Tennessee 8, Florida 5: Don't Take This Dominance For Granted

The Tennessee Volunteers never trailed in Hoover on their way to their first tournament title since 1995.

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Photo By Andrew Ferguson/Tennessee Athletics

This time yesterday the Tennessee Volunteers baseball team were battling the Florida Gators in the SEC Tournament championship over in Hoover. Twenty-four hours or so later and the Volunteers are back in Knoxville with a few extra pounds of championship hardware. I write about this a lot when it comes to the 2022 Volunteer baseball team. Having a chance to win sixty-plus games in one season is a rarity. Steamrolling the best college baseball conference both in the regular season and the postseason is nothing short of miraculous. This run and this team cannot be taken for granted.

It’s hard, though. I get it. It’s scary how quickly or bodies and minds adapt to a change in our surroundings. For instance, man, I had a stiff neck that would just not go away for days. I was miserable I pleaded with God that I would never keep my on a swivel again if I could just get back the full mobility of my dang neck. I felt so silly wearing various neck braces and whatnot. Each morning, I would wake up and my first item of business was to test out my 31-year-old neck and see if we were back in business. Eventually, one morning, I woke up and it was gone. I was grateful, sure, but by the middle of that afternoon I had forgotten all about life without a head that turns.

We just move forward. We get used to our new predicaments and surroundings far more quickly than I imagine most of us would like. It would be nice to be able to maintain that sense of gratitude at being back to normal, but that’s not realistic. Your circumstance changes and you adapt. After a week, you can barely remember what a stiff neck even felt like to begin with.

For Tennessee fans, you have to fight to remember what was. Man, it is fantastic that the Vols are the first SEC team to win the basketball and baseball tournament in the same year. It’s an unbelievable time to be a fan of a school that excels in virtually every sport nowadays. Some might even call Tennessee an Everything School. That can change on a dime, though. Tennessee baseball was not always like this. Manager Tony Vitello had to fight like hell to get it where it is today. This kind of dominance does not just happen. It takes time, it takes talent and it takes commitment. Only those guys in the building know just how long and arduous the road to the top has really been. On the outside, we are just treated to the end result. Where any loss at any time catches the entire fanbase by surprise. A few seasons ago, Volunteer fans could not imagine such a thing where victory was not only possible but expect. Constantly.

The 2022 Volunteer baseball team talks the talk and walks the walk. It’s a fine a line to walk, and some folks are not going to like it. What they are going to do, though, is respect it. You can count the number of losses, regular season and SEC tournament included, on one hand and we’re days away from June. This level of dominance is a rarity. It is unlike football, where the Alabamas of the world can reign over the rest of the conference well over a decade. That will not be the case for Tennessee baseball. Will they continue to be good, maybe even great, for the foreseeable future? Sure, but baseball is different, and things can change in a hurry, just ask the 2022 Mississippi State Bulldogs baseball team.

This is why it’s imperative to stay in the moment. Do not take any of these victories for granted. Expecting to get through the Tennessee batting order multiple times unscathed is a fool’s errand. For instance, let’s cut to Seth Stephenson. The Tennessee left fielder and leadoff man was going through it prior to the championship game against the Gators. In a lineup full of unlimited riches, folks at home were likely getting a little antsy with him atop the order heading into postseason play. It’s odd that a fanbase can feel so good about hitters 2-8 and feel a bit of unease at the man who figures to garner the most at-bats in a given game. Instead, though, Stephenson registered three hits, pulled off a beautiful RBI squeeze bunt and was more than fine roaming left field.

The highlight for most, though, on Sunday was Drew Gilbert. Goodness, I jotted down in my notes how curious it was for manager Kevin O’Sullivan to intentionally walk Jordan Beck to get to the Vols’ cleanup hitter. You don’t see that in baseball very often. Sure, context is needed and Gilbert was striking out in a way that was extremely uncharasteric of him. In the dugout, he was seen being extra hard on himself. When you’re batting close to .400 on the season, hitting that kind of rough patch he did in Hoover took its toll on him. Then, O’Sullivan elected to challenge him with the bases loaded in the top of he fifth inning. Gilbert proceeded to smash an RBI double, clear the bases and put the Vols up 4-0. The Vols have not lost a game this season in which they led by three or more runs. In a way, this decision sealed Florida’s fate on Sunday. Gilbert even added a bomb to RF in the top of the ninth inning for good measure to put the Vols up 8-3.

Early in this one, you wondered if it would come back to bite the Vols not knocking in Trey Lipscomb in the top of the second inning with no outs. It was fair to wonder for most teams, but this team has conditioned you to not fret. Ever, really. It can be 2-2 in the eighth inning and the Vols will beat you by ten when it’s all said and done. You cannot take it for granted that lack of anxiety about not doing the little things that usually come back to bite a team in the end like leaving a man on third who started the inning with a leadoff triple.