Georgia catcher Daniel Jackson, celebrating homer in the super regional against Mississippi State,is one of many Bulldogs who can go deep.
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OMAHA, Neb. — So Saturday night’s opening-round game of the College World Series for the Texas can basically be boiled down to this.
How do you get Daniel Jackson out?
“The key to getting anyone out is to throw strike one,” Longhorn pitcher Luke Harrison said Thursday.
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That’s all well and good. But the Georgia slugger with 31 home runs along with 86 RBI, a .396 batting average and 26 steals still would have two more strikes to play with.
And toying with the likely runaway Golden Spikes Award winner as the best player in college baseball is dangerous business, indeed.
Then, of course, there are the other eight batters in the Bulldogs’ lineup who collectively lead the sport with 174 home runs.
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Seven Georgia players have double-digit homers, including 21 from Michael O’Shaughnessy and 19 apiece from third baseman Tre Phelps and shortstop Kolby Branch, who played at Baylor and said Texas never recruited him.
Probably no more single factor shapes the 7 p.m. showdown between the SEC regular-season and tournament champion and the runner-up than the Longhorns’ ability to keep the ball in Charles Schwab Field.
To that point, Texas head coach Jim Schlossnagle almost concedes the point that Georgia will hit some balls out of the yard in Game 1.
“More than likely they’re going to hit some homers. The question is how many guys are on base,” the second-year Longhorn head coach said. “If you get caught up in being afraid to throw the ball in the strike zone, then there’s going to be too many ducks on the pond, or dogs on the pond, and those homers really stretch the lead.
“Oh, and by the way, we can hit some homers too. Not as many as them, but we’ll hit our share.”
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While Georgia has hit 24 more deep flies than the second most powerful team in college baseball in Oklahoma State and 67 more than the next most prodigious slugging club at the CWS in Ole Miss, Texas has clubbed 103 itself to rank 21st nationally and isn’t exactly timid at the plate. Troy, making its CWS debut on Friday, has 93 homers and was playing West Virginia, which has the fewest long balls of the eight teams here with just 55.
Johnson was a bit defensive about some arguments that his Georgia team benefits from a bandbox of a ballpark at hitter-friendly Foley Field. But he said his stadium is actually only the fourth-smallest ballpark in the SEC.
He did concede that there’s “that little pocket” in right field, which he said runs from 306 feet to 330. But he explained that it’s still 350 feet down the left-field line and 375 feet in the gaps, much like Charles Schwab Field, which usually plays bigger than most ballparks with the wind normally blowing in.
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“I’m pretty sure we’re not in Denver,” he added, lest anyone suggest that, uh, thin air in Athens explains all the homers. Wind perhaps, but more likely strong, physical batters.
Texas, for sure, doesn’t play in a cracker box, but it makes certain it has more than one way to score.
In fact, Schlossnagle made it a point to mention Thursday that Texas is the first Power 4 conference team in the 15-year BBCOR era of college baseball of reining in aluminum bats and ending “gorilla ball” to boast more than 100 homers and 100 stolen bases (111) in a season.
That wasn’t lost on him because he brought it up at the press conference and used it to make his recruiting pitch for all those prospects who have entered the transfer portal.
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Texas catcher Carson Tinney, celebrating a homer against Oregon in the super regionals, is also one of several Longhorns with double-digit steals.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
“I’m super proud of that,” he said. “I mean, that’s awesome. I think if I’m an offensive player, I would want to play in that offense — even a guy like (catcher Carson) Tinney has double-digit stolen bases. Our goal is to play any brand of baseball. If the wind is blowing in and we can’t hit home runs, we’ve got to win in another fashion.”
Tinney met Jackson in Cape Cod summer ball and joked on Thursday, “I would like to say that I probably have a little bit more speed than him. No, I’m just kidding. He’s a great player. I know he hits the ball pretty well and hard.”
