AUSTIN (KXAN) — The Texas Longhorns will take on a team that swept them at home during the regular season in the first round of the Big 12 Conference baseball tournament Wednesday.
It’ll be an early ballgame for the Horns as they open the tournament at 9 a.m. against the Oklahoma State Cowboys. Texas finished the Big 12 regular season in fifth place with a 14-10 record. The Cowboys finished a game ahead of the Longhorns in the standings at 15-9, but three of those wins came April 29-May 1 at UFCU Disch-Falk Field.
The last of those three wins for Oklahoma State came after they dumped 10 runs on the Longhorns in the seventh inning to turn a 7-0 Longhorn lead into a 10-7 deficit. Texas ended up losing the game 10-8 and the Cowboys completed the series sweep.
The Longhorns and Cowboys play the first game of the tournament at Globe Life Field in Arlington. TCU, the Big 12 regular season champs and No. 1 seed, plays 8th-seeded Baylor at 12:30 p.m. Texas Tech, the 2-seed, plays 7th-seeded Kansas State at 4 p.m., and 3-seed Oklahoma plays No. 6 seed West Virginia in the nightcap at 7:30 p.m.
The double-elimination tournament runs through Sunday. Games are televised on ESPNU and ESPN+. Tickets are available through the Texas Rangers website.
Texas finished the regular season with a sweep of last-place Kansas and moved up to No. 19 in the D1Baseball.com poll, but they’ve got some work to do if they want to host a regional tournament. The latest tournament projection by D1Baseball.com has Texas as a No. 2 seed in the College Station regional, hosted by Texas A&M, a projected No. 8 national seed. If the projections hold, the Longhorns would open the regional with UT-San Antonio.
Texas first baseman Ivan Melendez was named a co-player of the week by the Big 12 after he slugged three homers and drove in nine runs against Kansas. His third home run of the series, a mammoth 453-foot bomb that sailed over the left-field wall, was his 28th of the season, tying the school record. For the season, Melendez is second in the country in batting average, hitting .421, first in home runs with 28 and second in RBIs with 85.
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