What Could Have Been: Baylor’s Once Promising Season Ends in Familiar Frustration
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“I’m still fighting with the thing that I don’t feel like we’ve meshed it all together at one time consistently; it’d be nice to go two to three weeks and pitch well, play well on defense and swing the bats well,” head coach Mitch Thompson said in early May before the Oklahoma State series.
He later continued, “I think we’re better offensively than we’ve shown at times. I think we’ve been better on the mound than we’ve shown at times. I just want to put it all together. It’s pretty fun when it all clicks together. It just hasn’t clicked altogether yet for a very long period of time.”
With the season now finished, that three-week-old statement still unfortunately rings true. Thompson’s squad just never found a way to put it all together when it mattered most.
Despite a strong start to the season, when the Bears were 20-8 and had the No. 34 RPI in the nation, Baylor went 13-14 down the stretch, losing 13 of its final 22 games against Big 12 competition and finishing with the No. 74 RPI.
While the Bears won 11 more games than they did in 2024 and tied their highest regular-season win total (33) since 2017, it marks the third straight year of Thompson’s tenure in which his squad failed to reach the NCAA Tournament.
Although NCAA Tournament aspirations weren’t a realistic expectation in his first two seasons at the helm, it was the team’s overarching goal this spring.
It’s true that this year was definitely a step forward in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the circumstances of how this season played out that makes it feel like a lot was left on the table, especially when you consider the senior-heavy roster and the self-inflicted wounds that plagued the Bears across the final month and a half of the season.
There was no clearer example of that than Wednesday night’s loss in the Big 12 Tournament opener to Oklahoma State, where the Bears blew a late 3-1 lead following a pair of brutal errors, a missed strike-three call and continued struggles to get a “timely hit.”
In almost every series throughout conference play, you’d leave the ballpark on Sunday asking yourself, “What if this had happened?” or “What if that had happened?” The margin for error is so thin at this level, and it felt like Baylor found itself on the wrong side of that so many times throughout the latter half of the season, in particular.
There wasn’t a single conference series where the Bears put together 27 quality innings of baseball. The closest they got was in a road series win over No. 23 Arizona, but in the finale, a 10-spot by the Wildcats right out of the gates prevented Baylor from potentially going for a sweep.
Although the Bears had a relatively soft non-conference slate earlier in the spring, they took care of business and were playing really well as a team. It appeared they had turned a corner for a minute, but the course of the season shifted on April 4 in the series opener against Houston, where Baylor surrendered a late 4-1 lead and ended up losing 7-4 and eventually dropping the series.
Another critical moment was the Texas Tech series in Lubbock the following weekend. Baylor had a chance to turn its fortunes around with a road series win over a rival, but it fell apart in the opener, allowing eight runs across the final two frames, three of which were unearned. Then, in the finale on Sunday, the Bears blew two leads, including a 5-0 second-inning lead that instantly evaporated.
From that point forward, the team didn’t play with the same confidence and swagger they had in February and March.
And as frustrating as this season was, if the Bears had flipped three of those eight losses to Houston, Texas Tech, Arizona State and Oklahoma State, Thompson’s squad is arguably in a pretty good spot going into the Selection Show for the NCAA Tournament on Monday afternoon.
You can nit-pick what you believe was the underlying reason for the disappointing finish to the spring, but I’d argue it was the lack of timely hitting and Baylor’s flat-out inability to hit with runners in scoring position.
Despite having six seniors in the starting lineup every day, Baylor was 11th in the conference in batting average (.270), 13th in slugging percentage (.414), ninth in on-base percentage (.366) and 13th in extra-base hits (90) in Big 12 play.
Since April 4, the Bears hit an abysmal .216 (78-for-360) with runners on and .214 (52-for-243) with runners in scoring position against Big 12 opponents.
Baylor’s three most consistent position players this spring turned out to be shortstop Tyriq Kemp (Sr.), who started the year in the nine-hole, true freshman Pearson Riebock and second baseman Travis Sanders (RSo.), who didn’t crack the starting lineup every day until March.
What was initially supposed to be the team's strength ended up being its biggest weakness. Meanwhile, the pitching staff exceeded expectations under first-year pitching coach Sean Snedeker and gave the Bears a shot in almost every game.
Baylor was at the bottom of the conference in virtually every pitching category in 2024 but finished in the upper half in 2025 in earned run average (4.52), strikeout-to-walk ratio (444-173) and batting average against (.251).
Looking ahead to next season, outside of First-Team All-Big 12 closer Gabe Craig (RSr.), Baylor should be returning almost all of its key contributors on the mound, which is a positive for both Thompson and Snedeker. However, making a few transfer portal additions would still be wise to bolster the weekend rotation.
Speaking of next year, this will be the most important offseason of Thompson’s tenure and could ultimately determine whether he’s in Waco beyond 2026.
A couple of critical things await this summer, beginning with retaining the key talent on the roster, most notably Sanders and Riebock, who were both named honorable mention all-conference.
The next order of business is finding a way to replace over half of the starting lineup via the transfer portal. The coaching staff can hope a couple of underclassmen take a step forward, but if this program is to be serious about reaching the NCAA Tournament next season, it can’t rely on a majority of unknown underclassmen to take this team back to the promised land.
In three offseasons under Thompson, Baylor has added 13 transfer portal pickups. Given the urgency facing this coaching staff to get it right next spring, you’d like to think there will be an increase in that regard.
There’s also a lot up in the air right now with the pending House Settlement. It’s yet to be determined what roster numbers will be and how NIL will be impacted. If the roughly $21 million cap is instituted before the transfer portal opens on June 2, there might not be as many schools willing to allot a ton of money on transfers, which could hypothetically — key word hypothetically — play into Baylor’s favor.
Regardless of what happens with the House Settlement, Thompson and Co. will have a very interesting offseason ahead as they look to put the disappointing finish behind them and build off the positives from 2025.
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