Texas A&M baseball just keeps surprising fans. Up until this point in the season, that has been true mostly in a way that the Aggie faithful would rather it not be— but the tides may be turning.
Now, this is something we've sort of grasped at straws to see previously— say in the midst of a turgid offensive stretch, the bats wake up against an overmatched midweek opponent, causing Aggies to wonder if the offense is back. However, what Texas A&M baseball just pulled off is far greater than that kind of eventuality.
What the Aggies just did over this past weekend is stroll onto the home field of the number-one ranked team in the nation, hand them as many losses as they had in the entire season up until that point, and run-rule them in the process. All of this after a demoralizing game one loss that had A&M fans wondering if it was time to pull the ripcord on this coaching staff.
So, are the Aggies back for real, or was it just one good day? I won't lie: after everything we've seen so far this season, I find it tough to believe that the Ags won't trot out any more disappointing performances, but this is the kind of a result that can— and, in this case, must— galvanize a team.
This is the first time all year that the Aggies looked the way we thought they would. A&M was a hard-hitting and sharp-fielding machine up in Knoxville, finally resembling the squad fans had anticipated.
If mowing down the number one team in the nation and prohibitive favorite to repeat as national champions isn't enough to get this Aggie squad moving in the right direction in a sustained way, then nothing can pull that off. The thing about this series is that, in a way, it didn't seem fluky— I know to look at the records of the two teams it would seem as though it were, but this is who the team was supposed to be, not suddenly finding a new level that had heretofore never been hinted at.
The Aggies need desperately to stay on that level if they hope to make the postseason. We saw a couple of years ago that Ole Miss struggled early and snuck into the NCAA Tournament, only to win the whole thing. Could the Aggies' story be similar? There are a lot of steps that must be taken first, but it's not out of the question if the