The Tennessee Volunteers produced a middle-of-the-road regular season in Southeastern Conference baseball play.
They finished with a 15-15 league record. They won five series, including one sweep at Mississippi State, and they lost five series, including getting swept at Vanderbilt.
Yet finishing in the heart of the SEC pack was a desirable objective for Tennessee on April 5, when the Vols were saddled with a 4-8 conference ledger after surrendering a 10-run 12th inning in their memorable 16-6 collapse against LSU inside Lindsey Nelson Stadium.
“We’ve played some close games, and our guys have stayed in the fight,” Tennessee first-year coach Josh Elander said Saturday after the Vols took two of three contests from Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. “That’s what you want to see. At any point, our guys need to have the confidence that regardless of what the score is, they have the ability to come back.
“Our guys on the mound just need a little better tempo and better pace.”
Tennessee is 37-19 overall and a lock for a seventh straight NCAA tournament appearance. The Vols were ranked No. 24 last week by Baseball America and were No. 28 as of Sunday afternoon in the RPI rankings, according to NCAA.com, which projects them as a likely second seed in one of the looming 16 NCAA tournament regionals.
This week, however, is the SEC tournament in Hoover, Alabama, where the Vols are seeded 10th and will open play Tuesday afternoon (5:30 Eastern on the SEC Network) against 15th-seeded South Carolina (22-34, 7-23). The winner of that pairing will advance to play Wednesday (5:30 on the SEC Network) against seventh-seeded Arkansas (36-19, 17-13), a program that eliminated the Vols from last season’s NCAA tournament in the super regional round.
The Vols had a strong offensive close to the regular season, scoring nine runs in all three games against the Sooners and averaging 9.1 runs in their last 17 contests. They were last in the conference in batting average earlier this spring but finished the regular season 10th with a .277 clip, and they were seventh in runs scored (411) and third in home runs (109).
Tennessee finished seventh within the league with its 4.62 earned run average, but pitching will be a concern in tournament play if third-day weekend starter Landon Mack doesn’t return from arm soreness. The transfer from Rutgers sat out the last two series against Texas and Oklahoma, with the Vols giving up a combined 25 runs in those two series finales.
(SIGN UP: Get the daily sports newsletter in your email box by clicking here)
When it came to defense, Tennessee led the SEC during the regular season with a 98.4% fielding success and the fewest errors with 31. Six of those errors, though, occurred in Oklahoma City.
“I think that’s kind of an outlier,” Elander said. “I think we’re in the top five in a lot of those categories, and we just had some guys who have been out of position and moving around a little bit. We have an emphasis in our program to dominate the average play, and we didn’t do that to our standard the entire weekend.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.