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HOUSTON — Small men do not hit baseballs where Aiden Robbins landed his moonshot in the Texas Longhorns’ 8-1 win over Coastal Carolina Friday.
Pick your big-league slugger of choice. Aaron Judge. Shohei Ohtani. Cal Raleigh. Kyle Schwarber. Pete Alonso. Any of them would consider the 466-foot bomb Robbins hit off the train parked high above the left-field wall at Daikin Park, home of the Houston Astros, to be among their finest work. Only 11 men at the big-league level put more distance on a homer throughout the entire 2025 season.
“I didn’t even feel it coming off the bat,” Robbins said after the game. “That’s how I knew it was gone.”
Robbins, who left Daikin Park Friday night with a .457 average, looks like a more permanent residence at a big-league ballpark might soon be in his future based on his hit tool and outstanding glove alone. But, so far, he’s hitting for power that he never showed during two seasons playing at Seton Hall.
MORE: Texas baseball dominates No. 9 Coastal Carolina behind Ruger Riojas
Listed last year at 185 pounds, Robbins connected for six home runs in 53 games. Through nine contests with the Longhorns (9-0), he’s left the yard a team-high four times.
That’s — in part — because he added weight. Robbins is a sturdier 205 pounds these days, and says he feels just as fast. Robbins could not, he acknowledged, have destroyed that hanging third-inning breaking ball so comprehensively without the offseason training regimen that helped him add strength.
“I mean, that’s a shot,” Robbins said, a smile glued to his face.
Robbins is not the only Longhorn who spent the offseason pumping iron and bulking up. In fact, just about everyone who starred in the Friday night victory that opened the Bruce Bolt College Classic attacked the offseason similarly.
Temo Becerra slapped and poked his way through a three-year career at Stanford, a classic slick-fielding infielder collecting plenty of hits without much pop.
He’d managed three home runs in a 134-game career with the Cardinal. After gaining about 10 pounds this offseason and working with Texas hitting coach Troy Tulowitzki on tweaking his swing, Becerra homered twice against the No. 9 Chanticleers (6-3). He’s on pace to nearly double his extra-base hit total from last year by the end of the regular season.
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“Pretty much all fall I was working on my weight,” Becerra said postgame. “I struggle with gaining it and maintaining it, too. So this season, for me, is just focused on eating as much as I can.”
What, exactly, is on the menu?
“I don’t really count my calories,” Becerra said. “I like to have two dinners after practices and stuff. I’ll get our postgame food and sometimes I like to go to In-N-Out and stuff after for late-night snacks.”
Ruger Riojas, another offseason transformation project, tormented Coastal Carolina on the mound.
He needed only five innings of work to set a new career-high in strikeouts with 11. The Chanticleers notched only one hit against him — a ground ball that bounced over Becerra’s head at third base.
Riojas said an illness caused him to lose 15 to 20 pounds in the middle of last season. Listed at 195 pounds, he said he’s added about 10 to 15 pounds of muscle and now weighs roughly 205 pounds.
The radar gun backs that up. A low-to-mid 90’s guy last year, the bulked-up Riojas lived at 97 miles per hour on the radar gun Friday night.
Other players have benefited, too. Second baseman Ethan Mendoza looks like a completely different man, so much so that teammates have poked fun at him in interviews. But he’s driving the ball more consistently, batting .412 with three home runs on the season. The weight room has been vital for true freshman outfielder Anthony Pack Jr., too, according to coach Jim Schlossnagle.
“Pack wasn’t hitting the ball like this when he first got here,” Schlossnagle said. “He was hitting the ball 96, 97 miles an hour on his best day. For the last two years, we’ve shut our fall practice down a week early and kind of invested five days a week in the weight room, and I think you’re seeing the fruits of that labor.”