KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Oh, to be Cinderella and have to go to Knoxville to play baseball.
You’re the Evansville Purple Aces, and you’ve become the people’s choice on the road to Omaha. If the public loves bracket busters in June like it does in March, you’re it. The team that had never seen a super regional up close before. The irrepressible bunch who started the season 9-15, including a 2-10 stretch, but then started swinging its way up the ladder. The plucky upstarts who are here to show what can be done by a mid-major from a northern school in the southwest toe of Indiana.
“We understand what we’re fighting for, what we represent,” coach Wes Carroll would say Friday on an afternoon that was so historically meaningful for the little guys in baseball, except not so much at the end when the Purple Aces were overpowered by Tennessee 11-6 in Game 1.
But this is not only about one result but also what a team symbolizes, and how it is trying to handle it. “Big stage, bright lights,” Carroll would say. “I’m really proud of our guys going in and competing.”
You’re Evansville and you were No. 76 in the last RPI. The team in the other dugout was No. 1. You were fourth seed in your own region. Tennessee is the top seed for the entire tournament. You set an all-time school record with 92 home runs this season. The hammerin’ Vols hit 67 more than that.
Tennessee has been prepping in the comforts of home for this weekend. Travel delays had you bouncing all over the map returning to Evansville from the historic wins at East Carolina. You had 27 hours at home before heading for Knoxville. But your ride has become something of a fairy tale, and who doesn’t root for a happy ending to a fairy tale? “Everybody likes the underdog,” your house-afire hitter, Kip Fougerousse, said the other day. “And I think we’re the underdogs right now.”
Everybody likes the underdog, that is, except for the assembled crowd at Lindsey Nelson Stadium. You’re donning Evansville purple and gray. Nearly everyone else in the full house is wearing something orange. This is the place where the home team has gone 38-3 and hasn’t lost a game here since April. Welcome to Knoxville.
You know you need to do something quickly to take some of the juice out of the crowd. They do love their Vols here. Take Frank and Susan Fitzgerald from Lafayette, near Nashville, sitting behind home plate. Susan has a sign proclaiming that Friday is their 49th wedding anniversary and checking off the boxes of their lives. Met at the University of Tennessee, sent four kids to UT doctorates — “One of them gave us the tickets today,” Frank says — and now have 13 grandchildren thinking future orange. Where else were they going to spend their 49th anniversary?
“Next year will be a big one,” Susan says. “I don’t know if we’ll be here but we’ll be somewhere.” Depends, probably on whether the kids have any extra tickets.
Such fervor is what you’re up against and you need to quiet the throng in a hurry. But your first three hitters all strike out; the early victims of what would grow to 16. In the bottom of the inning, Blake Burke hits the seventh Evansville pitch of the game over the right field wall and the Vols have both their 160th homer of the season, a 1-0 lead, and the noise already at jumbo jet level. Even more than East Carolina last weekend because this is the top-ranked team you’re eyeball to eyeball with.
“I don’t think we were as loose as I wanted us to be,” Carroll would say later. “I don’t feel like our dugout was as excited and engaged and we discussed that after the game. It was suffocating, the crowd, the atmosphere.”
Or as second baseman Cal McGinnis puts it. “It’s a little different coming in here.”
You hang in for a while. You get a 2-1 lead on a McGinnis homer, fall behind 5-2, tie 5-5. But Tennessee is a wave that cannot be held back. The Vols keep homering 161 . . . 162 . . . 163 . . . — and score five runs with two out. “It’s very challenging to get the third out of every single inning. It just is,” Carroll says afterward. “It’s the most dangerous lineup I’ve seen in my 16 years as head coach, just what they’re able to do with the barrel and their approaches at the plate, I felt like our pitchers did a really good job but if you look at the stat lines it shows different.
“We understand as an offense we need to hang with them and that’s a tough strategy, especially in this ballpark with that talented a lineup, but we’re going to give it a go tomorrow.”
That’s what you’re all about now. Tomorrow. Saturday in other words, and it’s an 11 a.m. start. So midnight for Cinderella might come a little early. But you’ll all show up, that lineup with four grad students.
The catcher, who played one game in three seasons at Kentucky and has a degree in civil engineering. The shortstop, from a place called Santa Claus, Indiana, who came into Friday with 943 career at-bats, more than any player left in the tournament. The third baseman, who was the fourth-ranked tennis player in the state of Wisconsin for his age group as a grade schooler. The centerfielder, who contributed two plays in the regional that made the SportsCenter Top 10 list, though Ty Rumsey is actually questionable after taking a ball to the face trying to make a leaping grab at the wall Friday, which if caught would have put him right back in the Top 10. The rightfielder, who comes from a family that has owned and operated a western retail department store in Wyoming for 105 years. The leftfielder, who has done student teaching and delivered psychology lectures on game days.
Also the designated hitter, from a small high school in Indiana who played baseball for his father, but also set the school record in 3-pointers. That’s Fougerousse, whose bat had been so hot it could set off smoke detectors. He hit nine home runs in his first 47 games this season — and 12 in his next 15, including in six games in a row, No homers Friday but he did double in two runs. “We’re playing with house money,” he had said of the Aces’ loose approach to this week. So we’ll see about Saturday. The Tennessee lineup will still be stacked and the stadium will still be wall-to-wall orange.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle but we’re going to start with pitch one tomorrow and inning one tomorrow to get back in this thing,” Carroll says. “What I do know is we’re going to leave it on the field, a senior laden group that competes and earns everything that’s given to them.”
The second baseman thinks so, too. “We won’t dwell on this game too much,” McGinnis says. “Rinse the shampoo out, get back at it tomorrow.
“The way this team plays — like we always say we want to play really loose, have a ton of fun, let it fly — I think that’s really going to ring true tomorrow.”
As the Aces left their post-game press conference and walked across the diamond, now more underdogs than ever, Tennessee players were still at the rail signing autographs for kids in orange. Also somewhere, the happy couple from near Nashville were driving home to celebrate the rest of their anniversary. Ain’t it great being home?
