SOMEWHERE IN SEC LAND -- Two highly-seeded college baseball teams — actually the two highest seeded teams. Two super regional games on a Saturday in SEC territory. No. 1 Tennessee in Knoxville in the morning, No. 2 Kentucky in Lexington in the evening. Maybe one day they’ll meet in Omaha, but on this weekend, they’re just trying to get there. A tale of two cities, then, their college baseball fever only 170 miles apart:
10 a.m. At Lindsey Nelson Stadium, the Tennessee Vols are taking batting practice and it’s time for Saturday brunch. Who plays a college baseball game at 11 o’clock in the morning? Tennessee and Evansville do if the TV folks say so. “We’ll play at whatever time,” Vols coach Tony Vitello had said this week. “It’ll be like a football Saturday around here at 11. Only difference is, I won’t get to have fun. We’ll have to work.”
Following its 11-6 victory Friday, the start time gives top-ranked Tennessee the chance to punch its ticket to Omaha by lunch time in Nebraska. The locals are ready. Ninety minutes before the first pitch, the orange army is lining up for the best spots at the rail of the standing room area down the right field line.
Somewhere out there beyond the outfield wall and the trees and Neyland Drive is the Tennessee River. No homer has reached there, but it’s not like they haven’t been trying. The Vols have hit 116 home runs in their stadium this season. Only nine teams in the nation own that many anywhere. Of course, measurements of 320 feet down the lines, 365 feet to the alleys and 390 to center don’t hurt. If the wind is blowing out, this can be the Cape Canaveral of the SEC.
11 a.m. A team that has gone 39-3 at home must be feeling pretty confident about closing this out. And since the only thing more scarce in this ballpark than visitors’ wins is shade, there’s a strong whiff of sun screen in the stands when the first pitch is thrown at 11:06. Tennessee has the lead by 11:08, Blake Burke doing what he had done the day before, homering in the first inning. It’s 1-0 . . . no, 2-0. Dylan Dreiling homers, too. No, 3-0. Another by Hunter Ensley. Three home runs in the first 10 minutes. Each missile brings yet another rendition of Rocky Top. Music to bash guests by. It’s 4-0 after two innings and looks like another orange romp. Except . . .
1:30 p.m. Tennessee has stopped homering and started leaving runners on base; Evansville is the offense that is sending baseballs out of the park. Cal McGinnis, Brendan Hord, Kip Fougerousse. Suddenly it’s the seventh and the Purple Aces have scored 10 runs in three innings and lead 10-5 and everyone is starting to forget what Rocky Top sounds like. The Vols bullpen that was 39-5 this season had been knocked around.
2:26 p.m. Tennessee rallies to close to 10-8 and has the bases loaded with two out and SEC triple crown winner Christian Moore at the plate. The perfect moment for something legendary. Except Moore pops up on the ninth pitch of a terrific duel with Evansville pitcher Shane Harris, one of the Aces’ gazillion senior veterans. The stadium goes from rollicking to mute in the time it takes one popup to land in an Evansville glove. Given the opportunity to blink, the Evansville Aces had not. They were 4-for-6 with runners in scoring position and scored seven runs with two out. It was Tennessee that stranded 11 runners, and put its mighty season in peril.
“We don’t need to worry about anything other than tomorrow,” Vitello says afterward. “If you are bored and you're on your phone for too long, or you get involved in social media chats, which will be up to you all (in the media), not our players, then you could paint all kinds of pictures tomorrow. But really what it is, we are fortunate enough to host Evansville, one of the best teams in the country, and we are trying to win the series tomorrow.”
Evansville has become baseball’s UMBC. The Aces were seeded fourth in their own regional and past four-seeds had been 0-30 all-time against the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed. But not anymore. How does that happen?
“I think because we're super old,” Fougerousse says. “We're a bunch of old guys that have played a lot of baseball. We are not scared of the moment, and we have a lot of guys that really want it out there, a lot of good baseball players. There's no other way to say it. We're just an old bunch of guys that like having fun, and we've been together for a while.”
They’ll be together Sunday with a chance to shock the college baseball world — especially the part around Knoxville — and go to Omaha.
“I think it’s hands down the greatest win of our school’s history,” coach Wes Carroll says of Saturday. “I bleed purple, and it’s great to be able to experience that as the head baseball coach at UE.
“We are in rare air and uncharted waters, but we are going to come to the yard loose.”
The Vols have seen a lot of Sunday series deciding games in the SEC. Not quite the same as this, but still pretty heavy lifting. "So we know what it looks like,” catcher Cal Stark says. “We know how to treat the game [and] stuff like that.”
From the other side, Carroll: “We have to worry about us. The stakes are high for us too. As a coach, it's very challenging to get here. You don't know if you're ever going to get here again. It's going to be one of those things where I can be one game away for the rest of my life. I am going to cherish it. I'm going to embrace it, and most importantly I am going to make sure our boys are ready to compete like they did today for one another.”
For the Vols faithful it had been a frustrating and hot day in the sun. And now they’ll have to be back Sunday, for an uncertain fate.
