Slipping And Sliding: Things Are Not Going Well For Vol Baseball

Image: Tennessee Athletics

By Cody McClure

Things are not going well for Tennessee Baseball.

There’s no other way to put it at this point. Third-day pitching has been nonexistent this season, and now the bats have fallen asleep as well.

Tennessee put up just seven runs in this past weekend’s series loss to Auburn.

The boys have now lost four of their last five series in SEC play. And three of those four series losses came at home.

Tennessee’s only home conference series win was almost two months ago against Florida. Moreover, the Vols haven’t scored 10 runs in a conference game in almost a month.

Things don’t feel quite like they have the past few seasons. Vibes are off.

Sure, Vol Baseball is still 37-11, which is a nice enough record, but that’s only good enough to have this team in the middle of the pack within the conference.

And our standard is generally a bit higher than that.

The SEC is too good, and UT seems to be slipping.

The Vols are all the way down at 15th in this week’s D1 Baseball poll. They’ve dropped to 13th in the Baseball America poll. USA Today has the Vols at No. 12. And ESPN — No. 15.

Not that ESPN knows anything about college baseball. But still. The point is, the Vols have fallen from the mountaintop.

We all still believe in Tony Vitello to lift them back up, but time is running out. UT has two difficult SEC series remaining — at home vs. Vanderbilt and at Arkansas.

At this point, they’re not only at risk of not hosting a Super Regional, but also maybe not even hosting a Regional.

This is a program, of course, that has been to Omaha in three of the past four seasons. And the one season they didn’t make it to Omaha they still had arguably the best regular season of all time.

The College World Series has become the standard, whether that’s fair or not.

Maybe this team will find a way to get it together. Or maybe they just don’t have it this year.

We’ll see in the weeks ahead.