The Texas baseball team deserves applause for coming back and winning the TCU series after looking so bad in the 5-0 loss last Friday.

Ace Whitehead and Lebarron Johnson Jr. looked strong, allowing a combined one run over 12⅓ innings, in their two starts and helped keep very much alive the Longhorns’ Big 12 championship hopes despite their season-long pitching troubles.

I was a little surprised that Texas’ national RPI improved only modestly from 76 to 72. That may have had more to do with TCU’s status as the league’s 11th-place team, one that's not a robust hitting crew and that has won only four of 15 road games all season. Texas followed up Sunday's win with an 11-0 win over UT-Arlington on Tuesday, the first of two games head coach David Pierce will miss as he serves his suspension.

I wrote over the weekend that Texas baseball hasn’t lived up to its billing and should never be discounted, and it should not. It has a mystique that other programs envy. Texas is only 8-7 against top 50 teams but keeps winning series. That’s a clutch gene.

The Horns travel this week to league-leading Oklahoma, which leads by three games but is only 24-14. The Sooners have swept four Big 12 teams and won nine of their last 11, but they lost series to Oklahoma State and West Virginia.

Maybe this will be a repeat of 1989 when Texas A&M had its best team in history with Chuck Knoblauch and John Byington and couldn’t get out of a super regional it hosted and Texas had a bleak season, relatively speaking, with only superstars Kirk Dressendorfer and Scott Bryant and finished as the College World Series runner-up to Wichita State.

Kinda has that feel.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas baseball team shows some traits of having a surprise season