The last time No. 24 Texas baseball won a game was a week ago against St. John’s. Despite being on a four-game losing streak and falling to rival No. 7 Texas A&M 9-2 on Tuesday in front of the largest regular season crowd of 8,060 people, the team is staying positive.
In its last four games, Texas has played three top 10 opponents.
Redshirt junior Kimble Schuessler started his college baseball career at Texas A&M and is now the starting catcher at Texas. Schuessler has also been one of the team’s top hitters with 14 hits and 12 RBI on the season.
The season is still early and Schuessler understands that.
“Our bats have shown good signs and our pitching has a little ways to go, but it’s early and everyone believes in each other,” Schuessler said. “We could take this in a really negative way, this is a tough stretch, but we’re going to take it in a positive outlook and just go from here.”
One of the positives Schuessler mentioned was pitching. While the bullpen is still struggling, redshirt junior Tanner Witt started on the mound for Texas, and other than giving up a home run, had a solid performance.
Witt is still returning to his prime form, from before he tore his UCL, but is making strides in the right direction after a rough start against San Diego.
“I thought he did really good, he reminded me of how he was before (his Tommy John surgery) today,” Schuessler said. “His fastball had a lot of lift on it and I think he’s trending in the right direction.”
Through just over three innings, Witt threw 68 pitches, struck out three, gave up three hits and one home run for two runs.
While Witt’s pitching performance was promising, Head Coach David Pierce said that the team still isn’t playing three complete phases of baseball.
“When we pitch we don’t play defense, when we play defense we’re not hitting,” Pierce said. “We have to be able to not only play three phases, but play the entire game.”
Texas gave up four unearned runs, with a drop by senior outfielder Porter Brown at the left field warning track allowing two unearned runs to score. This was just what the Aggies needed to break free and put the game out of reach for the Longhorns.
Texas struggled in both defensive phases with errors and pitching, forcing five players to make appearances out of the bullpen. While Pierce was happy with the way his pitchers attacked the strike zone, they still walked six batters.
“We struck out 12 (batters) so there’s enough stuff there,” Pierce said. “Really (they) just came in on 2-0 counts and (we) just (started) pitching behind and it’s hard to get your secondary pitches and get guys out of balance if you’re just continuing to pitch behind.”
Despite having not won in a week, Pierce is not backing down from the level of competition his team is facing.
“It’s perfect,” Pierce said. “I don’t care, I’m not backing down from competition. It’s gonna make us better. If we play poor teams we’re not gonna get exposed so we need to be exposed right now.”
His team has now been exposed four times in a row, falling to 7—5, and will now start conference play this weekend by going on the road to play Texas Tech in Lubbock.
