IBTIT: Tennessee Vols vs. South Carolina Gamecocks Baseball Series Preview (May 16, 17, 18)

Could it be another championship weekend on Rocky Top?

Recently: Tennessee won their eighth series in a row last weekend in Nashville, taking two of three from Vandy (8-4, 7-6, 0-3). The Vols also run-ruled Belmont 10-0 on Senior Night Tuesday.

Meanwhile South Carolina was swept by UGA (10-14, 5-11, 6-14) last weekend. It’s been and up-and-down year for the Cocks: after losing three of their first four SEC series, USC won three of their next four before running into the Bulldogs last weekend.

Recently on Vols vs. Gamecocks: Tennessee trails the all-time series 45-67, and has spent a good chunk of this century being dominated by the Cocks. From 2007-2018, Tennessee won just a single series and a handful of games against Carolina. But since 2018, the Vols haven’t lost a series against USC and hold a 9-3 record over that span.

Preview:

If I could implement a rule in college baseball, it would be to make coaches declare intended starters going into a series. “TBA” must have the record for career starts, despite the fact that there’s no real edge to be gained by not declaring starters. The opposing coaches have every throw made by every one of your pitchers on film already, they have pages of scouting reports already—especially since you can just purchase that kind of data from analytics services nowadays. Not naming starters only hurts the fans who want to know a little bit about the upcoming series and don’t have access to all that scouting info ahead of time, and the humble blogger trying to bring that info to the people. /rant

We do know that Thursday’s starter will be 5th year SR RHP Ty Good, the current SEC leader in career strikeouts with 337 heading into game 1 of the series. He’s struck out at least seven batters in each of his last three games and 46 Ks in nine SEC games this season. At the plate, the Cocks’ biggest threats are JR C Funky Cole Messenia, who was named SEC Player of the Week earlier this month and leads the team in RBI (52), and SO 1B Ethan Petry, who leads Carolina in HR (19) and OPS (1.142).

While the human polls have Tennessee as a consensus no. 1, the RPI has not been as kind to the Vols. UT climbed from #8 to #6 in RPI after the series win against Vandy, but Tennessee is just barely favored to win this series according to the RPI projections at warrennolan.com:

At the same time, Kentucky hosts Vanderbilt and Arkansas goes to Texas A&M this weekend. UK currently holds a one-game lead over the Vols and Hogs for the SEC Championship, so with all SEC series this weekend being Thurs.-Sat., there will be a good deal of scoreboard watching the next three days.