TCU Horned Frogs baseball

The TCU Horned Frogs baseball team represents Texas Christian University in NCAA Division I baseball. The Frogs have competed in the Big 12 Conference since 2013 and previously competed in the Mountain West, Conference USA, Western Athletic Conference and Southwest Conference. Since February 2003, the Horned Frogs have played their home games at Lupton Stadium, located on the TCU campus in Fort Worth, Texas. The Frogs are led by head coach Kirk Saarloos.

TCU has fielded a baseball team since 1896, before the university found its permanent home in Fort Worth. The Horned Frog baseball team began playing baseball in the Southwest Conference (SWC) when it became a member of the conference in 1923. In their inaugural SWC season, the Frogs finished the year with a 13–11 overall record and a 2–10 conference record.

In 1933 Dutch Meyer, most noted for his tenure as head coach of the two-time national champion football team, led TCU to its first SWC title with a 9–1 record. The Horned Frogs went on to win 4 more SWC titles in 1956, 1966, 1967 and 1994. The SWC baseball tournament began in 1977, but the Horned Frogs never earned a conference tournament title before the SWC dissolved following the 1996 baseball season.

The dissolution of the SWC in 1996 touched off a period of instability for the Horned Frogs that lasted nearly two decades, during which they made stops in six conferences. Following the dissolution of the SWC, the TCU Horned Frogs first joined the Western Athletic Conference (WAC). During the 1997 and 1998 seasons, TCU competed in the WAC South Division with the New Mexico Lobos, UNLV Rebels, and former SWC member Rice Owls. The Horned Frogs made two appearances in the WAC baseball tournament in the team's five seasons as a member of the WAC. Eight WAC member schools joined with schools from several other conferences to form the new Mountain West Conference (MWC) in 2000. Two seasons later, TCU joined the Houston Cougars, another former SWC member, in entering Conference USA (C-USA) for the 2002 season.

Longtime TCU head coach Lance Brown, a SWC hall-of-famer as both a TCU player and TCU coach, retired after the 2003 season. Through his career as TCU's skipper, Brown notched a school-record 517 wins. After Brown's departure, TCU would go on to make several more conference moves in the early 2000s and see an emergence of its baseball program as a perennial national power.

Jim Schlossnagle was hired as TCU's head coach in 2003 and coached his first season at TCU in Spring 2004. His impact was immediate. Former Head Coach Lance Brown had recruited several exceptional classes, which allowed Schlossnagle to coach his first TCU team to the program's first regular season conference championship in a decade, its first conference tournament championship in history, and its first NCAA tournament appearance since 1994. Under Schlossnagle, conference championships began piling up year after year, in conference after conference. Schlossnagle's Horned Frogs repeated as C-USA regular season and tournament champions in 2005, and once again earned a berth to the NCAA tournament.

Prior to the 2006 season, conference realignment again led TCU to change conferences as eight other C-USA members changed conference homes. The Horned Frogs joined the Mountain West Conference (MWC), where the Frogs competed for seven years (2006–2012). In each season in the MWC, TCU advanced to the NCAA tournament and won at least a share of the Mountain West regular season title. In those seven years, TCU also won four MWC Tournament championships. During this era, TCU won its first-ever NCAA Regional Championship in 2009, and repeated the feat in 2010 and 2012. In 2009, the Horned Frogs advanced to its first NCAA Super Regional, where the Texas Longhorns eliminated TCU from the Tournament. In 2010, TCU and Texas met again in an NCAA Super Regional, but the Horned Frogs emerged from the rematch—advancing to the College World Series for the first time in school history. TCU compiled a 3–2 record in its first CWS appearance, eventually falling in the national semifinal to UCLA.

In 2011, the MWC Champion Horned Frogs were eliminated from the NCAA tournament in the Fort Worth Regional, but TCU came storming back in 2012 by winning the College Station Regional over host Texas A&M. TCU advanced to the 2012 Los Angeles Super Regional, where they were again eliminated from NCAA tournament play by the Bruins.