FINAL: Texas 2 – Texas Tech 1
The Texas Longhorns opened play in the 2015 Big 12 baseball tournament with a 2-1 victory over the Texas Tech Red Raiders. The Longhorns led throughout the game, and rode a complete game effort from starting pitcher Parker French to the narrow win.
In addition to French, the other star performer for the Longhorns was centerfielder Zane Gurwitz. An RBI double by Gurwitz, in the top of the second inning, put Texas on the board 1-0. Later, Gurwitz scored the Horns’ other run on after an errant throw by Tech’s Bryant Burleson. Gurwitz also hauled in a deep fly ball in left-centerfield at the warning track that represented one of Texas Tech’s top scoring opportunities.
With Gurwitz accounting for two runs, French proved to be more than Tech could handle. Texas’ senior starter scattered eight hits and one walk, while striking out six batters on the day. French’s complete game effort was the Longhorns’ first of the season, and it was also the first in French’s collegiate career.
With the win, the Horns advance into the winner’s bracket in the tournament. On Thursday, Texas will play the winner of today’s game between TCU and Baylor. Thursday’s game is scheduled to start at 4:00PM (Central).
POST-GAME
Augie Garrido
 was one of them. He made the adjustments, so it worked on different people in different ways.</p>
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<p> It was surprising to the coaching staff, quite frankly, because we went through the fall and had great workouts and did really a great job. Nobody missed anything. Everybody was working full blast and on the same page with everything and what it did, I think, was elevate the expectations of all of us. Expectation is a demon that wouldn’t fit in this room because it’s not real. So we had to get through that and we had to pay a high price in the nine one-run games that we lost and the six extra-inning games that we lost because we were expecting things to be easy or we felt like we didn’t have the right to fail. So we tried too hard and we started living in a little bit of an unrealistic world. Baseball is about that.</p>
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<p> The difference between last year is that no one was playing with expectations. We were playing just to play and fighting the fight. I hope I am making myself clear on that because it is one of the huge demons in this game. There are two that are bigger than everything else. One is batting average and two is expectations, not necessarily in that order.”</p>
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<p> <strong>On letting Parker French remain in the game: </strong>“We left him in the game because of his focus and his competitiveness, and the fact that his pitch count was reasonable. It wasn’t out of range for him. He has the right Longhorn spirit and he was in focus. He really competed, but he was under control at the same time. You just play your punches.”</p>
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<p> <strong>On the left-handed lineup:</strong> “I played the lineup we played when we scored 11 runs against Baylor, that’s why I played it. That’s the only way I thought about it. I just played this group against their [baylor’s] best left handed pitcher, we scored five runs in the first inning and 11 runs total, a higher total then we had scored in a long time, so why break that group up? That was my way of thinking about it.”</p>
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<p> <strong>On the regular season losses:</strong> “There wasn’t a series where we weren’t competitive. It seems like Friday night we would be playing 11 innings, 18 innings or 12 innings, so my position is that, and they can contradict this if I’m wrong, I think that they know they can win. I think the problem was that we expected to win and we thought it was going to be easy, but when it got tough we tried too hard. We were afraid we were going to lose. Fear of failure comes from expectations. Then once fear enters the minds of players, and now what feeds that fire, the fuel for that is losing. And we did that. Now this thing starts raging on us, but that’s gone.”</p>
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Parker French
Zane Gurwitz
