The grand slams disappeared on a chilly Wednesday night for the top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers, but the quality pitching returned thanks to former McCallie School and Cleveland State standout Austin Breedlove.
Tennessee improved to 13-0 before a crowd of 4,726 inside Lindsey Nelson Stadium with a 13-1 thumping of Xavier. Vols pitchers combined on 13 strikeouts a night after allowing a season high in runs to Radford in a 22-9 slugfest in which Tennessee racked up three grand slams to set a single-game program record and tie a single-game NCAA standard.
“As a coach, you want things to go in a specific direction and do things well, but each game has its own flow,” Tennessee coach Tony Vitello said in a news conference. “It may be two pitchers getting in a rhythm, or the wind or the turf being wet. It can be a variety of circumstances, but I don’t think tonight was meant to be an explosive night.
“We just kind of had that one inning where things picked up for us.”
Wednesday’s game was moved up 30 minutes to account for the plummeting temperatures.