Tennessee baseball earned its 10th straight home regional win Friday night, knocking off Miami (Ohio) 9-2 in a drama free win at Lindsey Nelson Stadium.
The Vols’ win sets the stage for a matchup against three-seed Cincinnati, who defeated Wake Forest 11-6 in Friday’s opener.
Right-handed pitcher Marcus Phillips is getting the ball for Tennessee after serving as a weekend starter his entire junior season. Phillips has posted a 3-4 record, 3.74 ERA and 1.27 WHIP entering the first NCAA Tournament start of his career.
The issue for Phillips has been managing the run game. SEC teams exploited Phillips’ slow delivery in the regular season with Kentucky stealing eight bases against him, Ole Miss stealing seven and two others stealing four.
Vitello wanted Phillips to be more persistent throwing over to first base while also varying his timing with runners on base. The junior has been much better with it his last two outings with neither Arkansas nor Alabama swiping a bag against him in a total of 8.1 innings pitched.
But that challenge gets much greater against Cincinnati. Arkansas and Alabama are two of the least aggressive teams on the base paths in the SEC. The Bearcats entered the weekend ranked 14th nationally in stolen bases this season.
Tennessee’s bullpen sits in a great spot behind Phillips. The Vols needed only seldom used relievers Austin Breedlove and Andrew Behnke against Miami (Ohio) and has top arms AJ Russell, Nate Snead and Brandon Arvidson fully ready to roll.
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Ace Liam Doyle helped preserve the Vols’ bullpen by tossing 6.2 innings against Miami (Ohio) Friday night. The Redhawks made him work early with the SEC Pitcher of the Year throwing 66 pitches to record his first nine outs and 38 pitches to record the next 11 outs.
“It was huge,” Vitello said. “It is about tonight, or at least was, but you do have a tournament, again, you’re in the middle of. For him to do that, not only—I’m sure he feels good about and it helped capitalize on the runs we were scoring in the middle of the game—but put us in a good position with our bullpen.”
Like Tennessee, Cincinnati has an easy decision to role with its second most used starter this season in the critical regional matchup.
“Yeah, Kellen O’Connor for sure tomorrow,” Cincinnati head coach Jordan Bischel said. ”You can put that one in stone, outside of a bus accident or something.”
O’Connor has started 11 games for the Bearcats this season, posting a 3-2 record, 4.61 ERA and 1.22 WHIP in 66.1 innings pitched. A 5-foot-10 lefty, O’Connor has done a little bit of everything for Cincinnati this season.
The Cal State Bakersfield transfer came out of the bullpen three times last week in the Big 12 Tournament allowing a total of two runs in four innings pitched. His best outing of the year came in a complete game against Texas Tech back in April.
Right-handed reliever Michael Conte (2.14 ERA in 21 innings pitched) threw 34 pitches on Friday while right-handed pitcher Adam Buczkowski (5.68 ERA in 31.2 innings) threw 12 pitches.
