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In shocking fashion, the Vanderbilt pitching staff on Sunday allowed twice as many runs as it had in the entire march to the SEC Baseball Tournament title game. But in this case, that was still good enough to win the game 3-2.
The final line on the Vandy staff at the SEC Tournament? 25 innings pitched, 10 hits allowed, 3 runs, all earned, 15 walks and 38 strikeouts. Those 10 hits were 8 singles, a double, and the lone home run in the last inning in Hoover.
Yes, the Commodores emerge from Hoover as the SEC Tournament champions. They’ve also won their last 8 games heading into NCAA Tournament play. That’s wins over Ole Miss, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kentucky (3 times) and Tennessee (2 more times).
Needless to say, Vandy more than locked down a spot as a potential super regional host. They look like a potential College World Series favorite.
Who else won in Hoover?
Obviously, the Ole Miss Rebels and Tennessee Volunteers were big winners. Both were announced Sunday evening as NCAA regional hosts. Although neither will have dibs on a super regional absent an upset, it’s still a big deal to play games at home in the NCAA Tournament. Both teams were outside of that realm heading into Hoover. Ole Miss certainly made a case as a legitimate NCAA contender and Tennessee erased some of the bad mojo of 5-straight SEC series losses.
Overall, SEC pitchers won. The tournament included 3 shutouts, 4 games in which the losing team scored 1 run, and 4 games in which the losing team scored 2 runs. That’s 11 of 15 games featuring a pitching staff holding the loser to 2 or fewer runs. Two of the other 4 games ended with the losing team scoring 3 runs. Tennessee’s 15-10 game over Alabama was the week’s only slugfest.
It’s a perennial, but Hoover is a winner. Small-town enough to be cozy, but professional in approach, this year, a few games got moved around due to weather, but the tiny Alabama town remains a wonderful destination for the SEC Tournament.
Who lost in Hoover?
Kentucky has a pressure packed Selection Monday ahead. The Wildcats came to Hoover having been swept by Vandy and promptly fell to Oklahoma in an ugly first-round loss. Kentucky went 13-17 in league play and finished the year with 4-straight league losses. Even a single win in Hoover would’ve been huge. Instead, the Wildcats will sweat out likely one of the last spots in the NCAA field, if that even works out. If not, Kentucky has nobody to blame but itself.
Texas’s utter lack of momentum is concerning. For a team that looked in control of the sport’s best league 3 weeks ago, finishing the season 4-7 in its last 11 games is not promising.
It seems like nobody fell off the NCAA super regional line, with 6 SEC teams still likely sitting pretty. Obviously, if anyone did fall off the line, that’s a big deal. But it seems pretty safe at the moment.
Texas A&M was the only team that really could have played its way into the NCAAs, but it didn’t quite do that. Frankly, it was always going to be hard countenancing a team that was swept by 3-27 Missouri in the NCAA Tournament.
The SEC’s bats could use a strong statement next week, but against non-SEC pitching staffs, that seems like a probable outcome.
Joe Cox is a columnist for Saturday Down South. He has also written or assisted in writing five books, and his most recent, Almost Perfect (a study of baseball pitchers’ near-miss attempts at perfect games), is available on Amazon or at many local bookstores.
