It ended like a bad Hollywood cliffhanger.
Like the proverbial damsel in distress, tied to the railroad tracks.
Like J.R. Ewing, slumping to the floor with a bullet in his belly.
Or like Rey on the mountaintop, arm outstretched, waiting to see what Luke Skywalker does with the lightsaber.
Need we recap?
Not once, but twice, TCU was one pitch away from putting a surprise NCAA-berth bow on its injury-wrecked 2018 baseball season.
But . . .
- A routine fly ball was lost in the sun in the Big 12 tournament final.
- The Frogs failed to make the NCAA tournament for only the second time in 15 seasons.
- And in the hours that followed that final inning, TCU fans were staggered by the news that coach Jim Schlossnagle could possibly be leaving for Mississippi State.
No wonder Schlossnagle, who stayed home, was eager to turn the page to a new season.
“This is as excited for a season as I’ve been since I’ve been at TCU,” Schlossnagle said. “I think that’s mainly because of the way things ended last year, but also because of the effort this club has put in.”
After last season’s disappointment, the buy-in this time was both immediate and unanimous, the coach said.
This year’s team rally video is named, “The Long Fight,” and TCU knows the lengthy road ahead as well as anyone.
First things first, though. Somebody saddled the Frogs with a recklessly demanding weekend to begin a challenging 2019 schedule.
“Yeah, I don’t know who made it,” Schlossnagle said with a smirk, “but that guy’s an idiot.”
Schlossnagle puts the schedules together, of course.
TCU is one of four pedigreed college baseball programs that will begin play Friday in the MLB4 tournament in Scottsdale, Ariz.
The Frogs will be joined by preseason No. 1-ranked Vanderbilt, five-time College World Series champ Cal State Fullerton and 2015 NCAA winner Virginia. TCU and Fullerton will open the MLB-sponsored tourney Friday at 2 p.m., Central time.
The same four teams were scheduled to play in Puerto Rico, but those plans were disrupted by Hurricane Maria. When the four coaches expressed a desire to stage the event elsewhere, Major League Baseball stepped in to sponsor it and offered Salt River Fields at Talking Stick as host.
“I truly believe this will be the most heavily scouted baseball tournament in the history of college baseball,” Schlossnagle predicted.
As he explained, “You’re going to have four great programs, four programs that are full of high draft picks, playing at a great complex in Arizona at the forefront of spring training when there’s really not that much going on.
“Last year we opened at Grand Canyon in Phoenix, and we had three big league managers come watch us play. So we’ll see GMs and managers and coaches and scouts, and this will really be great exposure for our players.”
A TCU team laden with new faces will greet the scouts. There were 16 new players – eight freshmen, eight transfers – that joined the program last fall.
Schlossnagle isn’t worried about all the newcomers.
“It reminds me of 2015,” he said. “We went to Omaha and we had about eight or nine seniors on that team — Keaton Jones, Derek Odell and a lot of really big-time names that had been here for awhile.
“We had lot of turnover, but we had some junior college players come in, people nobody knew about – Ryan Merrill, Cam Warner, guys like that – and those guys ended up taking us to two more World Series.”
Despite this weekend’s hospitality – the four college teams will be playing at the spring training home of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies – Major League Baseball has not been overly kind to the Frogs in recent seasons.
Seven recruits who signed with TCU over the past two years ended up instead choosing MLB.
“That’s not something that has normally happened to us,” Schlossnagle said. “We have normally held the guys we signed – Matt Purke, Nick Lodolo, Luken Baker, Charles King. We don’t usually lose that many players in the draft, but for a variety of reasons we lost seven guys.
“That created kind of a gap in those two classes, both in numbers and ability. So we tried to fill that by supplementing our program with junior college players.”
Prominent among the transfers will be outfielder Andrew Keefer and catcher Alex Isola. The latter will give starting catcher Zach Humphreys some much-needed support behind the plate.
Humphreys spent his summer in the Cape Cod League, where he made the all-star team.
“Isola has really got a chance to be a good player, and that’s going to be great for Humphreys because it means Zach is not going to have to catch every single inning of every single game,” Schlossnagle said.
“Zach is one of better pure, instinctual baseball players that we’ve had in my 16 years here. He’s a winning player.
“Last year I think the season just beat him down. He kinda caught his feet in the Cape Cod League, made the all-star team and has a lot of confidence from that. His two years of experience now are really going to serve him well.”
Keefer transferred from Weatherford College, where he played two seasons.
“He’s the kind of guy where everything he does is kinda ugly, but everything he does is successful,” Schlossnagle said. “In today’s baseball everybody wants to talk about launch angles and swings, and this guy, you may see him put his rear end out and flare one to right field, and next time up he’ll hook a ball down the line. He’s going to be a tough guy to pitch to.”
The key again is going to be his team’s health, Schlossnagle admitted. Injuries robbed the Frogs last year of their best hitter, Luken Baker, and best pitcher, Jared Janczak. Baker was drafted in the second round by the Cardinals, but Janczak returns for his senior season.
“College baseball is this way in general with only 11 1/2 scholarships,” Schlossnagle said. “But here with the cost of attendance 63- or 64-thousand dollars, you’re this far away from winning the national championship and you’re this far away from total disaster, because with limited scholarships and roster size, there’s no Triple-A, nobody to call up. Your team is your team.
“We ran into that last year with the injuries.”
Coincidence or not, the baseball team’s plague of medical issues was followed by injury-filled 2018 seasons by the TCU football and men’s basketball teams.
Schlossnagle hopes that turning the calendar to the new year will remedy all that.
“If we can stay healthy,” he said, “I like our chances.”
