When Tennessee lost its SEC baseball tournament opener to Alabama on Wednesday, my first knee-jerk thought was the Vols would be better off getting out of there as quickly as possible.
Just save the pitching arms and the determination for the next tournament. I covered a Tennessee baseball team in 2001 for the Knoxville News Sentinel that employed that strategy. Those Vols started a position player on the mound in one of their tournament games. They lost two in succession and retreated to Knoxville.
Back home, they recoiled and advanced all the way to the College World Series.
Different year, different team. After watching these Vols stick around Hoover, Ala., until Sunday’s championship game, my second thought was that I felt like a jerk about the first one.
“I think it will take a bus ride for our guys to soak up the whole deal,” UT coach Tony Vitello said following Sunday’s 7-2 loss to Arkansas. “Somewhere around the good city of Chattanooga, they’ll start laughing or saying the things they enjoyed that happened here. The bitterness of the loss won’t go away, but these guys have kind of shown after a Saturday loss and we go into a Sunday or after a Game 1 tourney loss, they seem to get motivation from that stuff.”
Somewhere around Chattanooga, perhaps it started to sink in that the whole deal had improved Tennessee’s NCAA profile. On Sunday night, the Vols were named a host site for one of this weekend’s 16 regionals.
On Monday, the Vols (45-16) were tabbed a No. 3 national seed for the 64-team field. If they advance, the Vols also will host a super regional.
For starters, the Vols will host a deep regional, beginning with Wright State (35-11) on Friday. The Raiders led the nation in runs with 488 in 46 games.
A top eight national seed was likely for Tennessee regardless of the SEC tournament results. But winning three games in Hoover factored into achieving a No. 3 seed.
A local product played a big part in one of those victories. Right-hander Camden Sewell, the former Cleveland High standout, pitched six scoreless innings Saturday in the Vols’ 4-0 victory over Florida. The win advanced UT to the championship and perhaps changed Sewell’s role for the NCAA tournament.
Sewell, who allowed just two hits and didn’t walk a batter while striking out six, said after Saturday’s game that he had ruined the coaching staff’s plans for that day.
“I don’t know how to take that,” he said, “but hopefully it was a good thing.”
It definitely was good for Sewell, who had pitched 38 innings previously in 18 appearances, primarily as a reliever. Before Saturday, his longest outing of the season was 3.2 innings.
“I think it just comes down to being myself,” he said. “Earlier in the year, I was trying to do too much and be something I’m not. The key to being a pitcher is just be yourself, and not everyone’s the same.”
It was good for the Vols to be reminded of the depth of their pitching depth. If they had enough arms to hang around Hoover, they have enough to get back to Omaha.
Vitello called Sewell “the ultimate leader” following his performance and added, “We certainly owe him a big, big thanks.”
* * *
Dan Fleser is a 1980 graduate of the University of Missouri, who covered University of Tennessee athletics from 1988-2019. He can be reached at danfleser3@gmail.com.