The Good, Bad, and Ugly From Texas Baseball’s Series Loss to Texas A&M

This is a series that the Texas Longhorns are going to want to forget, but it might be a little hard, especially with who it came up against.

Unlike last season, when a banged-up Texas A&M team rolled into Austin and was swept, the Aggies returned the favor, now fully healthy, and dominated the Jim Schlossnagle-led Longhorns in the first two games of the series.

But Mother Nature had other plans this weekend — the series finale on Sunday would eventually be cancelled after an eight-and-a-half-hour rain delay. There is no plan to make up the game, ending the series after just two games.

Even with the game being cancelled, Texas A&M had already won the series with an impressive 11-4 performance on Saturday. It's Texas’ first conference series loss since Florida late last season.

The Good: Aiden Robbins' Power Hitting Isn’t Stopping Anytime Soon

When Robbins made the move from Seton Hall this past offseason, he came to Austin as one of the best hitters last season. But those stats were compiled in the Big East, a conference not really known for its baseball prowess.

Robbins, though, hasn’t stopped even against “superior” competitors. In the two games against the Aggies, Robbins fired four home runs, with his first in the series opener being a full count two-run blast against Aggies starter Shane Sdao, who was cutting up the rest of the lineup on Friday.

Across the two games in College Station, Robbins went 5-8 at the plate, and of the 12 runs Texas scored, his bat accounted for half of them, driving in 6 RBI.

The Bad: The Rain Delays

Texas Longhorns head coach Jim Schlossnagle stands in the dugout ahead of the Lone Star Showdown | Aaron E. Martinez/American-Statesman / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

“Should’ve been a basketball coach if you don’t like the weather,” Schlossnagle said on Saturday.

The last two games of the series were plagued by the brisk hand of nature. Schlossnagle said after the game on Saturday that there were conversations about delaying the start time, but someone higher up decided to go ahead with the 2 p.m. first pitch time with the hope that the cell would break up.

The cell didn’t break up, and at the bottom of the first inning, around 2:22 p.m, the floodgates from above opened and paused the game for almost two hours.

Sunday was much of the same, just an hour before the first pitch time of 1 p.m., the game was delayed for an indefinite amount of time until an announcement around 5:30 p.m. for a tentative start of 7:30 p.m.

Two more delays occurred before the game was finally called due to surrounding lightning strikes and the Southeastern Conference rule that games must start before 10 p.m.

The Ugly: Luke Harrison and Friday’s Bullpen

Texas Longhorns pitcher Luke Harrison stares into the box before throwing a pitch. | University of Texas Athletics

Although some teams this season have gotten close, it was the Aggies that finally broke the formula on how to beat the Longhorns — retire their starter early and make them tap into the bullpen early.

Harrison, who has had one of the toughest jobs this season in the starting rotation, making his appearance following a series-opening loss, couldn’t make it out of the first inning. Even before the lengthy rain delay that paused the inning, Harrison gave up back-to-back singles and a 2-run double to give Texas A&M a 2-1 lead.

He would trot back out after the delay and continued to struggle. Harrison walked two batters and gave up three more extra-base hits as the score ballooned up to a daunting 8-1 before he was retired for Max Grubbs. The large deficit was too much for the Longhorns to overcome, losing the series-defining game 11-4, despite decent performance from the pen for the last eight innings.

While Texas A&M is one of the best hitting teams in the country, with one of the highest combined batting averages, they didn’t even need to swing to win the series opener. In an all too familiar scenario on Fridays, the Texas bullpen collapsed once the starter Ruger Riojas was pulled.

Haiden Leffew didn’t have the same commanding presence on the mound against the Aggies, walking three consecutive batters for a loaded bases walk before he was pulled. Brett Crossland also allowed two more runs to pass through before ending the tough inning with a strikeout. By then, Texas A&M took the lead.

In all, the Longhorns gave up their most runs in a two-game span in the Schlossnagle era, with the Aggies tattooing 20 runs across the brief series.

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