEC seems to be. However, Auburn did go to the Men’s College World Series last year and beat No. 2 Stanford in Omaha.

Sure, 2023 Auburn isn’t considered elite like LSU or Arkansas, but they are good.

In fact, Auburn held an 8-3 lead in the fifth inning of game three last weekend on the verge of winning a road series in Gainesville against Florida.

So this will be no walk in the park for the Aggies, despite facing a 3-6 Auburn squad trying to find last year’s magic just as A&M is trying to do as well.

Once you get past the identical 3-6 SEC records, the statistics seem to favor Auburn over Texas A&M.

Cyndi Chambers / USA TODAY NETWORK

A transfer from Northwest Florida State, Cannon is 1-0 in three SEC starts with a 1.54 ERA in conference play.

The Tigers have a significant advantage in most offensive categories with a .294 batting average to A&M’s .273. Auburn sports a spicy .490 slugging percentage to A&M’s .434 and a slightly higher on-base percentage. Bryson Ware is the bat that A&M pitching must manage all weekend. He’s one of the most dangerous hitters in the league with a .391 average with 14 home runs, 38 RBI and an elite .894 slugging percentage. Ike Irish is flirting with .400, leading the team at .395 and second with 31 RBI. Cole Foster is hitting at .367 and leads Auburn in on-base percentage at .479.

The offensive numbers drop off in the second half of the batting order, but the Tigers roll out 4-5 top-of-the-line SEC hitters that will be formidable against Aggie pitching.   

Auburn is sitting at 3-6 because the pitching has been inconsistent, especially in the bullpen where the Tigers have blown several high-profile SEC games, including the aforementioned blown five-run lead to Florida last weekend and giving up 16 runs in the eighth inning of a 24-7 loss to Georgia. Will Cannon has been the ace of this staff with a 2-0 record and 2.28 ERA. He’ll get the start on Thursday. While he gives up as many hits as innings pitched, he doesn’t give away many free passes and limits the number of runs scored despite surrendering 23 hits in 23 innings.

While his ERA looks elite, he’s hittable. He just makes teams earn their way on base.

It’s interesting that Auburn head coach Butch Thompson has listed the game two starter as “TBA,” but his most impressive pitcher in recent weeks, Tommy Vail, is scheduled to throw the finale. Vail has a strong 13 hits to 27 innings pitched to go along with his 2-1 record and 4.28 ERA.

John Armstrong is a solid arm out of the bullpen with a 5-1 record and a 4.97 ERA. After that, it’s a crapshoot with this pitching staff. The numbers aren't pretty.

For as much as Aggie fans have complained about their pitching staff, A&M’s team ERA of 5.15 is nearly a run lower than Auburn's bloated 6.11 team ERA. If A&M wants to do some damage in the win column this weekend, they need to get extended pitch counts on Auburn’s starting pitchers and get into the bullpen as quickly as possible.    

Texas A&M storylines to watch

At this point, everything is a storyline for this Texas A&M team that is digging itself out of an early-season hole. At various times in 2023, the hitting has been the problem, and at other times, the pitching has let the Aggies down.

The Aggies are still treading water offensively, holding steady in the low .270s in batting average. Texas A&M has just two starters hitting over .300. Now, those two are on fire right now. Hunter Haas has been a steady force at the top of the order, leading the team at .389. Jack Moss started slow like the other struggling veterans, but he’s been unstoppable over the past three weeks and has raised his average well over 100 points to .369. Now, if the offense can get the same improvement from guys like Trevor Werner (.222), Ryan Targac (.190) and Austin Bost (.248), the sky is the limit with this group, but these veterans seem to take one step forward at the plate and then two steps back. Targac, Werner and freshman Jace LaViolette have struck out an astonishing 103 times. You won’t produce runs consistently at that rate.

Now, there’s one big bright spot that sparked the offense last weekend. Brett Minnich returned from his hand injury, and he paid immediate dividends with three home runs in his first week back in action. Minnich was vaulted back into the semi-dormant middle of the batting order where the Aggies hope he’ll add a spark. With Auburn’s offense primed to score some runs this weekend, the Aggie offense will need to answer the bell, earn their way on base and show some explosive run production of their own.

