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Rice Baseball: Owls trending up following All-Star Break

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After a brief break for the All-Star Game, Rice Baseball‘s big leaguers returned to action. Here’s how the MLB Owls are doing since the midsummer classic.

JT Chargois – Los Angeles Dodgers

It’s been a mixed bag for Chargois after the break. He’s made four appearances, throwing a scoreless inning in two of them. In the other two, he allowed a pair of home runs and four runs. His season ERA has ticked up a bit to 5.11, but his 20 strikeouts in 12.1 innings is on pace to be the best mark of his MLB career.

Tyler Duffey – Minnesota Twins

Duffey has also had four outings since the break, allowing two runs on three hits with three strikeouts and one walk. He earned holds against Cleveland and Oakland. Opposing batters are hitting .231 against him during that span

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Jon Duplantier – Arizona Diamondbacks

Duplantier was last active with Arizona on June 11, going onto the injured list soon afterward. Team beat writer Steve Gilbert reported on July 19 Duplantier would be optioned back to AAA. He has yet to make an appearance with the club since his assignment.

Brock Holt – Boston Red Sox

Holt has been on a tear. He’s reached base in seven of his last eight games, hitting .476 with a 1.208 OPS. He’s raised his already superb .317 batting average to .344 and hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. He’s hit four doubles since the break with only three strikeouts in 24 plate appearances.

Anthony Rendon – Washington Nationals

Rendon opted to rest during All-Star week, giving up his spot after the first nomination of his career. That goodwill is turning out favorably for Rendon who is hitting .417 with a 1.056 OPS after the break. He’s hit five extra-base hits, has five RBI and has walked five times in nine games.

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Rice Baseball Minor League Roundup: Matt Canterino makes pro debut

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Rice baseball products are making headlines in the minor leagues. Updates on the 2019 draftees and Owls currently in the pipeline.

2019 Draftees

Garrett Gayle

Gayle has appeared in four games for the Tri-City ValleyCats (Astros) following his 12th round selection in the 2019 MLB Draft. He has a 3.00 ERA over four games with eight strikeouts and five walks. His most recent outing came on July 11th, a three-inning save, the first save of his pro career.

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Evan Kravetz

A fifth-round pick of the Reds this year, Kravetz has made one appearance so far this summer. He threw one scoreless inning in a start for the Greeneville Reds on June 22, retiring all three batters he faced without allowing a hit.

Matt Canterino

Canterino’s first action following his second-round selection by the Twins came on July 13 with the GCL Twins. He threw two innings, allowing one hit and one run with two strikeouts and a walk.

Other minor league notables

After spending 2018 in lower-A ball, Ford Proctor was promoted to single-A this season where he’s currently hitting .276 with the Bowling Green Hot Rods. He leads the team with 18 doubles and 48 runs scored.

Ricky Salinas was named Reds MiLB Player of the Month, and for good reason. Salinas started five games in June and finished with a jaw-dropping 1.03 ERA and a 0.911 WHIP. Opposing batter hit .181 during that span.

It was a good spring for Glenn Otto with the Tampa Tarpons (Yankees). He made seven appearances, all starts allowing more than two earned runs in just one outing. Among pitchers who made at least five starts, Otto was second on the team with a 2.87 ERA.

Tony Cingrani was pitching well in limited action with the Oklahoma City Dodgers. He posted a 2.45 ERA in eight appearances (one in with Rancho Cucamonga) before he had surgery to repair his labrum. He’ll miss the remainder of the season.

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Rice Baseball: MLB Owls riding high entering 2019 All-Star break

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Rice Baseball has five active players in the major leagues. Here’s how the current MLB Owls are doing at the 2019 All-Star break.

JT Chargois – Los Angeles Dodgers

Chargois made eight appearances before the All-Star break. He owns a 1-0 record through 8.2 innings pitched with 16 strikeouts and three walks. He struck out seven of the last batters he’s faced across two appearances in the month of July. Those terrific outings lowered his WHIP to a career-best 0.923.

