Oklahoma baseball: Sooners riding plenty of mighty ‘mo’
By Chip Rouse
With five more Big 12 series remaining in the 2018 Oklahoma baseball season, the Sooners find themselves in unfamiliar territory.
Through nine conference games, Oklahoma sits at 8-1 and in first place in the Big 12 standings. The Sooners have won 10 of their last dozen games, including a pair of three-game sweeps in their first two series to open Big 12 play.
The next three weekends will be pivotal in determining how things eventually shake out for OU in the conference race. The Sooners host archrival Texas this weekend. The Longhorns are 9-3 and just a game and a half back of Oklahoma in the standings.
After this weekend, the Sooners hit the road for two straight weekends, traveling first to Texas Tech, the nation’s fourth-ranked team this week but just 5-4 so far in conference action, and then it’s time for Bedlam with three games against Oklahoma State, which trails OU by a half game in the standings heading into this weekend.
Needless to say, Oklahoma has its work cut out for it on the baseball diamond over the next couple of weeks.
The Big 12 coaches projected the Sooners to finish fourth this season in the annual conference preseason poll. That has been fairly representative of the historical trend for Sooner baseball, at least throughout the 22 seasons the Big 12 has been in existence.
OU’s recent string of victories have propelled the Crimson and Cream to No. 17 in this week’s USA Today Top 25 Coaches Poll (the Sooners were unranked until last week, when they broke into the top 25 at No. 23) and at the top of the Big 12 standings.
Oklahoma has finished second in the Big 12 regular-season standings three times (2004, 2009 and 2010), but has never captured the league crown. In fact, the last time OU won a conference championship in baseball was in 1995, when the Sooners were members of the Big Eight Conference.
Oklahoma won outright or shared nine Big Eight regular-season championships The 1994 Sooner team, coached by Larry Cochell won the national championship, the school’s second all-time, but finished second in the conference standings that season.
Scoring early and often seems to be a key to the Sooners success to this point, and over the last dozen games especially. Oklahoma has scored in double digits 10 times this season.
When OU gets on the scoreboard in the first inning, the Sooners are 13-2 this season, and they are 18-5 when they score the first run in the game. Oklahoma has outscored its opponents 24-8 in the opening frame.
Where the resurgent Sooner baseball team will ultimately end up this season is anyone’s guess at this stage, but they are certainly headed in the right direction and currently playing some very good baseball.
If they can keep that momentum going, who knows?