Hooks & Runs · A podcast about baseball, music and culture.

256 - Southwest Conference Baseball w/ Bo Carter

·49 min·3 clips

A four-way SWC title tie was decided by four coin flips in 1966.

Craig starts the show alone because Rex is on tour with his band, Loose Helmet. Rex is playing Houston tonight, and he'll be back for the August 7 episode. The opening also covers a few baseball items. Emmanuel Clase has been placed on paid leave as the Cleveland micro-betting scandal expands, and Luis Ortiz is also on leave through August 31. Craig and Rex also went to an album release party on Saturday night for TV Dolls, a Houston band they both love, and they'll review that show on August 7. Another quick item lands before the main conversation begins. Major League Baseball is set to play its first regular-season game in Tennessee at Bristol Motor Speedway this Saturday night, and the game has already set a record for highest paid attendance for an MLB game. Once the housekeeping clears, Bo Carter joins to talk Southwest Conference baseball. The talk stays tied to real conference history rather than broad nostalgia. Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor, and Arkansas all come up as programs that had to deal with the Southwest Conference's mix of geography, weather, and timing. One story turns on a coin toss, which Texas happened to win. Luck still matters when a conference is deciding things the hard way. Another story centers on the 1986 tournament in College Station. It rained for days, the field got soggy, and people were trying to make the place playable. Texas and Arkansas saw the situation and decided they were not going to wait around until midweek, so they got on the bus and left to rest pitchers for the regional round. Baylor and A&M stayed and played it out, and A&M ended up taking both games and the automatic NCAA berth. That kind of story is exactly the show's lane: baseball as travel, timing, and institutional stubbornness. The final stretch moves from events to personalities. Gus Gustafson comes up as a meaningful figure in Texas baseball history, discussed as both a coach and former player. The conversation makes room for his role without turning it into a dry résumé. Instead, it stays in the register of people who know the sport's old structures well enough to explain them casually. The rhythm is conversational throughout. Details get corrected, confirmed, and widened as the talk goes along. A small anecdote becomes a bracket explanation. A bracket explanation becomes a history lesson. A history lesson becomes a reminder that baseball has always had to live with weather, luck, and whatever odd rule the day produced. By the end, the episode feels like a guided walk through Southwest Conference baseball's old operating manual. It is less about one box score than about how a conference built its own folklore out of storms, buses, and people who kept showing up.

As heard by us

Southwest Conference baseball comes through as practical history, with rain, coin tosses, and Gus Gustafson carrying the story.

The piece treats Southwest Conference baseball as practical history, where coin tosses, rain-soaked tournaments, bus rides home, and schedule pressure all shape the bracket as much as the standings.

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Why you'd press play

Southwest Conference baseball lore with Texas heat and a historian's eye.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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