Tyler Duffey – Minnesota Twins

Duffey was used sparingly through the first several weeks of the 2019 season before a May 11 doubleheader thrust him back amongst the bullpen regulars for the Minnesota Twins. Over the course of 25 games, Duffey sports a 3.49 ERA with 35 strikeouts over 28.1 innings. He’s walked only six batters. His 11.1 strikeouts per nine innings is a career best.

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Jon Duplantier – Arizona Diamondbacks

Duplantier made his MLB debut on April 1, earning the save in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ win over the San Diego Padres. His first career start came almost two months later on May 31 against the New York Mets. He went five innings, striking out four with two walks and three runs allowed, earning a no-decision. Following two more appearances, he was placed on the injured list with right shoulder inflammation. His line at the end of the first half of the season is a respectable 4.32 ERA in 25 innings with 24 strikeouts and nine walks.

Brock Holt – Boston Red Sox

A hamstring injury slowed Holt in the latter portion of June, but it couldn’t cool his red-hot start to the summer. Holt is hitting .317 entering the All-Star break, but a blazing .384 since June 1. He’s racked up 28 hits and just 15 strikeouts over that period, collecting 14 RBI in the process. He’s never hit better than .281 over the course of a season, the mark he reached in his first full year in Boston in 2014.

Anthony Rendon – Washington Nationals

Name an All-Star for the first time in his career, Rendon will not play in the Midsummer Classic, opting instead to rest up and nurse some minor injuries before the second half of the season begins. Even though he won’t get the chance to show off his skills in Cleveland, he’s more than proven himself worthy of the recognition.

Rendon is in his third consecutive season as a .300 hitter and is on pace for 160+ hits, 40+ doubles and 80+ RBI. Achieving those milestones would mark the fourth consecutive year he’d done so. This is a contract year for Rendon, making the timing of his steadfast productive all the more impactful.

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Rice Baseball: Anthony Rendon’s All-Star nomination long overdue

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Former Rice Baseball slugger Anthony Rendon’s All-Star caliber play has finally been rewarded. The honor is long overdue.

The fact that Anthony Rendon received his first All-Star nod during his age 29 season is baffling. Rendon was the No. 6 overall selection by the Washington Nationals in the 2011 MLB Draft. He made his debut in 2013 hitting .265/.329/.725. Since then he’s become even more productive.

Currently in his seventh season, Rendon is in the midst of his third consecutive year with a .300+ batting average. He’s hit 68 home runs over that span and still has half of the 2019 season to play. His OPS+ has been better than 135 in each of those seasons and he’s finished in the Top 11 of MVP voting in each of the last two seasons, ending up as high as sixth in 2017.

More: Redefining the culture Matt Bragga’s biggest win of 2019

By every measure, Rendon is one of the most outstanding players in professional baseball. Since 2014, his first complete season in the big leagues, Rendon has an fWAR (Fangraph’s measure of WAR) of 27.9. That’s seventh best among all position players during that time.

Perhaps he was overshadowed by the super-ego of Bryce Harper or perhaps the Nationals’ postseason failures limited his opportunities to gain more exposure. Whatever the reason, Rendon’s numbers speak for themselves. He is one of the best players in the sport right now and is well deserving of his 2019 All-Star selection.

Rendon’s banner year might have come at just the right time. He’s in the final season of his current contract with the Nationals and will be eligible for free agency following this year. He’s due to make a significant payday one that should put him among the elite third baseman in terms of salary. Maybe that will be enough to put his name at the forefront of public perception, too.

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Rice Baseball: Redefining the culture Matt Bragga biggest win in 2019

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The 2019 Rice baseball season saw mixed results and no NCAA Tournament bid, but head coach Matt Bragga is confident about the progress made in Year 1.

Last summer Matt Bragga hopped in the car and made the drive from Austin to Houston. Many Texans know the route, some have taken it fairly often. For Bragga, everything was new. He stopped off at a Men’s Wearhouse, bought a suit and continued on to South Main for an interview. It wasn’t long afterward that he was introduced as Rice baseball’s newest head coach.

