Texas Tech has had a pretty good season. This weekend they beat Kansas 2 out of 3 times to clinch third place in the Big 12. They’ll play again Wednesday morning to open the Big 12 tournament at 9am against the 6th seed Baylor Bears. That’s all fine and well, but lets dissect what’s happened since that information was decided over the weekend.
Multiple publications including d1baseball and the coaches poll have them ranked at number 5 in the nation. The RPI was bumped up to number eight in the country and d1baseball.com projected them as the eight seed in the NCAA tournament. That’s a big deal, but still just projection so not real tangible at this point.
That’s where things really start to heat up. While rumors raged about Texas A&M and Tim Tadlock the Big 12 awards were announced. The Big 12 coaches unanimously decided that Jace Jung was a first team All-Big 12, and they also named him Big 12 Player of the Year.
Jung is the second Jung to win the award after Josh won it back in 2019. The first pair of siblings to lock in Conference Player of the Year honors. Jace Jung is the 5th Red Raider to lock in the honor. Joe Dillon won the very first Big 12 player of the year in 1997, then a 20 year drought was snapped by Eric Gutierrez in 2016. Both Hunter Hargrove in 2017 and Jung in 2019 had to share the award with a fellow conference player.
Jace was the first underclassmen to win the award since 2011, and the first freshman to ever do so.
It’s easy to see why Jung was named conference player of the year, even without his team winning the conference which is usually a prerequisite for Big 12 POY. Jung led the league in home runs, slugging percentage and RBI, while also having a top five batting average, on base percentage, took the second most walks and only struckout 31 times.
Jung was the only first team Big 12 honoree, both Dru Baker and Cal Conley were also named to the squad. The second team was represented by Braxton Fulford and Micah Dallas. Patrick Monteverde and Ryan Sublette were named All-Big 12 honorable mention.
Seven total Red Raiders were honored.
Oh yeah, that Tim Tadlock business? Kirby Hocutt locked him up with a lifetime contract.
I thought Mondays were supposed to suck.
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