Texas Baseball: Longhorns lose starting SS to portal in Mitchell Daly
Texas baseball and head coach David Pierce suffered their fifth loss to the NCAA Transfer Portal early in the 2023 offseason in junior shortstop Mitchell Daly. Multiple reports (including one from HornSports on June 16) indicate that Daly has entered the transfer portal after spending three seasons at Texas.
Daly was a three-year starter for the Longhorns, playing nearly 200 games throughout the last three seasons. He started over 170 of the 189 games he played for the Longhorns in the last three seasons. He played second base for the Longhorns during his first two years on campus. And then, he moved to shortstop at the outset of the 2023 season.
During his true freshman campaign, Daly was one of the country’s best players in his class. He batted .316 with a solid .829 OPS while tying for the team lead in hits during the 2021 season as a freshman with 66.
Yet, Daly could not reach that level of offensive production he put up as a true freshman during the last two seasons for the Longhorns. Daly hit .236 as a sophomore and .230 this season while posting an OPS of around .720 combined in the last two years.
Junior Texas baseball MI Mitchell Daly enters the transfer portal
HornSports can confirm the report from @d1baseball that Texas INF Mitchell Daly is in the transfer portal.
— HornSports (@HornSports) June 16, 2023
Daly started 171 games over the course of 3 seasons at Texas. #HookEm
Daly’s offensive struggles this season led to him getting benched in May for the highly touted freshman infielder Jalin Flores.
He finished the 2023 season with a .230 batting average, 43 hits, seven home runs, and 22 runs batted in. Daly’s career at Texas ends with a .261 batting average, 158 hits, 16 stolen bases, 13 home runs, and 90 runs batted in.
Moreover, Daly joins four other Longhorns players who entered the transfer portal this offseason. Here are the other four.
- Junior RHP DJ Burke
- Freshman RHP Kobe Minchey
- Junior LHP Chris Stuart
- Freshman OF Collin Valentine
Next. 3 Texas football upperclassmen standing out early in summer workouts. dark
Texas finished up the 2023 season with a record of 42-22 (15-9 Big 12) following a heartbreaking one-run loss to the No. 8 Stanford Cardinal in Game 3 of the Stanford Super Regional earlier this week. Pierce and the Longhorns made it to supers for the third year in a row in 2023 along with winning a share of the Big 12 regular season title.