Column: ‘Win more,’ and Texas baseball can add national title No. 7 with this 2022 bunch

David Pierce’s Texas Longhorns enter the 2022 season as the No. 1 team in most major polls, and rightfully so.

Texas’ baseball program is familiar with being No. 1. The Longhorns have reached the mountaintop six times in their storied history and have competed in Omaha a record 37 times.

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Nebraska in June is the expectation for Longhorn baseball. They know it. More so than any other team Pierce has fielded since he succeeded Augie Garrido, this one has everything it could ask for in order to bring home the program’s seventh national championship.

Are those daunting terms? For most, yes. For this team? It’s what they know.

“The expectations here haven’t really changed,” Pierce said in late January. “They’ve been like that since the day we walked in. We accept it. We embrace it. We love it really because I don’t think anybody’s going to put more pressure on ourselves or create more expectations than the coaches and our players.”

The 2021 Longhorns took home a share of the Big 12 regular season title, reached the College World Series, and advanced to the national semi-finals, falling one game short of the championship series versus eventual national champions Mississippi State.

Texas returns a significant number of players from that team, like catcher Silas Ardoin, prospective first baseman Ivan Melendez, second baseman Mitchell Daly, shortstop Trey Faltine, left fielder Eric Kennedy, center fielder Douglas Hodo, and right fielder Austin Todd to name a few.

They lose some key cogs like Friday starter Ty Madden, first baseman Zach Zubia, third baseman Cam Williams, and center fielder Mike Antico, but many of those there to step into the roles left vacant by those players were part of the trip to the final four last year.

Melendez hopes to make a designated-hitter-to-first-baseman transition like Zubia. Pete Hansen, who manned the Sunday starter role in the latter portion of the 2021 season, is who Pierce has penciled in to pitch Friday nights. Tristan Stevens, the consistent inning-eater and veteran presence, is back for Saturday evening appearances. And freshman All-American Tanner Witt looks to move from the bullpen to the rotation and take the Sunday role.

Like Antico last year, Texas brings in a player who wasn’t previously on the roster they hope can be a difference-maker. Kansas transfer and 2021 second-team All-Big 12 honoree Skylar Messinger is likely to man the hot corner. He has adjusted well to playing up to the standards of the program, but it took some time to reach that point.

“He made a comment early in the fall, he goes ‘I always thought I worked really hard until I got here,’” Pierce said. “He understands there’s an ingredient here that has separated us, and he’s jumped right in. He’s embraced it.”

Who leads that experience? A group of assistant coaches that includes Sean Allen and Phillip Miller. Those two have great chances to become head coaches in the coming years, especially Allen after he took home D1Baseball.com’s assistant of the year award in 2021.

Those two, plus volunteer assistant and former MLB All-Star Troy Tulotwitzki, provide Pierce with advice he trusted on the way to his second Big 12 title and second College World Series appearance as a head coach, and will continue to trust in 2022.

With that in mind, Pierce isn’t totally hands-off. Sure, most of the batting order, pitching staff, and even the closer in Aaron Nixon returns from a team a few outs away from playing for the seventh national title in program history.

The team mostly knows what to do, see the above comment about Messinger as evidence, but Pierce also has to coach. After all, it’s what he’s paid handsomely to do. He received an extension and raise this past offseason that puts him among select company of college baseball coaches collecting over $1 million per year.

But who he’s working with makes that a much easier task.

“I think the key is to not overlook things that you really expect and assume, because they were in Omaha last year, that they have it figured out,” Pierce said. “I think the key is to stay demanding, but when you have older kids and you’ve watch them fight and do the things they’ve done over the past couple of years, it’s a lot easier to have conversations and talk with players and talk through it.

“I think that’s what you can do much more with a veteran team, you can ask them their opinion and what they think and they give you valid information.”

The accumulated talent, experience, and the culture Pierce has built upon successive “prove-it” seasons for the program have Texas looking down at everyone else before the games begin, and looking up at no one.

It is the preseason, though. There’s a slate of games to be played, expectations to be met, and, as far as Texas goes, a pile of humanity to be made in the middle of the stadium now known as Charles Schwab Field Omaha.

How do they plan to get there? What’s the philosophy?

Said Pierce with a smile: “Win more.”

On no other occasion has he had a team equipped to ‘win more’ than this one.

The journey to see if they can achieve that lofty goal of another dogpile in Omaha begins Friday.