OMAHA, Nebraska — Whether Tennessee deserved to win Friday’s College World Series thriller against Florida State on Friday night is an interesting and not-unimportant question. When you produce 12 runs on 18 hits in a nine-inning baseball game, you’re usually going to win, and it’s tough to argue you don’t deserve it. When you send eight men to plate in the bottom of the ninth and six of them reach base, including four consecutive base hits with two outs, including two on two-strike counts, you can rightfully state your case for earning a win.
But then there’s the other stuff we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears during the four-hour thriller at Charles Schwab Field, and most of those things weren’t great. They were, at the least, unbecoming of the top-ranked team in the land. Does any team deserve to win a College World Series game when it walks nine batters, commits three errors and has at least three more plays that could have been scored errors? No. The obvious answer to that question is no.
The wonderful and terrible thing about sports, though, is that teams don’t always get what they deserve, and they darn sure don’t always get what it looks like they’re going to get. Games are played, and unless those games happen on a golf course, the team that scores more than the other team wins. You play until time expires in sports with clocks. In baseball and softball, you play until the home team records the final out in the top of the inning, or the home team scores the winning run in the bottom of an inning. Or until it rains.
It didn’t rain Friday night here on the Nebraska-Iowa border. Nearly nine full innings were played, and the final result was a 12-11 Tennessee win.
At almost no point in the final seven innings of that game did it seem like Tennessee would win. The Vols were fortunate to escape some early jams and capitalize on some Florida State miscues to take a 4-1 lead heading into the top of the third. Teams of Tennessee’s caliber often pounce on opportunities like that and stroll away to comfortable wins. In fairness, that’s exactly what these Vols have done for most of the past five seasons. They didn’t do that Friday night, though. They put together their most miserable inning of the season. It was as close to a total meltdown as imaginable for such a talented team. They walked and hit batters. They threw two-strike pitches over the heart of the plate. Their defense looked like it had entered the annual Jello shot competition here in Omaha and done quite well for itself.
These things happen in baseball. They’re not supposed to happen to teams like this on stages like this, though. But they happened. They absolutely happened. And it looked like the Vols were going to continue their tradition of losing College World Series openers, this time with the worst loss of the lot.
We’ve seen these Vols come from behind and win games, and we’ve seen them almost always respond to rare losses with big wins. We’ve seen them bounce back so many times that we’ve come to expect it. But we’d never seen this team do anything like it did Friday night. We’d never seen this team play that badly. We’d also never seen them erase a four-run deficit with two outs and no one on base in the eighth inning. We’d never seen them erase a three-run deficit with one out in the ninth inning. We’d never seen them be down to their final strike multiple times and win a game. We’d never seen them do that of any stage, let alone this one.
The list of mistakes Tennessee made Friday night couldn’t fit on the internet. We might never know exactly what the plan was for Tony Vitello and his players in that game, but we know it wasn’t drawn up like that. From the very first at-bat of the game — a routine ground ball to the right side that turned into an infield single when rock-solid junior first baseman Blake Burke went well outside his area to attack it — things went weird. It started weird and ugly, and it got weirder and uglier. So many simple plays were not made, and some of the culprits were reliable veteran defenders who’ve played several games in this park, and the Vols looked rattled. You expect some nerves in the early stages of a College World Series opener, but you don’t expect them from some of the Tennessee players who made them. You expect veterans to catch balls thrown to them without a bounce. You expect veterans to pay attention to runners breaking from second to third. You expect veterans to look the ball into their glove. You expect veterans to not rush throws when they have time to set their feet.
For all the things Tennessee did wrong, though, the Vols never quit. Lesser teams with lesser fortitude would not have come back and won that game. Lesser players would have let go of the rope, especially in a non-elimination game. These Vols didn’t. They turned their worst performance of the season into one of the biggest wins in their program’s history, and now they’re exactly what they wanted to be heading into the weekend. This isn’t how they wanted to get there, of course, but who cares? They got there, and now they have all the momentum a team could want.
Tennessee’s pitching wasn’t great for most of Friday’s game. Frank Anderson-coached pitching staffs almost never walk nine batters in a game. But senior lefty Kirby Connell and junior righty Aaron Combs did enough to keep the Vols in the game, and hard-throwing sophomore righty Nate Snead was mostly fantastic in his 2.1 shutout innings at the end. He also needed just 39 pitches to do it, so he — like everyone except Combs — would in theory be available for Sunday’s winners’ bracket game against North Carolina. That would be so much more important if the Vols had lost Friday and been tossed into an elimination game against Virginia, but it’s still important, because Tennessee is now one win against North Carolina from getting two days off and being in pole position for a spot in the CWS championship series.
Wins like Friday’s are ones that almost always happen at least once during a ‘ship-winning season. They don’t guarantee titles, of course. If they guaranteed titles, Tennessee would’ve won the natty after last season’s unforgettable extra-inning win in hostile territory at the Clemson Regional. But the Vols were never the best team in the country last season. They were very good, especially down the stretch, but there was at least one better team, and that team (LSU) won the title.
Tennessee has looked like the best team in the country this season for a while. Vitello blows his top when people mention that, but it’s the truth. The Vols look like the best team in the country. They don’t look leaps-and-bounds better than the field like they did two years ago. The margin is much smaller now, and you could make a decent argument for at least a couple of other teams still in this field. But Tennessee has been ranked No. 1 for a while for a reason. Now that top-ranked team has the momentum generated from good, old-fashioned highway robbery, and it’s cleared the first hurdle.
One of the best arguments against the Vols winning this tournament was — and remains — a valid one. Tennessee does not have a true ace. The Vols don’t have a dominant, series-opening starter. You know who does, though? The Florida State Seminoles. Sophomore lefty Jamie Arnold is a certified dude. And Tennessee just torched that dude for eight runs in five innings. These Vols don’t have a classic ace, but they do have arguably the deepest pitching staff in this field, which is why they have the best ERA in this field. And, if nothing else, they have an offense that remains more than capable of wrecking the best arms in this field. They have the best player (Christian Moore) in this field, too, who needed just four at-bats Friday night to become just second player in history and first since 1956 to hit for the cycle in a CWS game.
Friday was about as vulnerable as this Tennessee team can be in their present form, and Florida State coach Link Jarrett knew that as well as anyone. You didn’t need to massage his postgame comments too deeply to uncover that. These Vols’ soft spots were exposed Friday night, and they made enough mistakes to lose multiple games. And they won.
Whether they deserved to win is irrelevant. They won. If they take the momentum from Friday’s win and sharpen the focus that wasn’t there for much of that game, they might just win the whole thing.
