Tennessee baseball clinches 2022 regular-season SEC title
The Tennessee Volunteers are officially SEC champions. Tony Vitello’s squad clinched the regular-season SEC baseball title on Friday night after beating Georgia 9-2 and Arkansas falling to Vanderbilt.
The Vols improved to 45-6 overall and 22-4 in conference play with the victory against UGA, also a series-clinching win. UT has 4 conference games to go and cannot be caught by Arkansas. The Razorbacks lead the SEC West with a 16-9 mark in conference play.
For Tennessee, it is the program’s fourth outright SEC regular-season championship in school history and first since 1995.
In the 2022 season, Tennessee has won 8-of-9 conference series. UT opened SEC play with sweeps over South Carolina, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and Missouri. Alabama was the first team to hand Tennessee an SEC loss, though the Vols bounced back to win the series. UT then swept Florida before taking the rubber game against Auburn for another series victory. Vitello’s squad stumbled in Kentucky, dropping the first 2 games for the only series loss of the season. Tennessee is currently on a 4-game winning streak that started with the UK finale and includes the first 2 games against UGA.
The Vols have 5 games remaining in the regular season. The Georgia series wraps up on Saturday. Tennessee’s home finale will be against Belmont on Tuesday. UT finishes the regular season on the road at defending national champion Mississippi State.
The SEC Tournament in Hoover, Alabama is scheduled for May 24-29.
Way to go, Vols, on to the postseason, now!
Got the score wrong on the UT-Georgia baseball game on Friday night. It was 9-2, not 6-2. It was really great to see the players get the SEC regular-season championship this year. I’m hoping for a World Series championship. However, if that doesn’t happen, this group of young men have still made this such a special year, and every UT fan should be very proud of them!
It has been fixed. Thanks.
I saw 6-2 when I looked on the SEC site https://www.secsports.com/clubhouse/baseball and that error got repeated.
Good deal!
Way to go Vols! This team is amazing. The future is bright also with Freshman like Blake Burke. Burke hit 2 homers against the Dawgs and it had me saying “ My God a Freshman”. Sounds like I’ve heard that somewhere before.
Congratulations! You guys have been playing great baseball since day one this season. WPS
Vols better work on playing small ball and manufacturing runs, because they’re going to need it when they’re playing away from Knoxville. Playing in larger parks (see the UK series) those at home HR’s will be long outs on the track. I’m shocked that the team has eight sacrifices this year, and the coaching staff isn’t working on that heading into the post season. They have little to work on, with hardly any weaknesses, but this is one that might come back to bite them before it’s over.
I would add base running/holding base runners as potential weaknesses too. There have been 2-3 boneheaded base running errors giving away outs in the last couple of series. They have also been pretty bad holding runners/throwing out runners stealing all year. I was really surprised Georgia didn’t try to run more (of course their offense was heavy with HRs).