Missouri pitcher and quarterback Sam Horn delivers a pitch during an SEC tournament game against Alabama on Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in Hoover, Ala.
Courtesy Mizzou Athletics
So ends a dismal season on the diamond for Missouri baseball.
The Tigers lost 4-1 to Alabama in the SEC tournament on Tuesday, wrapping up Mizzou’s worst campaign in decades — and maybe more than a century — with a 16-39 record.
Sam Horn, the two-sport athlete for whom minding his P’s and Q’s meant splitting time as a pitcher and a quarterback this spring, started the game and tossed three shutout innings, working himself into and out of a bases-loaded jam in the third before exiting. Catcher Mateo Serna’s solo home run in the top of the fourth inning wrapped around the right field foul pole to give the Tigers a 1-0 lead.
A two-run bottom of the fourth put the Crimson Tide in front, and they tacked on a run in both the seventh and eighth innings while holding MU hitless (0 for 9) with runners in scoring position.
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The Tigers are without a postseason victory since 2017, but that’s hardly the gravest historical benchmark for this season’s struggles.
Missouri’s three regular-season SEC wins — all of which came in a road sweep of preseason No. 1 Texas A&M, oddly enough — are the fewest since the conference moved to 30 league games in 1996. No team had won fewer than five in the 30-game era.
Of Mizzou’s 27 SEC losses, the first 24 came consecutively. MU lost more of those games by double digits (11) than by a margin that earned the other team a save (seven losses by three or fewer runs).
The Tigers’ .291 overall winning percentage is the program’s worst since 1959, when record books denote a 3-17 record. As it played out, however, the ’59 season wasn’t that bad. Mizzou, fresh off a national runner-up finish in ’58, went 16-4 on the field — only to forfeit 13 of those victories because it used an ineligible player, leading to the record-low .150 winning percentage.
That context makes 2025 Missouri’s worst baseball season without an asterisk since 1901, when Cy Young won the pitching triple crown in the American League and Missouri went 3-9 in a season with no record of when or where games were played.
Injuries, particularly to the pitching staff, held back MU in 2025, and coach Kerrick Jackson frequently focused on trying to get his team to play “good baseball,” plain and simple.
“We’re an immature club that’s maturing as the year’s gone on,” he told the SEC Network broadcast during Tuesday’s tournament game, citing the sweep of A&M as a step forward amid other clear negatives.
Jackson has been in regular contact with athletics director Laird Veatch as the season has gone on, and the latter doesn’t seem overly concerned about the baseball performance, given Missouri’s place in the sport’s landscape.
“It’s hard when you go through a year like this,” Veatch said last week. “Obviously, you had a couple injuries to key arms earlier in the season, and those things can’t be excuses in our world — but it’s challenging, right? It’s an uphill battle, particularly in that sport because — and I’ve said this before — we’re behind. We’re behind in what we’ve invested when you look at our stadium compared to the other stadiums. We don’t look the same.”
To that end, Mizzou is seeking bids for a Taylor Stadium project that would complete the artificial turf playing surface at an expected cost of $1.3 million to $1.5 million. It’ll take more than just a nicer-looking field to improve the stock of the program, though, which is also part of Veatch’s understanding.
“We’ve got to support Kerrick,” Veatch said. “We’ve got to support the program. We’ve got to keep investing more, make progress. We need to get back on track.”
That sort of rhetoric is part of why it would be quite surprising for Missouri to fire Jackson after his second season at the school. Dismissing Jackson now would cost MU roughly $1.7 million, which would be a hefty expenditure that could be used on more direct infrastructure improvements to the baseball facilities — or go toward the payroll of a revenue-generating sport, should that better align with the athletics department’s trajectory.
Veatch is optimistic Mizzou can return to being competitive in the SEC in due time.
“We are going to expect to win, and eventually, we want to expect to win at the high levels,” he said. “We want to play for championships. But you also have to understand where you’re at and take steps towards that.”
Softball suffers losses in portal, too
MU softball, which also struggled en route to a 25-31 record with only six SEC wins, was already in line to lose its top three hitters in terms of batting average as they ran out of eligibility. A couple of immediate transfer portal entries will further complicate coach Larissa Anderson’s rebuild.
Infielder Madison Walker, who led the Tigers with 18 home runs in 2025, has entered the transfer portal. So too has pitcher Taylor Pannell, who is still the NCAA’s active leader in saves after tying the single-season record for saves in 2024.
Their exits add to the urgency of this offseason for a Mizzou team that will need to clear the bar of making the NCAA tournament next season, after finishing as the only SEC team not to make the field in 2025.
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