CJ Smith, TexAgs

In five games since his return, Brett Minnich has collected five RBIs and three home runs on five hits. 

On the mound, this sounds like a broken record that I bring up every week. The Aggies need to get a quality start out of Nathan Dettmer. He’s gotten the team into the fifth or sixth inning recently, but certainly not unscathed. Texas A&M needs him to be good, if not dominant. Being just okay and giving up four runs over five innings isn’t the long-term answer. Dettmer is supposed to be a Friday ace, and he’s facing Friday aces. Thus, he needs to be an ace, and not just a pitcher trying to survive another inning.

Justin Lamkin is a very talented freshman lefty. He projects to be the program’s Friday night starter in 2024. He has a bright future. He’s also a freshman who made his first SEC start last weekend. As was the case in his midweek starts and relief appearances, Lamkin was impressive the first time through the batting order. He gave up a two-run homer with one bad pitch in the second inning, but he was holding a 4-2 lead going into the fourth frame, and the freshman had a mental lapse and lost it quickly.

It’s a maturity factor because the stuff is there. How long will it take for Lamkin to toughen his shell to battle through a rough patch and string together a quality six-inning start? Hopefully, that maturity will show up this weekend against the Tigers. He will be a good one, but the question is when. For the sake of the 2023 team, that moment needs to be sooner than later.

Evan Aschenbeck has been the glue in the bullpen. With Troy Wansing struggling again on Tuesday against Texas State, will Jim Schlossnagle move Aschenbeck into the starting rotation in that TBA spot in game three, or is he too valuable in the bullpen and the coach gets creative with his TBA starter?

It should be noted that Chris Cortez had his best outing of the season by far on Tuesday with a no-hit, no-walk two-inning save to clinch a 10-9 victory over the Bobcats. It also should be noted that Schlossnagle dusted off little-used Josh Stewart, and he had a great showing, going two innings, commanding the zone and striking out three with no free passes. That earned him a spot on the travel squad. We need to see this type of performance repeated a few more times before we write him up as an answer in the bullpen, but his Tuesday effort was very intriguing.

If both Cortez and Stewart can replicate what they did Tuesday, then there’s a glimmer of hope A&M can stabilize this pitching staff. Let’s see how things go this weekend before we get too excited.   

What’s at stake this weekend

Chris Swann, TexAgs

In his first SEC start last Saturday, Justin Lamkin allowed six earned runs on six hits while walking four in three innings.

As of the time of this writing, the weekend schedule has not changed with single games on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. However, the weatherman is calling for a lot of storms and rain Friday night into Saturday. Some teams playing in the southeast have already shifted their series to a doubleheader on Thursday and a game on Friday. If that happens to the A&M-Auburn series, that will affect the rest of Lamkin, who will be forced to come back with only five days rest. However, Thursday’s game is scheduled to be broadcast on the SEC Network, so it will take more coordination to play a double dip on Thursday.

Anyway, that’s something to consider when planning your Aggie baseball-watching weekend.

For the past three weeks, A&M’s mindset has been to survive the three-headed monster of LSU, Tennessee and Ole Miss. Most observers felt 4-5 would have been a good goal for the Aggies in this difficult stretch. Well, A&M came out the other side with a 3-6 record. Not so great, but not devastating either. However, what that has done is put extreme importance on this road series against a good Auburn team.

With seven series to go in the regular season, Texas A&M needs to at the very least get back to a .500 SEC record, meaning they must gain three games in the loss column the rest of the way. If the Aggies lose this series, they will fall four games under, and it will take a significant turnaround to get those four games back in six weeks, especially when two of those future opponents are Florida and Arkansas. Winning this series on the road is pretty urgent.

A&M is still realistically in the hunt leaving Auburn at 5-7 vs. 4-8. All of these series are critical at this point, but the Aggies really need to find a way to win this series. There are five SEC teams with either three or four conference wins. Drop the series, and A&M is likely sitting near the bottom of the conference standings. Win the series, and A&M is right in the middle of the conference race.

The margin in the SEC is so small. Every game matters.