Baseball: Longhorns have a case of ‘too little luck, too late’ in crushing loss

What would you do if faced with the best offense in America?

That’s the question Texas head coach Augie Garrido had to answer even before his team began the best-of-three championship series this week.

At first, it looked like he was going to micromanage his pitchers, switching from Ruffin to Wood to Jungmann to Dicharry in game one, playing the percentages, working the match ups, trying too hard to get everything perfect.

But in Game 2, he sent Jungmann to the mound with all his confidence and let the freshman pitch a full game that included nine strikeouts and zero earned runs. It was a much more respectable performance, and it forced a deciding rubber match.

Game 3 saw six different pitchers for the Longhorns and an outcome eerily similar to the one witnessed on Monday: Tigers jump to an early lead then Texas rallies, but cannot stop an onslaught from LSU in the later innings.

It isn’t immediately clear why the Texas bullpen, usually so stout, was unable to weather the LSU offensive storm last night. What is clear is that Dicharry and Wood were getting picked off by opposing hitters, and the Texas coaches responded too late with their changes.

That’s not to place the blame on Augie, or to say it was his coaching that cost the Longhorns the CWS. As predicted, long ball couldn’t sustain the Horns across an entire three-game series, their defense was good but not good enough to compliment their “swing-for-the-fences” attitude this week.

Some will ask why he deviated from the game plan, but did Augie really have a plan to begin with? This baseball god, a veritable sage, was more often than not dumbstruck in post-game interviews, baffled as much as we were as to how his guys continuously pulled victory out of defeat.

Everything went out the window after Cameron Rupp and Connor Rowe hit that pair of homers against Arizona State. It was clear in the afterglow of that warm, ninth-inning victory that Texas was just about un-coachable.

But Augie sure tried. He motivated his players, coaching until the end. Eventually, you just have to sit back and let the game unfold as it will.

And maybe that was his game plan after all. As a veteran of this sport, the man knows when to allow his players the freedom to form their own destinies.

In the end, it was the Tigers against the Horns on the field, and eventually the Tigers simply decided to outplay their burnt orange counterparts. To no one’s fault, not even Augie’s, Lousiana State cashed in on its nine-year CWS drought with a stellar performance that turned the Longhorns from a team of destiny to just another case of too little luck too late.

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