At that press conference, Bragga said all the things you’d expect a new head coach to say. He talked about how excited he was to be at Rice, how hard it had been to leave his former school and how he was ready for the task at hand. A year later, Bragga remains resolute the program is going in the right direction, but he’d be lying if he’d said he thought it was going to be easy.

“It’s been 15 years [since being hired at Tennessee Tech]. I forgot how hard taking over a program was.” Bragga says, looking back at the 2019 season, “but that’s the fun of it, that’s the challenge. That’s why you do what you do.”

A year of inconsistency

There were some days when it felt like hard was putting things lightly. Rice lost their opener to Rhode Island in extra innings and five in a row to ranked competition (Texas, Arizona and UC Irvine) early in the non-conference portion of the schedule. There were flickers of hope, including wins over in-state powers Baylor, TCU and Houston.

That’s kind of how the season went. The team bounced from cavernous depths to unbelievable highs as they went from series to series. They’d sweep a quality opponent like Louisiana Tech, then turn around and drop three in a row to Western Kentucky. Sometimes there wasn’t much of a rhyme or reason.

At the end of the season, though, the 26-33 overall record was rather indicative of the season as a whole. Rice wasn’t a bad baseball team in 2019, but they weren’t excellent either. Consistency and the thirst for a true identity and a unified culture were marked areas in need of improvement.

Willing to go the distance

Bragga builds cultures. The reason he drove from Austin to Houston in the summer of 2018 was because he’d taken a Tennessee Tech program with no historical success to the cusp of the College World Series.

Despite losing to Texas in a decisive winner-take-all game, Bragga had already proven he had what it takes to reach the sports’ highest levels. What got him a seat at the table was no surprise to Bragga. It wasn’t a five-step plan to get to Omaha. It was dependent on creating an atmosphere and a system which enabled his team to get there.

“You as a coach build those expectations… At the end of the day, I got hired because I’m a good baseball coach and I’ve built good cultures where I’ve been. That’s what my focus is on. If my focus is on [getting to the College World Series] I’m hosed.”

Culture has been on his mind a lot lately. “I don’t think we’re tough enough and that is on me,” he remarked in the weeks following the end of the Owls’ 2019 season. That toughness, both mental and physical, has been one of the things Bragga has leaned into this year. By and large, the attitude is changing. “I could not have asked for a better first year in terms of our guys buying into what is we’re doing, he said.” But as Bragga knows as well as anyone else, it’s going to take time.

It took more than a decade for Bragga to take Tennessee Tech from a glorified high school field and a shoestring budget to being one game away from college baseball’s greatest achievement. The resources and commitment at Rice outweigh the support he was able to garner at his previous stop, allowing for an expedited ramp up. That’s a reality that hastens Bragga’s confidence.

Transitioning from rebuild to reload

Rice will lose two Top 5 MLB Draft selections following the 2019 season: Matt Canterino (Twins) and Evan Kravetz (Reds). They’ll solidify some of their roster deficiencies with important JUCO additions. The lineup will look different, but that might be because guys who were hitting at the top third of the lineup are pushed back to seventh or eighth in 2020.

The new look Owls will have more power at the plate. They’ll be more disciplined in the field, a facet of the game which they improved on significantly during the 2019 season. Rice began the season with an eight-error game in non-conference play against Arizona. They finished as the best fielding club in the conference tournament. Change is coming, one step at a time.

Bragga is under no illusions that gradual shifts will be enough for a program with the rich tradition of Rice baseball. But he’s confident that his abilities combined with the talent and resources available to him at South Main will produce a winning formula, sooner rather than later.

“I’ve dreamed since I started coaching baseball 23 years ago to coach at a premier baseball program in the country… That’s what Rice is. This is a goal that’s been on my mind for 23 years,” Bragga declared, “This program is going in the right direction. We’re going to get this program to the pinnacle of college baseball. I believe that with all my heart.”

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