TCU heads to Big 12 baseball tournament after ‘overachieving’

Favored to win the Big 12, TCU heads to the conference tournament off a third-place finish.

It may be an unexpected result, but coach Jim Schlossnagle keeps the big picture in mind.

“In my mind, this team has overachieved,” he said. “Especially from a pitching standpoint, I think you’ve overachieved in a major way, when you look at the major injuries or the underperformance of some veteran pitchers and how some guys that we weren’t counting on have pitched.”

The Horned Frogs, who learned a week before the season began that they would be without projected opening night starter Mitchell Traver and had to redshirt starting center fielder and leadoff hitter Nolan Brown because of a broken hand, open postseason Wednesday as the No. 3 seed in the Phillips 66 Big 12 Baseball Championship.

At 38-14, TCU is far off the win pace of last year’s team, which was 43-9 after the regular season. It does not have the margin for error of the 2015 team, which went 0-2 at the conference tournament but still hosted a regional and earned a national seed.

The 2014 team, with almost the same record as this year’s team, went 4-0 in winning the conference tournament and hosted a regional.

“I don’t know what kind of year people expected from us,” Schlossnagle said. “I think preseason rankings are based more on your history than they are on people really looking at the makeup of your team. Knowing what we lost and the injuries that have really changed things, especially from a pitching standpoint, and Nolan Brown being out, for us to be 20 games over .500 versus the schedule we’ve played — we don’t like how we’ve gotten there — but it’s pretty admirable in my opinion over the long haul.”

The Frogs, who replaced the entire infield from last year and have used four freshmen in the rotation and a freshman closer, started 22-5. They appeared to be on track.

But an 11-9 stretch — including 7-7 in Big 12 games — from the start of April until mid-May knocked down their chances of winning the league and being in line to repeat as a national seed. That six-week period also included the loss of Luken Baker as a pitcher because of a muscle strain.

But in the past week, TCU has won five straight, including a sweep of Kansas State last week that revived its home regional hopes.

“Obviously, we’ve had our ups and downs,” junior reliever Brian Trieglaff said. “Tough series loss to Tech, tough series loss to Oklahoma State. But we’ve played some really good baseball this year. We’ve played some really tough games.”

More tough games are possible this week. To reach the Big 12 championship game, TCU must win a pool against Baylor, Oklahoma State and Texas — all of which beat the Frogs in their series this year.

But TCU won the last time it faced Baylor, 7-3 on May 15 in Waco, to start its five-game winning streak.

“The season, it’s obvious maybe it’s not where we want it to be,” Trieglaff said. “But like Coach Schloss said, our best baseball’s ahead. If we keep playing well, get the routine out, just keep staying true to who we are, then I think we’ll have a great season.”

This story was originally published May 23, 2016 at 3:36 PM with the headline "TCU heads to Big 12 baseball tournament after ‘overachieving’."