NCAA regional defeat underscores a harsh reality for Vanderbilt baseball | Estes
This wasn’t worth the wait.
Goes for this entire Vanderbilt baseball season, promising as it once was, right down to its belated finality. For nearly four hours Sunday afternoon, the Commodores endured a lightning delay – can’t call it a rain delay, because it barely rained – at Hawkins Field with three outs standing between them and elimination from the NCAA Tournament.
Eventually: Fly out. Strike out. Ground out. Ballgame.
Elimination by one run to a relative lightweight – two relative lightweights, actually, counting an 8-7 loss to Oregon on Saturday night – as the No. 6 national seed qualifies as a major disappointment. After winning the SEC Tournament the week before, the Commodores (42-20) showed up meagerly for their own regional.
In the two losses, Vanderbilt combined to hit 2-for-15 with runners in scoring position and 3-for-21 with two outs. Against Oregon, the Commodores had two hits after the second inning. Against Xavier on Sunday, they only had four hits total – and the lone knock after the third inning was an infield hit.
The Musketeers, with only six hits themselves, scored the game-winning run in the seventh inning courtesy of Vanderbilt freshman second baseman R.J. Austin booting a potential double-play ball with one out. That loaded the bases, meaning that when pitcher Patrick Reilly threw inside and grazed a batter, the go-ahead run scored.
And that was all it took.
“That was a tough one,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said, “on a lot of levels.”
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In baseball, the NCAA Tournament is a stern test that'll expose any team’s weaknesses, sooner or later. And if we’re real about Vanderbilt’s season, there were weaknesses bound to be exposed.
Vanderbilt punched above its weight all season. Too often during games, it felt as though the Commodores were fighting an uphill battle, but they kept doing it so tenaciously that it became easy to overlook the limitations and focus on the possibilities.
From a distance, the Commodores looked beautiful as ever – worthy of that national seed. Up close, though, there were warts. The hitting numbers weren’t great, ranking in the bottom half of the SEC. In the league, only Kentucky hit fewer home runs than Vanderbilt.
Meanwhile, the Commodores’ pitching – at one point quite formidable – weakened once starters Carter Holton and Hunter Owen were lost to injuries.
“Our health was challenged all year,” Corbin said, “but I'm not going to sit here and talk like that. We did the best we possibly could. And we had a good year. It was a good year. But you get to this point right here, and you're hosting at home, the kids and all of us, our intentions are to (advance).”
As Corbin said, this was a good team. It’s just that entering this NCAA Tournament if someone were to ask why Vanderbilt was a good team, there wasn’t an obvious answer as with other top SEC teams. Sure wasn’t Vanderbilt's hitting. Wasn’t the pitching, either.
The best answer, honestly, would have been Corbin.
This team wore the trademarks of a well-coached club. It did all the little things well. It fielded well. It ran the bases well. It was mature and poised. It was tough, mentally and physically. It often produced when it mattered most, and it often bounced back from adversity. It proved genuinely better than the sum of its parts.
All things considered, this season should rank among Corbin’s best work.
But when you think about it, that underscores a problem and a harsh reality:
Vanderbilt is no longer that program capable of overwhelming any foe with waves of elite, big-league-type talent.
The Commodores haven’t nose-dived in that department, but a subtle downward trend is clear when looking at SEC rivals like LSU or Florida or Arkansas or maybe even South Carolina or Tennessee. No one could say the Commodores enjoy the same gap in talent as, say, just four years ago.
All types of reasons for that, starting with the transfer portal and NIL. But don’t go too far fretting over those modern complexities. Vanderbilt has held its own in spite of Corbin’s reluctance to venture into the portal. He still had a solid roster in 2023. It was good enough to get hot in Hoover and win a trophy and arrive at the NCAA Tournament knowing it wouldn’t have to leave Hawkins Field to return to Omaha.
It just didn’t have superstars. No Kumar Rocker or JJ Bleday or Austin Martin or Jack Leiter was coming to save this team when it had to have something special.
In June, special is usually what it takes, and even that isn’t always enough.
Vanderbilt has had far better teams endure far worse disappointments this time of year. The 2023 Vandy Boys could fool you at times, but this was never one of those all-time Corbin juggernauts. They were the ones who did better than they probably should've when facing the best teams.
They overachieved. They got the most of what they had. They can be proud of that.
But after exiting the NCAA Tournament's opening weekend for a second year in a row, a proud, powerful program also shouldn’t be in denial about the direction. It’ll take more and better players to get Vanderbilt baseball back where it expects to be.
Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Vanderbilt baseball no longer has the talent to run college baseball
