This Week in Texas Baseball: Fans, Longhorns enjoy a nice weekend at the ballpark

For the Texas Longhorns, it was not a bad weekend at the ballpark.

Texas improved its record to 6-1 over the weekend with three wins over Cal Poly. Each of those victories was witnessed by over 7,600 fans at UFCU Disch-Falk Field. The announced crowd of 8,033 on Saturday was the largest at UFCU Disch-Falk Field for a game that was neither an exhibition match or a postseason regional game. UFCU Disch-Falk Field opened in 1975.

Here is a recap of how things went this past week for the Texas baseball team...

Texas 20, Houston Christian 3 (2/20): While emptying its bench against the overmatched Huskies, Texas had 12 players combine for 24 hits. That hit total was one shy of a school record that was first set in 1953 and later matched in 1998.

Texas 2, Cal Poly 0 (2/23): In an entertaining pitching duel between UT's Lebarron Johnson, Jr., and Cal Poly's Jakob Wright, Texas earned the victory after Johnson pitched eight innings of two-hit baseball.

Texas 6, Cal Poly 0 (2/24): Home runs by Max Belyeu and Jared Thomas provided enough offense for a Texas team that got a combined shutout from Charlie Hurley, Grant Fontenot and David Shaw.

Texas 7, Cal Poly 0 (2/25): Belyeu, Peyton Powell and Jalin Flores combined for four homers and two defensive highlights as Texas recorded a sweep and another shutout.

Texas makes history with series shutout of Cal Poly

After Texas wrapped up the weekend on Sunday with its third shutout win over Cal Poly, head coach David Pierce told reporters that "I've been doing this a long time and that's the first time ever that we've gone three straight at home in a series, same team and put up 27 innings of shutout baseball."

This is Pierce's eighth season at Texas and 13th as a head coach at the college level. He isn't the only one who hasn't seen a UT team shutout an opposing team over the entirety of a three-game series. In fact, this is only the third time that it's ever been done by a Texas team that started playing baseball in 1896.

• 1971 at SMU: Texas needed only three pitchers over its three-game sweep in Dallas as Burt Hooton, Mike Beard and Donnie Horne all went the distance as UT outscored SMU by a 21-0 tally. Hooton only pitched seven innings in his shutout since it was the first game in a doubleheader, but he registered the first 14 of UT's 34 strikeouts in that series sweep.

• 2002 vs. UT-Pan American: Over three games, nine UT pitchers combined to allow 15 hits and no runs in a clean sweep. Justin Simmons, who was honored this Saturday as part of the TraDISCHion series, threw eight scoreless innings in the second win over UT-Pan American. During its 2002 national championship season, Texas shutout nine opponents.

• 2024 vs. Cal Poly: Nobody will mistake Cal Poly with the 1997 Blake Street Bombers, but the Mustangs did open the season by scoring 12 runs over a three-game series against Missouri. One week later, Cal Poly was limited to 17 hits and only five runners reached third base. Cal Poly struck out 26 times during its weekend in Austin.

Cade O'Hara makes his 2024 debut at a new position

The 36 innings pitched by Texas this weekend was divided up between 12 players. But not all of those players are listed as pitchers on the Texas roster.

On Tuesday, sophomore Cade O'Hara closed out the game by pitching a scoreless nine inning. He retired the three batters that he faced and registered a strikeout. The 13 pitches that O'Hara threw against Houston Christian were the first 13 pitches of his collegiate career. O'Hara is a reserve infielder for the Longhorns who started twice at shortstop in 2023.

Pierce said that O'Hara participated in a bullpen session a few weeks ago and the coach liked what he saw. Assessed Pierce: "He can throw strikes and he can throw strikes with three pitches and he's pretty comfortable on the mound. He's a two-way (player), I guess."

What did the rest of the Longhorns think of O'Hara moonlighting as a reliever? Hypothetically-speaking, would Flores take O'Hara deep if the slugging shortstop were to face his teammate in the ninth inning of a close game?

"If I'm going to put my chance up against him, I'm saying I'm winning 100% of the time," Flores said. "But I'm gonna give him all the credit. He's done a tremendous job around here."

Notable Number: 9

On Sunday, UT tweeted out a photo to celebrate Black History Month. The photo featured the nine Black players on the Texas roster: senior Porter Brown, Johnson and fellow redshirt juniors Andre Duplantier II and Cam Constantine, sophomore Jayden Duplantier and freshmen Dee Kennedy, Nik Sanders, Oliver Service and Tommy Farmer IV.

Why is this significant? According to the Texas game notes, "the Longhorns have History Makers on the current baseball roster, with nine Black players making up 22% of the roster. According to a USA Today article from 2021, of the 279 Division I teams not from historically Black colleges and universities, only 4% of players were Black in 2021. Last season in Major League Baseball, only 6.1% of players were African American. The Texas roster has been among the most diverse in Division I baseball over the last five seasons with between 12-22% of the roster being composed of Black players."

What does this mean?

Following its good week, Texas made a little movement in the D1Baseball poll. The Longhorns moved into the No. 15 slot of college baseball's go-to poll. Texas was ranked 16th in D1Baseball's first two polls of the season.

Up next: Tests get much tougher for Texas

Texas will close out an eight-game homestand on Tuesday against St. John's before heading to Houston to play LSU, Texas State and Vanderbilt at the Astros Foundation College Classic. The NCAA's defending champion, LSU (7-1) is currently ranked third in the D1Baseball poll. Vanderbilt (5-3) is ranked ninth while Texas State has won four of its seven games. St. John's (2-2) opened its season with a 9-5 win over a Florida team that was ranked second in the D1Baseball preseason poll.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas baseball records historic sweep, shutout streak during big week