Tony Vitello reveals his message to the team after losing first game of doubleheader

On3 imageby:Barkley Truax05/22/23

BarkleyTruax

It was a tale of two games during No. 18 Tennessee‘s weekend double-header against No. 13 South Carolina. The Gamecocks rallied late in game one to earn a 6-1 victory, while the Vols controlled game two, 12-1.

After closing out the regular season with an SEC road series win, Tennessee baseball coach Tony Vitello revealed the message he sent to his team before coming out for the second outing.

“Just be where you need to be and what you have right in front of you is an opportunity to win a road series,” Vitello said of his message to the team in-between games. “There are a couple of places we traveled to this year where we would have killed to be in [their] position, but we came away with not a whole lot.”

The first game was knotted at one run in the sixth, but five Gamecock runs in the bottom of the inning built an insurmountable lead with only three outs for the Vols to work with. They cut their losses and headed back to the drawing board with a loss that tied the weekend series.

“It’s very easy to be in the moment of being overly emotional about the [game two] loss or it didn’t go this way, or I made a mistake and things like that. All they did was focus on what was in front of them,” Vitello said. “Kind of like we showed up on the bus after sitting in the hotel for awhile. They just kind of had that vibe they were ready to play ball.”

Coming out for game two following the late inning mistakes, neither team could buy a run during the first three innings of the second game. The Vols would go on to score at least one run in every inning for the rest of the day. They scored four runs in the fourth innings and six more in the seventh.

DH Griffin Merritt, CF Christian Scott and C Cal Stark all went yard during the matchup.

Physically and mentally, the Vols have been all over the place this season. To round out their regular season with their first SEC road victory of the season speaks to how much the Vols have matured in the past few weeks.

The Vols’ regular season efforts earned them a No. 7 seed in the upcoming SEC Baseball Tournament. Tennessee will play No. 10 seed Texas A&M in Game 2 at 1:30 p.m. ET Tuesday afternoon with the winner advancing to play No. 2 seed Arkansas in the quarterfinals, which will be double elimination. All first-round tournament games will be broadcasted on the SEC Network.