Texas A&M Baseball: Aggie Offense Returns Some Potent Bats
The Texas A&M baseball team finished the regular season in 2016 as the nation’s number one team. If they plan to reach that mark again they’ll have to do it with some new faces.
Last year’s team finished a few innings short of a trip to Omaha. That was the final hoorah in Aggieland for some key offensive weapons. Ryne Birk, Nick Banks, Michael Barash, Boomer White, J.B. Moss, Jonathan Moroney, Ronnie Gideon and Hunter Melton are all off pursuing their professional careers.
It’s challenging to fully understand the impact of those departures on the program. Beyond the sentiment, here are some numbers. Those seven Aggies were responsible for 87 percent of the Aggies 62 home runs and 77 percent of the team’s 439 RBI.
Four of those seven seniors were drafted in the first ten rounds of the MLB draft last summer. Not only were they important members of this team, they were incredibly talented ballplayers.
This year’s squad will have to replaced 165 extra base hits and 352 runs. It’s not a surprise that preseason polls have the Aggies somewhere in the 20s rather than near the top of the lists. However, there are plenty of reasons to believe that this team is going to reload rather than rebuild.