Big 12 Baseball Post-Season Awards

The 2007 Big 12 Baseball Post season Awards have been announced and the winner is Texas, Texas, Texas.

• Player of the Year - Kyle Russell, Texas
• Pitcher of the Year - Adrian Alaniz, Texas
• Freshman of the Year - Trevor Coleman, Missouri
• Newcomer of the Year - David Newmann and Brandon Hicks, Texas A&M
• Coach of the Year - Tim Jamieson, Missouri and Augie Garrido, Texas

Nebraska did not place a single player on the All-Big 12 First Team. Tony Watson and Jeff Tezak made the second team.

Pitchers Luke Wertz and Johnny Dorn made honorable mention, along with catcher Mitch Abeita, third baseman Craig Corriston, and first baseman Andrew Brown.

No big surprises on the big awards - Kyle Russell should be on track to win a lot of national awards, so he's the likely choice for Big 12 Player of the Year. Texas pitcher Alaniz has a 2.75 ERA in Big 12 play, and won the weekly Big 12 pitcher of the week awards twice, so there's not much argument there either.

The fact that we didn't have a single first team All-Big 12 player but yet finished fourth in conference says a lot about this Husker team. We didn't have the consistency we needed throughout the year to be great, and played badly early in the season. The Huskers seemed to find themselves somewhat towards the end of the season, but still showed that they can be very inconsistent and sometimes downright lousy - the Friday night losses of the last two series were evidence of that.

If you had to name the  guy who really came around and saved Nebraska's season - it's junior pitcher Luke Wertz. He's gone 4-0 and has an ERA of 2.12 in 14 appearances. He's struck out 55 over 51 innings, and he finished the regular season second in the Big 12 in ERA and opponent batting average (.200). He has been consistent since starting on Sundays, and we wouldn't be going to post-season play without him.