Coach Jim Schlossnagle held media availability today as Fall practices really kick into gear. Here are some of the questions and answers about the program, players, expectations, etc.
- Opening Statement by Schloss
- "New year, super excited to get Fall Practice started. We’ve been going on for about three or four weeks, since the beginning of school in our skill hours, and got a lot of good work done. Got a lot of good teaching implemented. Looking forward to just playing the games. You know, we’ll start inner squad games on Friday. Play a couple of those a week. You can only take so much batting practice. You eventually have to find out who can actually play in the game. So looking forward to getting that going and seeing what the players have to offer."
- Question: Hectic summer with the quick transition, filling out the roster. When did things kind of slow down?
- "Yeah I think things slowed down when we were finally able to get on the field, you know, once the players got back. Being a coach in the summer times, recruiting is a necessary evil. Obviously it’s the lifeblood of your program, but at the end of the day, any coach worth his salt didn’t get into the profession to recruit. You get into the profession to work with the players and interact with the players and develop relationships with the players. And so, when the players get back, you feel normal and then when you get on the field and start working with them and helping them, helping them achieve their goals. That’s the reason, at least, that I got in the profession, is to help young people get better. It's something they’re passionate about. So once we were able to get on the fiend, things felt a little more normal."
- Question: What are your objectives? What do you want to accomplish this Fall?
- "Fall practice is about teaching. I mean, there’s nothing that’s too rocket science about, at least in my view, baseball, but we are certainly going to implement an offense and a defensive style of play, which is just straight fundamental baseball. But it's mainly evaluate. Trying to figure who can do what. Currently seven or eight more players than we’re allowed roster spots for the spring. So we have to figure out who’s going to be on the team throughout the course of the fall, and learn more about the players. You never really know anything until you actually play in some games, and then you really don’t know until you get into the season. But having an opportunity to put them in game like situations and watch them play is what I look forward to the most."
- Question: Do you go into the Fall with this being a complete blank slate for the players or do you have an idea that this person is in this position?
- "I think it’s a completely blank for some people. No disrespect to anybody else, but I have a tough time thinking that Jalin [Flores] wouldn’t be our shortstop. That doesn’t mean he can’t lose the job, but there are certain positions that I think there are the odds on favorite, just because of their track record and when you just watch them play, but I don’t want to discount anybody else that may come out of nowhere. We certainly have to prepare other people to play the positions that they’re capable of playing, because, as we saw with Quinn [Ewers], anything can happen. So you have to be ready to handle the ups and downs of a season."
- Question: For the returners on the team, do you get a sense that they are excited for a new start, a fresh start with a new coach?
- "We have a new coaching staff, we have a lot of good energy. That doesn’t mean its better than the past. It just means its different, and we’ll find out if its better by the results on the field. But we haven’t played a game yet, so I haven’t had to write one lineup yet. When we play intersquad, we’ll have Longhorns on both sides of the field, so you never really find out about any team, whether it’s a new coach or not until you post that first lineup, and you post that first travel squad, and you lose your first game. Hopefully we’ll win them all, but probably wont. So it’s the adversity that tests your culture, you know, right now, its not all puppies and ice cream, but its close."
- Question: Along those lines, how much have you had to say, I know that this is the way you did it, and that was great, but I prefer you do it this way?
- "I mean, I haven’t really asked the way it was done in the past, that’s not for me. I think the world of Coach Pierce and Coach Rodriguez and all the other coaches that were here and three College World Series trips in what, five or six years, that’s a pretty darn good percentage. Some of the things may be the same, but its not for me to judge. It's just for us to coach our team. And you’d have to ask the players about that. But I don’t want them to have anything negative from them to be said about the previous coach. So I’d rather just everybody looking in the front mirror and not the back."
- Question: How did you feel about just putting the roster together. Who you were able to retain, who you had recruiting, and that whole construction?
- "It was a challenge, obviously because you know anytime you play that deep into the CWS, your 20 plus days into the portal being open, didn’t really get to create super deep relationships with some of the incoming freshman that we lost in the draft. Had we been able to do that over the course of time, maybe we could have kept a couple of those guys, some of them went really high, but some others, you know, we would have liked to kept, but I think given the situation, we did break even. Jalin [Flores] was honestly the biggest recruit to get on campus because he could have signed, he certainly could have transferred. Same with Max [Belyeu] in the outfield, the two catchers [Galvan and Schuessler], [Will] Gasparino, a couple of the pitchers. Just getting the Longhorns that played in a regional last year and have tasted success, keeping those guys around was super important."
- Question: Max specifically, what sets him apart?
- Oh, he’s good. He’s certainly talented. He’s physical. He’s gotten stronger, just in the last four weeks. I think he uses the whole field to hit. I think he’s a self-made player. He’s at Texas, so he was somewhat recruited out of high school, but from what I was told, he wasn’t a marquee player this time last year and then just kind of showed up on the field. Again that’s why you play the games. There’ll be some guys this fall that look like they’re superstars and they wont show up in the spring for whatever reason, and they’ll be the opposite. But I think Max [Belyeu] the biggest key for Max right now is his confidence in himself. Don’t take an arrogance from the season, but you take a lot of confidence from the season he had last year and his Big 12 Player of the Year, and it would be pretty awesome to be SEC player of the year. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before, he's got a lot of work to do to do that, and we have to put a good team around him. But he’s a really good player."
- Question: Are there any position changes? Are you going to try people in positions they weren’t at before?
- "I don’t see Jalin [Flores] moving anywhere, but certainly, we’ll move the outfielders around a bit. Haven’t really had a chance to see them against live pitching. You think a guy can hit and then a pitcher starts out mixing three pitches and Max Weiner is calling the pitches and messing with their minds and so you got to find out who actually play the games. And then once we figure out who can actually play the games, and that final position for him on the field."
