Texas A&M baseball has been announced as the number 12 seed nationally in the NCAA Baseball tournament, a far lower seed than any Aggie fan was hoping for. This comes at the end of a disappointing few weeks for the program, as an injury-ravaged Aggie squad fell in several series (though they won a key one against Mississippi State) and their first game in Hoover.
However, Aggie fans should make no mistake: despite those losses, this is a Texas A&M baseball team that deserved better than this. The Aggies were not only underseeded, they were given maybe one of the toughest regionals in the entire field.
Joining Texas A&M for the College Station regional will be the Texas State Bobcats, the USC Trojans, and the Lamar Cardinals. Texas A&M has played two of these teams already this season, coming away with a win against Lamar and splitting two games against Texas State, but they didn’t see the best effort out of either of them.
Texas A&M given another highly difficult path to College World Series
The Aggies are set to open against Lamar this Friday, whose ace is actually a decent threat to an A&M lineup that has struggled to create offense at times this fall. That will be allayed somewhat by the return of Nico Partida to the lineup, but there are more issues attached here.
Texas A&M will face not only Lamar’s ace, but the ace of the team following, as the Trojans and Bobcats will no doubt be saving their best arm for a potential Saturday showdown. Given that the Aggies are the top seed in their regional, every other squad will be coming for their crown, knowing it’s the Aggies that they have to get through to get to Omaha.
If Texas A&M does indeed emerge from this regional alive— which they have a decent if not overwhelming chance to do— then they will in all likelihood be heading to Chapel Hill to face off with North Carolina in a super regional. If the Tar Heels fall, though, the Aggies will host whichever team emerges from the Chapel Hill regional.
This is going to be an extremely tough road, but we have seen this happen time and time again with NCAA selection committees and the Aggies. It’s extremely strange that it has happened across several sports, but A&M hardly ever gets the benefit of the doubt in these situations— they always get the tough draw instead of the cushy one.
The laws of averages would tell you that, at some point, Texas A&M would get an easier path in one of these tournaments, but it simply hasn’t yet happened. They could get a break if someone other than UNC emerges from the Chapel Hill regional, but there’s still work that has to happen first.
Let’s not put the cart before the horse, though. Texas A&M has to win their games in order to advance. They’ll square off with Lamar this Friday, and the team will be taking it from there— hopefully, their trajectory takes them all the way to Omaha for the second time in three years.
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