Baylor Baseball: 2025 Offseason Thread
With the transfer portal opening for college baseball on Monday, June 2, read what Baylor baseball’s most significant needs will be this offseason.
Find a True Friday-Night Caliber Starter
One of the few quibbles in an otherwise successful season under first-year pitching coach Sean Snedeker was that Baylor didn’t have consistent starting pitching for most of the spring.
Whether it was Mason Green’s injury over the first half of the year, seniors Cole Stasio and Bryson Bales not living up to expectations or Carson Bailey being unavailable for most of May, the Bears struggled to field a consistent weekend rotation.
Baylor was usually out-gunned on Friday nights, in particular, and had a 3-7 record in series openers across conference play.
Ideally, the Bears find a way to add another potential starter in the transfer portal this summer, thereby fostering more competition leading into next season and avoiding the need for the coaching staff to scramble if a player gets injured or doesn’t pan out. As an aside, hopefully, the all-lefty rotation experiment comes to an end as well.
Snedeker and head coach Mitch Thompson will have to get creative to land a Friday-caliber arm. Although it doesn’t have to be the flashiest pickup, these types of players are out there. First-Team All-Big 12 pitchers Tommy LaPour (TCU) and Harrison Bodendorf (Oklahoma State) transferred from Wichita State and Hawaii, respectively, and neither of them had eye-popping numbers at their previous stops.
A transfer paired with a combination of Green (Jr.), Caleb Jameson (RJr.), Lucas Davenport (RJr.) or Ethan Calder (Sr.) could have the potential to be a solid weekend rotation.
Rebuild the Entire Lineup
Baylor enters the offseason needing to find an everyday starting first baseman and replace five senior starters — catcher Cortlan Castle, shortstop Tyriq Kemp, left fielder Wesley Jordan, right fielder Enzo Apodaca and designated hitter Hunter Simmons.
Kemp, Jordan and center fielder Ty Johnson all have an extra year of eligibility after spending a season at a junior college. For the sake of this article, we’re assuming Kemp and Jordan go to the MLB Draft and Johnson returns to Waco for a fifth year.
With few clear players waiting in the wings to replace the seniors production-wise, aside from Travis Sanders (RJr.) and Pearson Riebock (So.), Thompson and the rest of the coaching staff will likely need to utilize the transfer portal to make at least four impactful position-player additions.
You’d like to hope that some incoming true freshmen — Cash McDade, Dylan Perez, TJ Woodson — or former highly touted recruits — Hunter Snow (RFr.) and Brayden Buchanan (RSo.) — can develop, take some steps forward and become key pieces next spring, but that’s not a given. Baylor shouldn’t put itself in a position where more than one or two of those players are penciled into the starting lineup next year.
With the House Settlement still not passed, there will be a scramble among programs with more NIL resources to pay top dollar for bats this summer. It’s just not realistic to expect Baylor to win recruiting battles against SEC foes, so the Bears will have to find a niche, whether that’s unsigned junior college players, former highly touted high school recruits buried on a depth chart somewhere or something else.
Regardless of which route the coaching staff takes, what Baylor does or doesn’t do in this regard will determine the ceiling of next year’s team. Without a handful of impactful additions, the Bears could have had a much-worse lineup than they did in 2025, which started the season hot against a weak non-conference schedule but flamed out and didn’t live up to expectations as Big 12 play progressed.
Add More Pitching Depth
In one offseason, Snedeker managed to turn around a pitching staff that was at the bottom of the Big 12 in nearly every statistic in 2024 to the upper half of the conference in earned run average (4.52), batting average against (.252), WHIP (1.33) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (442:132).
The good news is that the Bears should return every impactful reliever, except for closer Gabe Craig, who had an All-American caliber season and will surely hear his name called in the MLB Draft later this summer. Craig logged 10 saves and held opponents to a .124 batting average and led the country with an outstanding 0.56 ERA, a 0.50 WHIP and a 51:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio across 32 innings of work.
Aside from Craig, Baylor will welcome back its other top bullpen options — Caleb Bunch (5Sr.), Grayson Murry (Sr.) and Will Glatch (5Sr.), although Glatch missed the last month of the season with an undisclosed arm injury.
Suppose the weekend rotation is made up of Green, Calder and a transfer, that leaves Jameson and Davenport to eat a ton of innings in long relief. Those five players — Bunch, Murry, Glatch, Jameson and Davenport — should account for over 175 innings next season out of the bullpen, assuming they are all healthy.
While it’s a huge positive to have that much experience returning, Baylor should still look to add some more supplemental pitching depth. The Bears have three junior college pitchers — Alex Wallace (MCC), Cade Waibel (MCC) and Luke DeVasher (TJC) — set to join the squad next year, but they probably need a few more transfer portal pieces to feel really good about the pitching staff as a whole.
More Baseball Reading:
- Bears, Thompson Brace for Offseason Ahead after Failing to Reach NCAA Tournament
- Baylor Baseball: 2025 Review, Plus End-of-Season Survey Results
- Baylor Earns Commitment from Odessa College Stud Infielder Robert De La Garza
- What Could Have Been: Baylor's Once Promising Season Ends in Familiar Frustration
