Tennessee baseball head coach Tony Vitello met with the media following the Vols’ 12-1 series-clinching run-rule victory over Bowling Green on Saturday night.
Vitello discussed a wide-range of topics regarding the Vols’ win, including his thoughts on Drew Beam’s great start, Blake Burke’s two HR night, Billy Amick and more.
See everything Vitello said following the game below.
On what he liked offensively:
“The ups and downs, you have to go with the ebbs and flows of the game a little bit. And I think the game started off with a lot of electricity. I don’t know if I’ve seen a game where both leadoff hitters hit a home run. Of course I’m sitting there wondering if my Seinfeld comment, I was just trying to have fun, had a little dose of karma right there. But CMo (Christian Moore) does his thing and then it’s tied 1-1, and then Blake Burke, really what he did was carry over BP (batting practice). I don’t know that it was his best BP if you’re a fan, but it was my favorite BP I’ve seen him take in a long long time. And really the ball he hit there, or really the night he had, was a by-product of that. But, it looks like it’s going to be, if you’re a fan, you’re probably sitting there thinking, maybe you don’t know the game as well as we do, we’re going to keep scoring and they’re not going to stop us. Well, that’s not how it goes. They made an adjustment, and then our guys had to adjust. And then there were different things that went on in the game, and you saw our guys do whatever they needed to do to piece together some offense. Because again, nine-inning game if you don’t have the run-rule thing, but over the course of the game, there’s going to be a lot of different things that happen and you need to just keep playing and there’ll be some things that go well and some things that don’t go well. But I kind of like the fact that we were able to ride the roller coaster fairly smoothly.”
On Blake Burke’s approach the last two weeks:
“Settle in and not try to take the world by storm at the plate. Really, my thing that I look at with him is his takes, and his takes are better. And then BP, too. His BP is always impressive. He’s naturally gifted with a beautiful swing and some hand-eye, and then he probably swings as much as anybody here in the cages. And out there on the field, he always cheats and takes more than he is supposed to when we have it listed on the practice sheet. So, he’s worked hard to be the hitter that he is. But I think when he’s actually not swinging the bat, those takes will kind of tell you what he is trying to do, and his one at-bat that was not very good tonight, he had a really bad take in there. So, that’s kind of what we’ve seen. He’s just as good as the two guys hitting right next to him, and it makes it nice there for us.”
On Drew Beam’s Outing:
“I think, to me, he’s usually – we beat up the dead horse of ‘Steady Eddy’ or ‘consistency,’ ‘reliability,’ – all those good words. Those are good things, but he threw a few pitches tonight and I’m wondering, he’ll look at the video, I wonder if I’ll pull them myself and pick out the four or five that were really impressive, that were pretty dynamic. And his last bullpen was in here, and we’ll use the technology as we see fit. I don’t know who invented it, but the pitching lab, and then Snead threw well the other night, the Frank Anderson lab was thrown out, but this is just an indoor area with a nice dirt mound that we bought. Our guys never throw on anything that is not dirt. And he was working on – I don’t interfere – he was working on sharpening up some off-speed things, and you saw those in moments. So maybe consistency will get added, and it’ll be even more dynamic a time or two out.”
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On Billy Amick thinking less at the plate:
“I think he’s older and always has success at the plate. You want the guys to work hard but you also want them to know what they need and what they don’t need. Whether it be on defense or offense – also in the weight room. He’s got a pretty good understanding of who he is and what he needs to do. He’s a good listener when you offer him information but he’s not looking to add eyewash or anything like that. The fact that he lives his day-to-day life and also works his day-to-day to prepare for games, kind of with that same mantra. It’s like Drew Beam. Consistently the same attitude, same mentality, same personality and same mood every day. To be consistent you’ve got to be consistent, and it sounds dumb to say, but it really is an equation that works. I think for Billy, what he is doing in hen game is also what he is doing day-to-day. It’s nice that he is letting that mindset work for him and maybe he can talk to a couple of other guys to think less and play more.”
On Hunter Ensley working out of his slump:
“Yeah, it’s about sample size. You got the regular stats that you guys [media] look at and then we got a lot of other subsets of that. I printed off a subset _ I’ll keep to myself what it was – but I printed it off today and then I started to look at it but the sample size was not nig enough. I threw it away in my trashcan. Sample size isn’t big enough to start getting too critical. I met with one of our guys upstairs today – we may not make the right decision but it’s not going to be because we didn’t put the time into it. It is important to us. It is not important for us to start breaking down these stats too much for guys. There are some glaring things they need to pay attention to but we are still not to the point to where you can fully judge where a guy is at right now.”
On success feeding more success at the plate:
“It kind of starts to feed one another. We want guys to have productive at-bats, so if a guy gets hit by a pitch – even though he doesn’t do anything – and then moves up on a ball in the dirt, now suddenly, the guy at the plate can move the runner. He can drive him in and there is more opportunities to look good to the fans or have quality at-bats to make the coaches happy or him happy to feel good as a player. When your teammates do their job, it makes it easier on you to do your thing. When you do your thing, you make it easier on your teammates. It kind of feeds itself and I do feel like we have that lineup. One of my favorite things said about our team was that in 2020, you could flip our lineup upside down and it would kind of be the same thing. Hunter Ensley has let off in about an important game you can play against amateur competition. He also has hit ninth. That’s just one example. Cannon Peebles has moved all over the place. I think it’s a lineup that has good depth. We have guys ready to go off the bench. If everyone just keeps doing their part, it will make it easier, and everything will just kind of feed itself.”
On if there’s a plan for a starting pitcher for Sunday:
“No and I don’t know if we will even come to that conclusion in the next couple of hours. We want to use a lot of guys. We have been cut short four innings for guys on the mound. Trust me, the goal is to win the game. We kind of had the conversation out there – it’s kind of fun to win a series on a Sunday because you can kind of act a fool. Back in the locker room. It’s over and you accomplished the mission. The mission is to win the series each weekend, but when you win it on a Saturday, day two, there’s something right around the bend. There’s a team that’s dying to get out of here with a win and call it an SEC win too for Bowling Green. We need to be just as hungry as they are tomorrow. Having said that, we do have to see the whole season as a big picture. [Aaron] Combs just needed to throw tonight. It had been too long and maybe I mismanaged that. And we need to get some other guys out there. Whoever throws the first inning, there’s a relatively decent chance it’s a different guy the second inning.”
