I Thought I Knew
What I thought I knew about Tennessee baseball coming into the season was wrong.
Welcome to the Tennessee Volunteers section here at SRM. This is a section of the newsletter where I write about the Tennessee Volunteers. I do hope that you enjoy it and add your email below so you never miss an issue. This newsletter is delivered to your inbox, not your doorstep, daily. Happy reading.
I also host a very popular daily national sports podcast called ‘The Chase Thomas Podcast’ that you should very much subscribe to here.
Listen via Apple l Spotify l Google l Stitcher l Download l RSS l YouTube
There is comfort in knowing. I know this because I struggle with the unknown. More accurately, I struggle with the unknown that I was certain was known.
For instance, I stumbled into this conundrum often in graduate school here at the University of Tennessee. If I went into an assignment already knowing it was going to be arduous, that stressed me out significantly less than miscalculating a different assignment that I thought was going to be a breeze only to find that was very much not the case. Instead, it was actually going to be a problem, and suddenly, my whole day flipped. My anxiety rose. (Granted, I always got it all done and I graduated with my master’s degree in December, but, boy, let me tell you those Sundays when I realized I miscalculated what I thought was a known only for it to be very much an unknown were tough.)
That’s how I view the 2023 Tennessee baseball team.
This season has been a struggle. It has been that way since that opening weekend in Arizona when the Vols dropped their first two games against Arizona and Grand Canyon. It is still that way following Florida taking two of three over the Vols in Knoxville over the weekend. Everything has been a struggle. Before the season, though, I thought this season would be a struggle. What I and every Tennessee fan have found, though, is that this is a totally different kind of struggle than any of us anticipated.
The Vols are not a bad baseball team. In fact, they have consistently been one of the 25 best teams in the country all season long. The Vols swept Texas A&M after getting swept by Mizzou. They lost the first two games against two of the three best teams in all of college baseball in LSU and Florida, but they bounced back in the final game in each series scoring a combined 28 runs in those two games alone. There is a lot of baseball still to be played. The season is not over by any means.
It is just not playing out the way that I had anticipated. Coming into the 2023 season, I thought Tennessee boasted the best starting rotation in college baseball with Drew Beam, Chase Dollander and Chase Burns. I never thought I would write in mid-April the only reliable arm of that trio of aces was Beam. But here were are. Fried of the pod, Ryan Schumpert of Rocky Top Insider, tweeted it out perfectly, “Chase Dollander has given up six more earned runs in four SEC starts than he did all of last year. Chase Burns has given up five more earned runs than he did last year. The duo performing like All-SEC pitchers is the best way for UT to reach its potential.”
With Tennessee having to replace everyone in their lineup from a season ago, you anticipated issues with the offense. You thought Tennessee would have to win a whole lot of games 2-1 or 1-0 to compete anywhere close to the way they did a season ago. Instead, Tennessee hasn’t been able to rely on The Chases all season long. Instead, it’s been the bullpen and Beam that have kept this team afloat. Jared Dickey, the team’s most reliable hitter, is still not hitting in the leadoff spot. I’m holding my breath whenever Dolly and Burns are on the mound for Tennessee. I’m stressed out early in Tennessee baseball games. I’m hoping Tony Vitello goes to the bullpen sooner rather than later.
I just didn’t see that coming.
There is comfort in just knowing how things’ll go for your sports teams. For instance, as frustrating as the 2022-23 Tennessee basketball season was at times, can you really say you were surprised at all? That the team being defense-first and offensively limited caught you off-guard at all? The Vols were one of the best defensive teams, if not the best, from the beginning of the season until the end. You knew who they were. You expected it coming into the season. You just wondered if that certainty would be what kept the Vols from reaching their first Final Four in program history.
(It did.)
There was comfort for Vol fans coming into the 2023 baseball season that, hey, there is no chance the offense would be what it was a season ago, but we know we have a trio of aces that’ll keep carrying us as the young guys like Dylan Dreiling and Kavares Tears figure things out offensively over the course of the season.
That hasn’t been the case, so I’ve been anxious. I suspect if you’re a Tennessee fan, you’ve been anxious, too. This Tennessee team is not what we thought they were coming into the season. That’ll continue to be the case the rest of the way. Buckle up.