For the third time this year Texas has been shut out. Also for the third time this year, Texas has only managed one hit throughout nine innings of baseball. The Longhorns were unable to get anything going offensively and dropped the second of a three-game series to Texas Tech 3-0.
The score doesn’t even begin to tell the story of the lackluster performance from both offenses on Saturday. Through seven full innings neither team managed to score a run. It wasn’t until redshirt junior starting pitcher Blair Henley walked two batters to lead off the eighth that either team had a real shot to score.
After issuing the two walks, Henley was replaced by redshirt Freshman Cole Quintanilla. TTU’s runners would double steal and a sacrifice fly to deep right would bring one run in. A pair of singles would follow-up the sacrifice fly, the second of which brought two more runs in. That would be all the firepower needed for Texas Tech to clinch a victory.
Texas Tech scratched a total seven hits on the day, but the majority of them came against Quintanilla in the final two innings of play.
“It was just one of those days that we couldn’t get the timing with the offense together and come up with the clutch hit,” head coach David Pierce said. “Just a poor job of offensive baseball today.”
Henley’s outing was a silver lining to take away from Saturday’s game. The right hander went for seven full innings and only allowed three hits before being replaced in the eighth. Henley has had an up-and-down season him putting up seven solid innings of work had to be encouraging for his coaches and teammates.
“I thought Blair was outstanding early,” Pierce said. “He really mixed all four pitches.”
Texas has a major problem with its offense disappearing. The first time the Texas offense was nowhere to be found was in a 0-4 loss to Purdue, where the team was one-hit. The second was a 0-9 loss to Stanford in Palo Alto, also where the team was one-hit. There was one shutout and zero one-hitters in all of 2018.
Thus far in 2019, shut outs and one hitters make up 14% of Texas’ outings.
The Longhorns will have to work on consistently scratching runs if they want to duplicate the success they had in 2018. Texas will look to shake off Saturday’s game in preparation for Sunday’s rubber match against TTU at The Disch. First pitch is set for 1 P.M.