Neither one of these teams live by the small game that earned past Longhorn coaches Cliff Gustafson and Augie Garrido four titles while at Texas, the Longhorns will lay down an occasional bunt — 14 on the season — while the Bulldogs have exactly two sacrifice bunts all season in 63 games. Kenny Ishikawa has both, the same number of homers he has.
“We don’t bunt,” said Wes Johnson, Georgia’s third-year head coach who spent four seasons as the pitching coach for the Minnesota Twins sandwiched around similar roles at Mississippi State, Arkansas and LSU. “That’s just our style. We want to hit the ball hard and elevate.”
Schlossnagle can relate. He’s not a fan either of giving up easy outs. Nobody has more than the three sac bunts that Casey Borba and Jayden Duplantier have laid down this season.
As Schlossnagle said, “You can’t bunt the ball over the fence.” That baseballology flies in the face of small ball advocates Gustafson, who pioneered the “Gusball” style this writer coined half a century ago and Garrido, who once famously uttered the words, “I’d bunt Babe Ruth.”
And the latter coach did win five CWS crowns, two at Texas and three at mid-major Cal State Fullerton, as the first coach to win two at different schools. Gus also won two and was runner-up three other times in a span of seven years.
While Harrison could throw in relief Saturday, the starting role falls to Dylan Volantis, clearly one of the best pitchers in the country and a finalist for national Pitcher of the Year. Even on his off games, he is still highly effective as against Oregon in the super regional when he threw a season-high four wild pitches and walked four, he still struck out 10 batters and stranded 11 of the 17 batters the Ducks left on base.
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As much respect as Georgia has for Volantis, Johnson said his team won’t change its style of aggressive at-bats this late in the game.
“We obviously play in the SEC, so we see Friday night guys every week who are really, really good and have a chance to play in the big leagues,” Johnson said. “You start trying to change the way you do things to combat somebody, you usually get in trouble. We go out and hunt zones and hunt areas.
“And quite frankly, we hope he makes some mistakes.”
He has, but this lanky 6-6 left-hander with more angles than an architect and a pitcher who builds his repertoire around a sweeping curve ball that can drop several feet as well as a 94-mph fastball, cutter, changeup and occasional sidearm delivery.
Dylan Volantis draws the start for Texas against Georgia in the CWS opener.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
Volantis holds the key to Texas’ chances in this CWS. Beating Georgia is imperative for the Longhorns, who probably don’t have the quality starting pitching depth to survive a run through the losers’ bracket.
“Joey Volchko is a good pitcher. Dylan Volantis is a good pitcher,” Schlossnagle said. “Usually in baseball, just when you think it’s going to go one way, it goes the opposite.”
Schlossnagle, whose departure from Texas A&M on the heels of a finals appearance created a firestorm of epic proportions, is in hot pursuit of his first national championship. After seven tries here, five with TCU and two with Texas A&M, and an agonizing loss to Tennessee in the 2024 CWS finals, the 55-year-old coach has a terrific opportunity to get his first title and Texas’ first since 2005.
“We planned on winning the national championship at TCU and A&M, too. It just didn’t work out,” he said Thursday. “Certainly at Texas, the fact that this is the 39th trip, the expectation — it’s a bad season if you don’t finish it in Omaha. And certainly they’ve won six national titles, and we continue to win national titles in different sports. Just won back-to-back in softball. So the standard is very high amongst all of our head coaches. I certainly know what the assignment is.”
Step one is a big one. Because win or lose, Texas won’t play again until Monday, it will use any and all pitchers it needs to prevail Saturday to keep Georgia from putting up crooked numbers.
Oh, and to further give Schlossnagle a headache, he saw a brisk and rare north wind blowing hard out to center fielder at The Chuck during his team’s Thursday workout.
“I will say the times in which I’ve been here, I don’t remember a north wind blowing dead out like it is today and like it’s supposed to on Saturday,” he chuckled. “So that should be interesting.”