“I’m built for this.”
“The winning tradition of the University of Texas will not be entrusted to the weak nor the timid.”
There was certainly no timidity amidst the monumental temerity of Texas Longhorns athletics director Chris Del Conte hiding by the Snook cemetery outside of College Station last June in the wake of the Texas A&M Aggies losing the College World Series final to the Tennessee Volunteers, shocking the college baseball world by spiriting his old friend Jim Schlossnagle to Austin to replace David Pierce just hours after the Aggies returned from Omaha.
Del Conte was there waiting to pick up Schlossnagle to become the seventh head baseball coach since 1911 for the winningest program in the sport’s history with six national championships and a record 38 visits to the College World Series.
Of all the school’s sports, baseball perhaps best exemplifies the phrase that Del Conte likes to employ when discussing the standard at Texas, and Schlossnagle does, too.
“Coaching at Texas is like managing the Yankees, and there’s a lot of support and there’s a lot of expectation. I’m built for this,” Schlossnagle told the Austin American-Statesman this week.
Schlossnagle paused for a beat, acknowledging the uncertainty of success.
“But Texas A&M was a big job, we turned TCU into a big job, and this is a big job. So there’s a lot of big jobs these days in college baseball. This is the golden age of college baseball. Go on a road trip with us in the SEC and you’ll see that college baseball is just a super important deal in a lot of those SEC towns,” he said.
The buzz around the Forty Acres is palpable with Schlossnagle’s addition in a way that it never was under Pierce, a missing ingredient as well as the end of legendary head coach Augie Garrido’s career as the 20th anniversary of the program’s last national championship looms months away.
But if there’s anything to dim that buzz, it’s the reality of playing baseball in the nation’s most competitive conference.
Look at the roster that Schlossnagle has assembled and it mostly appears more promising than the end under Pierce, two long years away from Omaha following thrashing Texas took in the College World Series in 2022, including a 10-2 elimination game loss to Schlossnagle’s Aggies, increasingly ironic after another loss to Schlossnagle’s team in the College Station regional sent Pierce’s tenure to its unceremonious end.
After all, the Longhorns are ranked as a consensus top-20 team among the five major publications, slotting at high as No. 7 by Perfect Game.
And yet, even the talented transition year roster under Schlossnagle is only good enough to sit at eighth in the SEC preseason baseball poll, well behind Texas A&M, atop the poll after Schlossnagle’s assistant Michael Earley took over the program and kept the elite talent on the roster.
Tennessee, the reigning national champion, is second, followed by perennial powers Arkansas and LSU. Florida and Georgia are ascendant, too, and Vanderbilt has only slipped so much under Tim Corbin in recent years.
A look at the preseason All-SEC teams only confirms where Texas sits talent-wise in relation to other conference programs.
Junior left fielder Max Belyeu, last year’s Big 12 Player of the Year, is the only Texas member of the first team even though junior shortstop Jalen Fores hit .340 with 18 home runs and 56 RBI last year. Only junior catcher Rylan Galvan is on the second team, too, and that’s a projection for a true breakout season for the Sinton product whose power started to show last year, but still struggled with a strikeout rate of 33.3 percent.
Belyeu, Flores, and Galvan combine with the versatile Kimble Schuessler and improving center fielder Will Gasparino to form the team’s core of returning players, along with sixth-year pitcher Andre Duplantier.
Schlossnagle isn’t completely sure about the team’s identity yet, but he does have some early impressions from preseason work.
“I know they’re a tight bunch. I know they like to have good time together. I know for the most part, they hold each other accountable really well. Thank goodness for that core group of Kimble Schussler, Rylan Galvan, Jalen Flores, Dre Duplantier, even Will Gasparino, in terms of returning players, but just those four or five experienced kind of confident, tough. I would say the identity right now is super blue collar — I mean, they love to work,” Schlossnagle told the Around the Horns podcast.
The Texas head coach recounted a story about having to tell the players to stop using the batting cages and focus on rest and recovery to prepare for the opening weekend of games at the Shriner’s Children College Showdown that begins on Friday against Louisville at 7 p.m. Central at Globe Life Field in Arlington.
