Sports Editor: Tennessee baseball is cool

ANDREW PETERS Sports Editor

Last season, Tennessee baseball garnished sellout crowds nearly every weekend as the Vols put together one of the greatest regular seasons in college baseball history.

Even in the freezing February weather, fans piled into Lindsey Nelson Stadium to see Tennessee clobber mid-majors behind a plethora of home runs and dominant pitching.

What drew these abnormally large crowds? Guys like Evan Russell, Drew Gilbert, Jordan Beck, Trey Lipscomb and others.

Why did fans like this group so much? Well, they were really, really good at baseball, for one. But they were also cool guys.

I am sure that fans would have latched on to last year’s team no matter what, but I am convinced that the thing bringing them back week after week was the swagger that each player brought every time he walked up to the plate or to the mound.

It made the game fun to watch. Even when Tennessee was up 10+ runs, which happened nearly every game, fans stayed glued to their seats to see what their favorite players were going to do next.

The hands-over-the-face celebration for doubles, the fur coat that players donned after home runs, the daddy hat – man, that team was fun to watch.

They also embraced the fact that they were the villains of college baseball.

“We definitely embrace it,” Gilbert said on Tennessee being the villain after a win over Vanderbilt. “We don’t care if people are yelling at us. We kind of like it.”

And that villain role was embraced by head coach Tony Vitello, too. Vitello and his team were going to run up the score, celebrate like they just won the World Series, and they didn’t care what you thought about it.

That emotion that the team brought is what made them so fun to watch. You could tell how passionate they were about the game and how much they loved winning.

The Vols played and acted in an unconventional way that baseball elitists probably frown upon, but Tennessee fans live for.

When Vitello chest bumped an umpire last season against Auburn, he had the support of his entire dugout and the thousands of fans inside Lindsey Nelson Stadium.

When Beck hit a double over the head of a Georgia Tech outfielder and proceeded to give him a not-so-friendly gesture with his finger, he encapsulated what all the fans in that stadium were feeling that night.

While Beck, Russell, Gilbert, Lipscomb and many of the other guys that made Tennessee baseball so cool last season might be gone, I have no doubt that the younger guys from last year probably learned a thing or two and will keep this tradition alive.

So here’s to more fun baseball, even if it makes baseball purists angry.