Debut at The Hawk

Commodores looking to improve during start of long homestand

by Chad Bishop

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The defending national champions are back home.

Vanderbilt opens the home portion of its schedule at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday looking to bounce back from dropping 2 of 3 at the MLB4 Collegiate Baseball Tournament in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Dores (1-2) are also trying to find themselves in the infancy of the 2020 campaign with a young and relatively inexperienced squad.

“I think they’re still feeling themselves out,” Vanderbilt head coach Tim Corbin told the Vanderbilt Sports Network on Sunday. “I don’t think they know who they are yet, which for good reason. That’s going to take some time.

“Offensively and on the field we just have a lot of new kids. They’re not going to be what you want them to be right away – nor would they want themselves to be.”

Vanderbilt started three freshmen over the weekend and a fourth, Parker Noland, played in all three contests. Four freshmen pitchers also made their debuts on the mound.

They were all part of a highly-competitive three-game series that included a 4-3 loss to Michigan, a 6-1 win over UConn and a 9-8 loss to Cal Poly (the latter game saw Vandy score six unanswered runs before falling in walk-off fashion).

“Good baseball games,” Vanderbilt senior second baseman Harrison Ray said. “We got to see a lot out of ourselves and we definitely got tested. We fought both of the (losses) and we fought to the end. So can’t really criticize the effort or criticize the fight that we had.

“At the end of the day we just got to play better.”

Junior Mason Hickman and sophomore Kumar Rocker were as sharp as expected in their 2020 debuts. The two starters combined to throw 11 innings, strike out 12 hitters and allow just five hits combined and no earned runs.

On the back end, Sam Hliboki, Nick Maldonado, Ethan Smith and Luke Murphy all threw innings of scoreless ball, but veteran Tyler Brown and freshman Chris McElvain weren’t as fortunate. Junior starter Jake Eder lasted 3 1/3 innings Sunday and was charged with two earned runs.

Vandy hit just .240 as a team in the opening three games of the season and left 31 runners on base. And the Commodores know they’ll have to be creative, especially early in the season, to reproduce the same sort of record-setting numbers from the 2019 team.

Bunting was a key facet of Vanderbilt’s offensive attack to start the season.

“Right now it matters just from a standpoint of instigating and creating offense a little bit and just moving runners,” Corbin said of the bunt. “When you move runners with the bunt game and you’re very active on balls in the dirt and stealing bases, then what it does is it opens up the bat.

“You start feeling good about yourself. It’s almost like a way of building self-esteem of an offensive player. We just knew coming in that that was going to have be part of what we were going do. Whether we end up doing that the rest of the year, I don’t know, but we’ll do what we have to do to score runs because they can’t act as independent contractors. That’s not the way our offense is going to run. It’s going to have run when they’re working with one another and they’re connected with each other.”

Defensively, the Commodores were also uncharacteristically inconsistent to start the season. Five different players combined to make nine errors in the first three games of the season.

“Just more reps, more repetitions – everything needs to be cleaned up in my opinion,” Vanderbilt junior third baseman Austin Martin said. “I’m disappointed in (Sunday’s) result, but I’m not disappointed in this team at all. I think these guys have a lot of fight, a lot of heart. We’ll be back and we’ll be better.”

Vanderbilt turns its attention to South Alabama this week before welcoming Illinois-Chicago in for a three-game series over the weekend. Another freshman, Jack Leiter, is penciled in start Tuesday’s affair.

The Jaguars of South Alabama took 2 of 3 from Campbell over the weekend, won 30 games in 2019 and are the favorite to win the Sun Belt Conference’s East Division.

That presents a tough challenge for the Commodores to get back in the win column, but Corbin is more focused on his team’s own improvement at this early stage of the season.

“Hopefully you can look back in May and say, ‘OK, these guys have gotten a lot better.’ Because really that’s the goal,” Corbin said. “What we do in the intermediate, I don’t know? We want to win, but we just got to get better. If we get better I feel like things will take care of themselves.”

Chad Bishop covers Vanderbilt for VUCommodores.com. Follow him @MrChadBishop.

 


Opening Day at The Hawk by Vanderbilt Athletics on Exposure