Tennessee’s baseball program under coach Tony Vitello has accomplished about as much as possible the past three seasons short of winning a national championship.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus halted the 2020 season, the Volunteers have made trips to the 2021 and 2023 College World Series and sandwiched those around a 2022 season that yielded a 57-9 record and the top overall seed in the NCAA tournament. The ascension of Vitello’s Vols has been as entertaining as it has successful, and that combination could be in store again through a blend of returning players, transfer portal additions and promising freshmen.
“I’ve said this many times, but relative to other teams in our league or the traditional powers in college baseball, we’re just building into this thing,” Vitello said Thursday during a news conference to preview his seventh season in Knoxville. “We haven’t done everything we want to do, and we’re not even close, but the one thing that’s happened is that these guys committed here because they saw us win some games. It wasn’t us selling some vision or something like that.
“There are guys here who had other options besides Tennessee, so they had the mindset of wanting to win and choosing a winning program or a program that they see as a winning program. That’s a mentality that’s different from what we had been used to, and hopefully that winds up a good thing.”
Tennessee was recently ranked No. 9 in D1 Baseball’s preseason poll behind a top eight of Wake Forest, Florida, Arkansas, LSU, TCU, Vanderbilt, Oregon State and Texas A&M.