“The identity is kind of a blue-collar work ethic, grinder mentality, pretty reflective on the position player side of Troy Tulowitzki, which is one of the main reasons that I really wanted him here,” Schlossnagle said.
Tulowitzki initially wasn’t going to be part of Schlossnagle’s staff with Earley holding that role instead, but when Earley returned to College Station to take over the Texas A&M program, the two-time Gold Glove winner stuck around Austin.
Right now, Schlossnagle believes that the top 11 of 12 position players have separated themselves from the rest with freshman Adrian Rodriguez, a flip from the Aggies, pushing for playing time at third base and freshman outfielder Cole Chamberlain showing off his left-handed swing with a home run in the Alumni game while competing for at bats at designed hitter.
There’s sophomore Casey Borba in the mix on both sides of the infield, leaned-down junior college transfer first baseman Jaquae Stewart to provide some left-handed power, ULM transfer outfielder Easton Winfield stepping in as the starter in left field, and sophomore outfielder Tommy Farmer, who has impressed the new staff.
“Since the second that we’ve stepped on this campus, Tommy Farmer has been a really good player. He’s a really good defender,” Schlossnagle said.
The path to playing time is made more difficult by Gasparino’s improvement — the 6’6, 225-pounder flashed power with 12 home runs and 13 doubles last season, but struggled to make contact when his swing lengthened around his naturally long levers with a strikeout rate of 36.2 percent.
“He’s a completely different hitter than what he was even in the fall — he’s really finally bought into an approach, worked hard with Tulo and Nolan [Cain], trying to control the strike zone a little bit better because we know if he swings at the strikes and takes the balls, as long as he touches the ball, he’s one of those guys that when he hits it, he hits it really, really hard,” Schlossnagle said.
“The one correlation to having success as a hitter is just hitting the ball hard. The guys who hit the ball the hardest do the best, plain and simple, and so he hits the ball as hard as anybody on our team.”
There are also still some reminders that this is a transition year.
“We’re not at a point where, from a depth standpoint in the SEC, that we can afford too many guys getting banged up,” Schlossnagle told D1 Baseball.
The difference in pure velocity is one that will require adjustment for the entire team. According to Schlossnagle, Flores saw 130 to 140 fastballs over 92 miles per hour last year. At Texas A&M, shortstop Ali Camarillo saw close to 400 of those fastballs.
“I have full confidence these guys will be ready to go, they’re good players, but more importantly, it’s the depth of pitching and the depth of the weekend — it’s a Super Regional every weekend and they’re so easy to lose and they’re so hard to win,” Schlossnagle said.
The winning margins may take some time for the pitching staff to find. Notably short on velocity last season, Schlossnagle and pitching coach Max Weiner added a number of power arms following their arrival, enough to push the team’s average velocity up 2.5 miles per hour.
But the staff is still working to define its roles with last season’s surprise No. 1 starter, junior right-hander Max Grubbs, just now getting back to throwing after sitting out the fall. The surprise No. 2 starter, senior left-hander Ace Whitehead, remains a question mark for Schlossnagle this season entirely.
So Indiana State transfer left-hander Jared Spencer is currently set as the Friday starter against Louisville even though only 11 of his 59 appearances for the Sycamores were starts. The Saturday starter is redshirt junior Luke Harrison, the soft-tossing left-hander who missed the 2023 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery before posting a 9.28 ERA in 13 appearances last year. The Sunday starter is to be announced.
“We’re always going to default to the strike throwers — that’s what gives you the best chance. At the same time, sometimes, especially on this team, some of the guys that are the better strike throwers, the pure stuff is a little bit lighter than what the SEC or what elite Division One baseball demands now at the end of the day,” Schlossnagle said.
It’s an ominous admission and a ringing indictment of the pitching staff under Pierce.
However, the buzz surrounding Texas baseball now is not necessarily about where Schlossnagle can take this year’s team — the College World Series remains the standard, even if these Horns don’t project as a true contender in Omaha if they can make it — it’s about what Schlossnagle can built with this Longhorns program.