OMAHA, Neb. — Before there was Christian Moore starring for Tennessee baseball, there was Tommy Bridges.
Doesn’t ring a bell? Bridges was a pitcher for the Volunteers in the late 1920s and later had a rather interesting debut with the Detroit Tigers. The first major league batter he ever faced was Babe Ruth. He got him to pop up on the first pitch. The third batter he faced was Lou Gehrig. He struck him out. Welcome to the bigs, kid. He would end up winning 194 games.
Before there was Caden Sorrell hitting a home runs for Texas A&M, there was Wally Moon.
Can’t quite place the name? Moon was an All-Southwest Conference outfielder for the Aggies in 1950. He homered in his first major league at-bat for St. Louis and was named National League rookie of the year. A couple of other candidates for the award that season were named Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks. Moon later played on three World Series champions for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where his homers even acquired their own nicknames. Moon Shots.
Phil Garner was an infielder for the last Pittsburgh Pirates World Series title 45 years ago, and later managed the Houston Astros to their first World Series. Know where he played his college baseball? Tennessee.
Davey Johnson was an infielder for the Baltimore Orioles World Series champions in 1966 and 1970 and later managed the New York Mets to the title in 1986. Know what he was in college? A Texas A&M Aggie.
In other words, they’ve been playing baseball a long time at Tennessee and Texas A&M and with some pretty good people wearing the colors. But maybe neither program has ever quite had a moment like what will happen this weekend in Omaha.
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Tennessee will win its first-ever Men’s College World Series. Or Texas A&M will.
One of them will be the sixth different SEC team to clinch a national baseball title in the past seven NCAA tournaments. One of them will be an iconic champion for a fan base that has seen a good deal of success in many sports past — and frustrations too.
Tennessee has never made it to the men’s Final Four in basketball before. Neither has Texas A&M.
And the Vols have never grabbed a spot in the College Football Playoff. Nor have the Aggies.
Tennessee has never had a Heisman winner, not even Peyton Manning. Don't ask anyone from Knoxville about that election. Texas A&M has never had a national player of the year in basketball, men or women.
Tennessee’s women’s basketball program had its remarkable eight national championships and 18 Final Fours in the first 27 NCAA tournaments. But none in the 15 since. Texas A&M’s only women’s Final Four was 13 years ago, when the Aggies won the championship.
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By NCAA count, Texas A&M has won 14 national championships in something, including women’s tennis last month. Tennessee has won 16, but none since the women’s indoor track title in 2009.
Now the schools are the latest to carry the SEC standard together in Omaha, the ninth and 10th different conference baseball programs to get this far in the past 17 years. Their own league is the rite of passage. Together they’re 62-3 against the outside world, all three of the non-SEC losses belonging to Tennessee. Take a bow, Oklahoma, Lipscomb and Evansville. You own the only non-conference wins this season against the duo in the Championship Series.
This pairing is the handiwork of two coaches whose mission has always been to build programs talented enough and resilient enough to have this chance. Jim Schlossnagle first made TCU baseball an enduring power, with the help of an assistant named Tony Vitello. Schlossnagle moved on to Texas A&M and the teeming baseball land that is the SEC, with the hunger to be a champion one day. Vitello eventually took the job at Tennessee with precisely the same idea.
Now they’ll face each other. But only one reaches the end of his quest.
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Tennessee has been trending toward this moment in recent years with teams that carried big numbers but could never quite take the last steps. “We always say before something happens, something happens,” Vitello said. “There's been a lot of build-up into the successes we've had this year and the failures, too, to be honest with you.”
Texas A&M is the result of a headlong dash to join the party of the SEC elite, something a fan base renowned for its fervor has long sought.
“You want to reward the commitment that they have made. I think we've done that,” Schlossnagle said. “So just trying to reestablish Texas A&M as a baseball power that it should be. We have a lot of advantages, we need a new ballpark, but we also have a lot of advantages and Texas A&M should be good in baseball.”
Both men have never had an opportunity like this, nor have their programs, at least for decades. Both are in new territory, and the unmatchable joy of accomplishing something for the first time is what’s on the table the next few days in Charles Schwab Field.
The old Volunteer who put down Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in his first inning as a big league pitcher would be so proud. So would the old Aggie who gave Dodger Stadium the Moon Shot.
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