Jim Schlossnagle shares what he learned about Texas A&M in Seattle series

Texas A&M opened its 2023 campaign with a weekend sweep of visiting Seattle. No game was decided by three runs or less with Sunday’s contest wrapping up in eight innings as the Aggies walked away with a 14-2 victory over the Redhawks.

In total, Texas A&M scored 24 runs and hit five home runs over its three games against Seattle. The Aggies also only allowed seven runs in the series with a team cumulative WHIP of 1.27.

The biggest downside of the weekend was Brett Minnich‘s broke thumb, which he suffered in the first inning of the first game of the season. Minnich was one of two players to start all 64 games last season for the Aggies, hitting .306 with a .409 on-base percentage, 51 runs and 52 RBIs.

Head coach Jim Schlossnagle said after the series finale he learned some good information about his team this weekend.

“We know more about our team,” Schlossnagle said. “Obviously we had the injury, and that’s super disappointing. Sad for Brett but we’ll get him back hopefully in the next six weeks. But that just creates opportunity and so we learned a lot about [Kasen] Wells, Stanley Tucker got to play, get some other guys in there late. We know Kaeden Kent‘s an outstanding player. We may look to get him in there, maybe in a different position. But, overall, we’ll take the three wins. Would like to have Juan seem to be a little cleaner in just start but we had a lot of new Aggies get their feet wet.”

Another thing Schlossnagle emphasized as a fun part of the weekend was the atmosphere at Blue Bell Park. Texas A&M had over 6,000 fans for its first two games against Seattle and then had an announced attendance of 4,999 for Sunday’s game, which started at 10:30 a.m.

“I thought today’s crowd was awesome,” Schlossnagle said. “Honestly, the highlight of the weekend was the crowd. To play a 10:30 game on a Sunday and have however many we had — 5,000 people — I thought that was great and we’re super thankful they came out on Sunday morning.”