- Question: Y’all hit the portal and recruiting pretty hard when it came to your pitching this offseason. What do you and Max want to see from those guys this Fall?
- "It’s a good question. It varies on the pitcher, like some of the guys, like Jared Spencer was drafted and he was throwing all the way up until the signing deadline, in case he did sign. Some guys like Aiden Moffett was pitching all summer in the Cape Cod League, so one thing is, I don’t anticipate us playing any outside competition this fall, simply because we have to figure out our pitching staff and some of those guys are going to pitch a lot this fall. Some guys like Boogie [Ace Whitehead] and Max [Grubbs], those guys are banged up a little. [Ace] Whitehead is coming off surgery. The one thing I’ve learned in 35 years of coaching is the best ability is availability and making sure your best players are ready to go in the spring. So I think to answer your question, we want to see them fill up the strike zone. There are some guys that are pitching to make the team, and there are some guys that like Grayson Saunier who is going to be working on something. We know what he is capable of in terms of his fastball, but can he command and off speed pitch? Can he hold runners? So each player it's kind of like a spring training for a veteran player in MLB, they might be working on something, so their performance may be down a bit, whereas other guys, like we need to see them perform because they have to make the team."
- Question: Pitching staff makeup? Starters and relievers or all potential starters?
- "You look at everybody for the most part as a starter. There are certainly some guys maybe that throw from a different arm slot, or do something unique, or maybe have some limitations to where they’re probably going to be in the bullpen. But at the end of the day, we’re not ever going to pitch more than two innings, three innings in the fall. So we're not going to stretch anybody out to find out if they can go through a lineup twice or certainly not three times in the fall. So we’ll have to figure those things out as we go along, but we’ll develop everybody about the same"
- Question: You’ve mentioned a couple times how you are still learning a lot about some of these guys. What is this like for you in this process of learning? Is it kind of stepping back and letting them direct or how involved were you in that? What does this process all look like?
- "Well, it’s the fourth time I’ve done it, and hopefully the last in terms of new school. I think you instill a culture, and you instill a standard, and the guys have done great at that. We do have, at this point, super strong leadership among four or give guys that have set a great example and holding each other accountable. Then you get on the baseball field and within the confines of the structure, you give them a ton of freedom and try to figure out who can do what, and the fall is what we call inexpensive practice. There’s nothing expensive about the fall, even if we were to play an outside competition game and then in February in Arlington, whenever we play that first game on that Friday, it becomes super expensive. So try to instill that, as they’re going to make mistakes. The only way to get better is to challenge yourself, and for me, to put them in positions to where they if its too easy, then we’re not learning enough about them, because the SEC is certainly not going to be easy. So we have to challenge them every day and see how they handle it."
- Question: Have you had many seasons where you opting to do things in house in the fall and not play outside competition. Is that a regular thing you do?
- "No, we want to play those two fall games as often as we can. And there's a chance, next year actually if this roster limit comes, like they’re saying that, they may actually give us a six to eight Fall games, because you’re not actually going to be able to play intersquad games. You're not going to players, so you're going to need to play somebody else to play. I think a last weekend of October, maybe on that Friday, we’ll announce it eventually, but we may do like an orange and white type one game, where people can come in and see the team play, and there's value in that for us to have people in the stands and stuff like that. But we just made the decision that we didn’t want to play anybody outside because I didn’t know if we have enough pitching to get through an 8-10-12-14 inning game. And I just really don’t want to stress anybody. I want to make sure the guys that pitch the best are able to pitch the most in the spring."
- Question: You bring up the roster cap that’s out there, but its not official yet. How much is that on your mind as you’re trying to recruit and trying to figure everything out?
- "Yeah, everyday, especially since we don’t really know the rules, I mean nobody knows. It changes by the minute as I’m told. The roster cap is firm. It is going to be 34 in our sport. The question in baseball is, are they going to allow us to maybe have a couple extra people in the fall? You know, could we have 38 to get to 34 where if you have an injury, which is part of pitching for sure, can you replace it with somebody else? So we don’t know when that number is going to be set. Could it be in the Fall? Could it be in the Spring? We don’t know, but we do know that its definitely going to be 34, we just don’t know the number of scholarships. You know, could be 34, could be 25, its really going to be whatever the SEC decides."
- Question: Anybody impressed you for their leadership?
- "Oh yeah for sure. A lot of these kids. [Rylan] Galvan, [Jalin] Flores, Max [Belyeu], Dre [Andre Duplantier], but there's guys like Kimble [Schuessler] and these guys are super hungry. They know way more than I do what its like to play here, work here, coach here. They know the standard. So I think creating a culture where they’re allowed to lead where they’re you know, I call it a coach fed player led where you my job is to run the program but each individual player owns the team. Its their team and when you can get them to hold each other accountable and get them to police themselves, especially away from the field, that’s when you know you have a really really strong culture."
- Question: How much effort did you and the staff have to put into retaining those guys and convincing them to stay?
- "A lot. I mean some of them more than others, but Jalin [Flores] obviously wasn’t so much to not stay at Texas, but not go to the draft. I think anytime you don’t have the relationship with somebody, especially in todays world where its so easy to just go somewhere else. When you don’t have a relationship with someone, you try to build that relationship as quick as you can which is what we tried to do, whether that be in person while they're here, whether it be on the phone with Max [Belyeu] up in the Cape Cod League. So yeah, we put a lot of long days in those first three weeks here, recruiting the current team back and recruiting new players."