5:30 p.m. Three hours north, the Bluegrass has gone gaga over baseball this June. The trip up Interstate I-75 sails past the Stinking Creek Road interchange, the state line, the exit for Corbin, Kentucky — where Colonel Sanders fried his first chicken legs, and eventually onto Man O’ War Boulevard toward campus. Finally, there’s Kentucky Proud Park, one of the new SEC baseball gems, packed with the Big Blue Nation, except for a small group of fans in orange behind the Oregon State dugout. Custer wasn’t this surrounded.
6:05 p.m. Kentucky is only one spot behind Tennessee in the rankings but a lot further than that in postseason pedigree. Back in Knoxville, there is a big 6 on the stadium wall, marking six trips to the Men's College World Series. Kentucky is trying to get there for the first time. The Wildcats are 43-14, confident and at home. Why not now?
Two wins over Oregon State are required. The Beavers represent a program that has stood tall in June, too. Three-time national champions and the only non-SEC program to win the Men's College World Series since 2016. And so it begins, the first super regional game ever played in Lexington, the first-ever game between Kentucky and Oregon State.
8:20 p.m. By the middle of the seventh inning, Kentucky leads 3-0 and a transfer graduate student pitcher from the College of Charleston named Trey Pooser is becoming Lexington’s man of the month. Pooser goes seven innings and allows Oregon State one lonely single. This is seven days after he allowed Illinois one run in seven innings in the regional, which was nine days after he shutout Arkansas five innings in the SEC tournament. That’s one run in 19 postseason innings. He’s becoming the prince of June darkness.
“I've been trying to do the same thing; it's just worked out better for me honestly, that's pretty much it,” he more or less shrugs about his extraordinary postseason. Tributes come from elsewhere.
“He is like one of the best pitchers in the country that nobody knows about,” teammate Ryan Nicholson says. “He doesn't really talk about it. He's not a boastful guy. He's all about the team. He just goes out there with a smile on his face, and gets outs for the guys behind him.”
Added coach Nick Mingione: “I'm just telling you, you have real toughness if you can stand on the mound — and that mound can be a lonely place where everybody is watching you — and when something doesn't go your way, the guy just sits there and just smiles, and he shakes his head and he goes on to the next thing.”
This much seems certain: If Kentucky is in Omaha next weekend, Trey Pooser will be one of the most intriguing storylines.
8:30 p.m. The Wildcats score seven runs to make it a rout and the first chants of SEC! SEC! come from the audience. Kentucky Proud Park is three miles from Rupp Arena, where Kentucky more famously has home advantage, but it’s not easy for visitors here, either. When opposing pitchers are working against Wildcat hitters, they often endure a steady drumbeat of a mantra from the seats, Throw it in the dirt! Dirt! Dirt! That chant gains more traction in the seventh when Kentucky scores four runs on two wild pitches and two wild pickoff throws. It’s not a very fun night for the Beavers. One of the last eruptions of applause is when former Wildcat national basketball player of the year Oscar Tshiebwe is spotted in the stands. Hoop season is never far away in Lexington.
9:01 p.m. It ends 10-0, and Kentucky’s recent pitching numbers have become incandescent. The Wildcats have allowed one run in their past 30 postseason innings, and thrown back-to-back shutouts against Indiana State and Oregon State — two teams who had not been blanked all season.
“There is momentum that builds,” Mingione says of his pitching. “We often talk about showing the roadmap. Someone needs to be able to step up and show what it's supposed to look like. We talk a lot about our pitching staff and how they look. The behavioral piece is so important to us. We've had a lot of guys do it at a high level. For us to do what we want to do, that's what has to happen. It starts on the mound for us.”
This in a sport where six of Saturday’s eight super regional winners score 10 runs, and another puts up 18.
It would seem that Oregon State’s hitters have a task ahead for game 2, which doesn’t start until 9:06 p.m. ET Sunday at TV request. “I looked at those guys in the huddle after the game and I saw what was in their eyes, and they want to fight. They want to get back out there and they want to play right now,” Beavers’ coach Mitch Canham says.
9:54 p.m. Sunday’s start time has created a dilemma for Kentucky. Mingione has a set-in-stone rule that the celebration of any victory must end at midnight, when it’s time to move on. “They've got two hours and six minutes,” he says of Saturday night’s romp. “It just means we're one step closer to where we want to be.”
But what, a player asked this week, if they win Sunday and the game is already past midnight?
“I said I need to think about that,” Mingione says. “If that happens, I'll discuss and talk to the staff, and we may need to add an extension and some time. If that happens and we go to Omaha, we'll put ourselves on Omaha time, and you might have 45 minutes.”
That he must even consider such a question is a sign of the higher bar that has come to Kentucky baseball. “Their goals have changed,” he says of his team. “They want to do something that's never been done.”
Three hours south, so do the Evansville Aces at the expense of Tennessee. The No. 1- No. 2 corridor will be back in action Sunday. The results might be enormous.
