No question about it — the toughest ticket to a series of baseball games in Houston this season will be to this weekend’s NCAA Super-Regional baseball tournament series between the Rice Owls and the Texas A&M Aggies at Reckling Park on the Rice University campus in the shadow of the Texas Medical Center. The winner of the best-of-three series moves on to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, which begins on June 15. Ryan over a Texas A&M & Baseball INPO provides a good preview of the matchup.
Inasmuch as Houston is one of the most prominent high school and college baseball hotbeds in the country, the series sold out shortly after tickets went on sale earlier this week. The Owls (52-12) have been a college baseball power over the past decade under the driving force of Coach Wayne Graham, while the Aggies (48-17) this season revived a generally strong program that had been underperforming for the past several seasons. Game times are today at 6 p.m. (ESPN); Saturday: 5 p.m. (ESPNU); and Sunday, if necessary at 6:35 p.m. (ESPN2).
I’ll be pulling for the hometown Owls in this series because I had the privilege of coaching a couple of the Owls’ players — LF Jordan Dodson and C Danny Lehmann — during their youth baseball days in The Woodlands. Both players were able to overcome my coaching to become starters at The Woodlands High School and at Rice, where they have already enjoyed one trip to the College World Series over the past three seasons. Although I cannot take any credit for either Jordan or Danny’s baseball accomplishments, I am proud of the fact that both of them are high on-base percentage guys with solid slugging percentages who understand that the teams that create the most runs are the ones with players who get on base and hit the ball hard a high percentage of the time.
By the way, this earlier post reported on pointed criticism that Owls Coach Graham was receiving around some baseball circles for the high injury rate of minor league baseball pitchers coming out of the Rice program over the past several years. The Chronicle’s John Lopez recently wrote this profile of Coach Graham in which he addresses that criticism head on. Check it out.