Schlossnagle Era Year Two

What a difference a year makes.

Although there were boatloads of excitement for the upcoming baseball season in the Brazos Valley and what the Jim Schlossnagle era would bring to Aggieland, expectations from the outside were low 2022. The Aggies were picked to finish sixth in the SEC West in the league’s preseason coaches poll and the Maroon & White were an afterthought when the experts crafted their national preseason rankings.

“The expectations in year one were obviously pretty low,” Aggie first baseman Jack Moss said. “The year before I got here the team didn’t do particularly well in SEC play or really the whole season. When we came in everybody kind of wrote us off and really didn’t think much was going to happen from it. We all took that personally and really wanted to prove everybody wrong.”

Even the thought of what the team’s potential upper limits could be was unknown on the inside.

“If I’m going to be honest, I didn’t know what the ceiling was,” Schlossnagle said. “We had a bunch of new guys and new coaches and the SEC is such a strong league. I thought we were going to be a good offensive team and better defensive team, but I was uncertain about our pitching. Then we lost Khristian Curtis and that was a big blow. I felt like we were a team that could sneak into a regional. And once you get into a regional, you never know.”

Early hiccups in the non-conference slate had the Maroon & White off to a pedestrian 10-6 start heading into the behemoth SEC slate. The naysayers continued to naysay.

Following an 8-2 loss to Houston in a Tuesday night game, Schlossnagle regaled the team with a Pringles-related parable. The Maroon & White respond by shocking the collegiate baseball world with a series win at No. 8 LSU that changed the trajectory of the season.

“Coach (Schlossnagle) said winning needed to be like eating Pringles,” departed Aggie pitcher Micah Dallas said. “He asked if we ever had one Pringle and were like ‘I don’t want any more.’ You can’t eat just one. You’ve got to have them all. So, we kind of just took that to heart.”

The Aggies came out on the wrong end of a donnybrook of a series against Auburn which included two extra-inning affairs, but a 12-9 victory over T.U. was followed by Ol’ Sarge’s charges claiming eight consecutive SEC series and A&M earned the SEC West title.

“We found a formula to win,” Schlossnagle said. “We were able to hit. And we were able to grind it out on the mound with (Joseph) Menefee and (Jacob) Palisch winning us a lot of games pitching out of the bullpen on Friday and Sunday. We would normally be ultra-competitive in the first game of a series. The second game was hit or miss. But that third was when we could beat you up because our offense was that good. Palisch and Menefee could keep us in games and we could beat you up at the plate with your pitching staff taxed the first two days.”

“That’s not sustainable winning baseball from year to year, but it worked last year. They believed in each other. The fans believed in the team. They didn’t think they could lose. Who was I to tell them they could? So I just stayed out of the way.”

A run to the SEC Tournament semifinals was followed by sweeps of the NCAA Regional and Super Regional rounds at Blue Bell Park. The historic campaign hit a crescendo with the Aggies claiming their first College World Series win since 1993 and recording multiple victories in Omaha for the first time.

“They hopefully will forever be remembered as the team that reignited Texas A&M Baseball,” Schlossnagle said in Omaha at his final postgame press conference of the season. “It’s our job now to honor what they’ve started and continue to build on it. It’s not going to be easy to repeat. I don’t care how many talented players you recruit. It’s hard to create the kind of synergy and leadership this team had. We have to start back at ground zero.”

Fast-forward to 2023. Expectations are sky high. The national preseason polls have attached numbers like 4, 5 and 7 next to the Maroon & White. But as Schlossnagle said in Omaha, the Aggies are back at ground zero.

“It’s not as easy as copy-and-paste from last year’s team,” A&M third baseman Trevor Werner said. “Especially with the guys who played big roles who aren’t with us this season. After we celebrated our ring ceremony, we put last year’s team aside. This is the 2023 team. We must build on that winning culture and work harder than we worked last year, both in practice and outside of practice.”

While this year’s team had to start at ground zero in their quest for a national title, they had an undeniable head start on last year’s team. The 2022 version of Texas A&M was a hodgepodge of players who had virtually no experience working together and none of them were in tune with the intricacies of the Schlossnagle Way. 

“The biggest difference between this year and last year is having a solid group of returners come back,” Aggie pitcher Will Johnston said. “It makes it easier when you have a group of players that are reinforcing the culture that Coach Schloss and Coach Yeskie and the whole staff are trying to instill in everybody. I would say this year we have a head start on bringing everybody together and kind of pulling on the rope in the same direction. We developed a cohesive culture much earlier in the fall than a year ago.”

The 2023 squad also benefits from a strong group of returnees who have the taste of winning and the recipe for the success. There were thoughts that Austin Bost, Brett Minnich and Trevor Werner may have played their last collegiate game when the sun set on A&M in Omaha, but the trio shunned MLB overtures to return for one final go. Added to the star power of Moss, Johnston, Nathan Dettmer, Chris Cortez and Ryan Targac and you have a treasure trove of talent that would make any coaching staff envious.

