Summer Ball Preps Stoney for Senior Year

The O'Brien File
Position	First Baseman
Hometown	Owasso, Okla.
High School	Owasso
Major	Health & Exercise Science
2016 Stats	.267/.342/.424, 5 HR, 28 RBI

Stoney Shots
O'Brien enters his senior season with 10 career home runs and over 100 hits. He went yard five times in 2016, including his final longball of the season coming against Texas Tech in an elimination game win at the Big 12 Championship in OKC.

Nine players were a part of the incoming crop of OU baseball freshman in the fall of 2013. Through the MLB draft and attrition, there is just one left for 2017. As first baseman Austin O'Brien prepares for his final season at Oklahoma, he is ready to accept his role as a leader on the Sooner team and the top goal for he and his team to strive for is clear.

“Making the tournament,” O'Brien stated simply when asked what his goal for next year would be. “Being the only fourth-year guy, I feel like it's my duty to go out there and lead and help the team make the tournament so that's what I'm going to do.”

In his three seasons at Oklahoma, O'Brien has started 105 games between first base and designated hitter. He is a career .252 hitter with a .387 slugging percentage. O'Brien has scored 62 runs and driven in 59. His 10^th career home run came at the Big 12 Championship and marked the 100^th hit of his career.

Coming off a season in which he hit .267 and drove in a career-best 28 runs, O'Brien has made the move north to Kansas to spend his summer months in the Jayhawks League with the Hays Larks.

“It's been great,” he said. “The Larks really do have a great history and I was fortunate enough to be placed with a great host family, which has such a big impact on your summer. It's really a blessing to be placed with a great family. I'm staying with Bill and Donna Scott and they're taking great care of me.”

O'Brien, who has six multi-hit games in his last 10 played, is hitting a team-best .437 (31-for-71) with 23 RBI on nine doubles and five home runs. The Larks are off to a hot start with a 16-4 record; the top mark in the standings of the eight-team league in the first half of the season.

”I love all the guys,” O'Brien continued. “It's always fun to meet guys from all over the country. This team meshed really quickly and we've been playing really good baseball. It's been a great experience so far.”

In 2014, O'Brien earned a spot on the All-Big 12 Freshman Team as he won the starting first base spot midway through the season and hit .280. However, he suffered a setback as a sophomore and played through an injury most of the season. That injury required offseason shoulder surgery, which kept him off the field for the summer of 2015 after a successful summer with the San Luis Obispo Blues of the California Collegiate League in 2014.

“I did miss it. Summer ball really is so laid back and you get the opportunity to meet a lot of new guys and it is a lot of fun to play and get extra reps and at-bats. I definitely missed out last summer.”

A spot start at first against Mississippi State in early-March at Dodger Stadium helped launch O'Brien back into the everyday lineup.

O'Brien returned to Norman for his junior season, but was limited throughout the fall ball season. At the start of the spring semester, he continued to progress, but was not quite ready to contribute on a regular basis.

His opportunities were few early in the season. Used primarily as a pinch-hitter against left-handed pitching, O'Brien got just one start as a designated hitter and did not play in the field through the first 11 games of the season. On a Sunday against eventual national-seed Mississippi State at Dodger Stadium, O'Brien's patience was rewarded as the Bulldogs threw a lefty on the hill. Starting at first base, O'Brien went 1-for-3 with a RBI-double.

As his spot starts at first and DH continued to become more bunched together, O'Brien had a breakout weekend in Bakersfield, Calif. After hitting a pinch-hit, RBI-triple on Friday, he was slotted into the lineup for both ends of a Saturday doubleheader. O'Brien quickly delivered a 3-for-5, two-RBI performance in game one and topped it with a 2-for-3, four-RBI game with his first home run of the season in the nightcap.

“I definitely wasn't myself when I came back the first few months,” O'Brien reflected. “It was tough coming back. My shoulder really only hurt when I swung, which was tough. Toward the end of this last season and through summer ball, it has felt 100%. Now, I'm just working on getting stronger and gaining some weight back to hopefully go out and have a really good senior year and help the team make the tournament. That's my goal.”

O'Brien is using the summer to continue to work on all areas of his game and continue to get healthier and stronger in hopes of pushing his final collegiate season further than any other he has played in. In his first three seasons, he has shown glimpses of being a leader. Heading into his sophomore season, O'Brien was picked by his teammates as the “Ultimate Sooner” along with former OU catcher Chris Shaw. This past season, he was also picked a series captain on the team's road swing to Kansas.

Now, as the last man standing from the incoming freshman class in 2013, the goal for his senior season is clear and so too is what he looks forward to the most.

“Being a leader and helping out those younger guys in whatever way I can.”

As the halfway point of his final season of summer ball has passed, O'Brien is less than two months away from stepping on the field at L. Dale Mitchell Park to begin the final chapter of his career as the leader of a new Sooner squad.