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College Baseball

SEC Tournament: Vanderbilt stays hot, thumps 1-seed Tennessee with long ball

Andrew Olson

By Andrew Olson

Published:

Vanderbilt extended its winning streak to 3, adding to its NCAA Tournament resume with a second SEC Tournament victory. The 8-seed Commodores had the bats going on Wednesday, thumping 1-seed Tennessee 13-4 in Hoover.

The Vandy Boys slugged from start to finish. Three Dores hitters left the yard in Hoover. Alan Espinal had 2 home runs, leading the offensive output with 5 RBIs.

UT took a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the 2nd inning, but it did not last. Vandy answered in a big way, scoring 5 in the top of the 3rd.

Espinal’s first homer of the day came in the big inning, a 3-run jack to make it 4-1.

Vanderbilt extended its lead to 6-1 in the top of the 4th, but the Vols weren’t going away. UT scored 3 on a Reese Chapman homer to cut it to 6-4. The Dores answered with another run to get the lead back up to 3 runs in the top of the 5th.

The Vandy Boys poured it on to put the game out of the reach over the final three innings. Espinal went yard for the second time in the 7th to make it 9-4.

In the 8th inning, Jonathan Vastine launched a 3-run blast to make it 12-4. Colin Barczi added the exclamation point with a solo shot in the 9th inning.

Vanderbilt used three pitchers in the win. Devin Futrell was charged with all 4 runs, throwing 80 pitches over 4 innings, striking out 4 and walking 2. The Vols registered only 3 more hits in the final 4 innings against Miller Green, who struck out 4 over 55 pitches.

Tennessee used 8 arms. Starter Nate Snead had the longest outing for the Vols, going 2.2 IP, allowing 5 earned runs on 5 hits with 1 walk and 1 wild pitch, striking out 2 of his 13 batters faced. Vandy hitters were .450 (9-of-20) with runners on, and .385 (5-of-13) with runners in scoring position. On the plus side for UT, Kirby Connell kept RJ Austin from stealing home in the 5th inning.

Vanderbilt improves to 37-20 with the No. 20 RPI in the nation. The Dores will play the winner of the Mississippi State-Texas A&M game in a winner’s bracket contest. Tennessee faces the loser of MSU-TAMU in an elimination game.

Andrew Olson

Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaigns of Fred Taylor and Andruw Jones.

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