“The blessing that we had between years one and two is the number of players that came back and the quality of human beings that they are,” Schlossnagle said. “We call it ‘Coach Fed and Player Led.’ Our job as coaches is to run the overreaching 36,000-foot view of the program. Ideally you want each team every year to be run by the players and their internal leadership. When you bring back guys like Bost and Minnich and Moss and Targac and Werner and Dettmer and Johnston – those guys are elite human beings. They know how we want the program to be run on a day-to-day basis. They hold each other and the team accountable. 

“This time last year we were trying to implement everything from the ground up. The players were unsure of how practices flowed, how we run our drills, how are we going to travel, what are we supposed to wear, how is the locker room supposed to look. Those kids did an awesome job of adjusting to the new culture. Now they are teaching it to the new guys. That’s behind us and they can just worry about baseball.”

It isn’t accurate to say nobody had prior experience working with one another heading into the 2022 campaign. A prior relationship that played a key role A&M surging in 2022 was Moss and hitting coach Michael Earley reuniting in Aggieland. Earley mentored Moss at Arizona State as a freshman in 2021 and played a big role in the Englewood, Colorado, native transferring to Texas A&M. Moss was key in getting teammates to buy into what Earley, one of the top hitting coaches in the nation, was teaching.

“We left a program we both loved and came here and were ‘all in’,” Earley said. “He was very instrumental in my coaching last year. He gained a lot of trust from the guys early on last year. That helped me get my message out. He already had me as a coach for a year and done a lot of the stuff we would be doing. Him being here was probably a bigger help for me than I was for him.” 

In 2023, the Aggies welcome another former Sun Devil who has worked with Earley. Hunter Haas reunites with Moss and is expected to be a vital part of the A&M infield.

The men on the mound had a bridge to pitching coach Nate Yeskie that cannot be overlooked. Catcher Troy Claunch worked with Yeskie at Oregon State in 2018-19 and he was able to convey to the pitching staff the lessons that needed to be learned.

“Troy meant the world because there was familiarity,” Yeskie said. “The conversations we would have – there were three, four years of conversations that were brought into a new environment. Sometimes all it took was a look and he’d be like ‘No, I got it’ and I could stand back. It was good for him. It was good for the other players.”

A key to Aggie success in 2023 will be finding a catcher who can fill the shoes of Clutch Claunch. 

“The success of the pitching staff is always tied to the catcher,” Yeskie said. “That’s the challenge that out ahead of every catcher and pitcher – building that relationship, cohesiveness and comfort. That comes from bullpens, that comes from catch-play, comes from riding buses, riding planes, working together in the weight room. There are so many layers to it. Because at the end of the day, if you know that guy on the other end of that game of catch is giving you his best effort and he’s worked to put himself in a position to succeed you can go out there and tackle the challenge ahead of you.”

With the Maroon & White losing 20 lettermen after the 2021 campaign, it was imperative that Schlossnagle and his staff dig deep in the transfer portal and not miss. They struck gold.

In addition to Moss, who batted .380 and led the SEC with 103 hits, and Claunch, who earned the coveted No. 12 jersey with his leadership abilities, the Aggies benefited from the addition of All-American Dylan Rock and Kole Kaler, who ended up playing shortstop for most of the season with injuries to Kalae Harrison and Werner.

On the mound, Dallas arrived from Texas Tech to bolster the starting rotation and Stanford graduate Palisch earned All-America recognition out of the bullpen.

“The transfer portal was huge,” Schlossnagle said. “If it had not been in play for us, it would’ve been a long season. The impact they had on this program will not just be felt in 2022 or when their career is done here. It will be felt years down the road. They set the standard.”

In the future, Schlossnagle’s expectation is the Aggies will not need to raid the transfer portal to that extent. They expect to use it judiciously to fill holes with the kind of players that will fit the program. They have brought in a handful for 2023, including pitchers Troy Wansing (Purdue), Carson Lambert (USC), Josh Stewart (Texas), Matt Dillard (Sam Houston), Brandyn Garcia (Quinnipiac), Max Debiec (Washington) and Jace Hutchins (Texas) and outfielder Tab Tracy (Houston), as well as the aforementioned Haas.

“Make-up wise we didn’t miss,” Schlossnagle said. “Hunter Haas is definitely our kind of human being. You can say the same for Wansing, Garcia, Stewart and on down the line. They’ve all been really good people and they’ve molded into the culture of the program which is what you want. When you bring someone in whether they’re a freshman or a transfer you want them to be all-in.”

A mother lode of returning talent and solid additions from the transfer portal will be mixed in with an extremely gifted group of high school and junior college newcomers. Building the winning chemistry is well underway.

“We’ve done a good job as a team getting everybody together,” Werner said. “It’s all about building relationships both at the field or outside the field. We have common goal and we’re making sure everybody is working to get to that goal every day.”

As for that goal, making it to Omaha was an outstanding feat for the 2022 squad and finish in college baseball’s final four far exceeded expectations, but members of this year’s club won’t be satisfied with just the trip to Nebraska.

“Omaha is hard feat to accomplish,” Minnich said. “I think any team in the country would say that. We have to work harder than last year. We have to go to that bar and then exceed that bar. We’re not just trying to get to Omaha. We’re trying to win the whole thing. That is something we’ve talked about all year. People say ‘It’s cool you guys made it to Omaha,” but so what. We didn’t win. We’re trying to win the whole thing. That’s the goal.”