Texas Leaves 17 on Base as Mississippi State Baseball Forces Rubber Match

mississippi state baseball forced Texas into a Sunday rubber match after the Longhorns left 17 runners on base in Saturday’s loss. Texas has scored only 11 runs in its past 36 innings, and the missed chances piled up again when the game tightened late.

Texas Misses Late Chances

Texas had four loaded bases situations in the final four innings, but it could not cash in enough to protect the series. The Longhorns kept putting traffic on the bases and kept coming away empty, a sequence that left them chasing the game instead of controlling it.

That was the sharpest break in a stretch that had already been thin at the plate. The Longhorns arrived in this conference series after scoring 11 runs over their previous 36 innings, and Saturday fit the same pattern when the innings that should have changed the score did not.

Schlossnagle Faces Sunday

Jim Schlossnagle said he wasn’t too worried about heading into Sunday’s game. Texas still has a chance to reset the series, but the pressure is now on the lineup to turn base traffic into runs before the deciding game slips away.

The recent run of results gives the setback a sharper edge. Around this time last season, Texas was swept by Arkansas, lost its final home series to Florida before the SEC Tournament, and later fell to UTSA in the Austin Regional, so another stalled weekend would land in a familiar place for a storied program that has appeared in the most College World Series in college baseball history.

Carson Tinney, Anthony Pack Jr. and Jared Spencer are part of the group Texas is leaning on to stop the slide, but Saturday’s box score pointed to the same issue first: too many runners, not enough finishing. Sunday now gives Texas one more shot to avoid letting those missed chances define the series.