May 22, 2007
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| Commadores??? |
With Regular Season in Books, Commodores Set Sights on Postseason Glory
Preview by Will Matthews
HOOVER, Ala. – If indeed Vanderbilt enters the Southeastern Conference Tournament this week as the prohibitive favorite, you would never know it based on the décor of Regions Park.
Despite its status as the reigning regular season SEC champion, the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed and its perch atop all of the nation’s major collegiate baseball polls, the Vanderbilt team arrived for its pre-tournament practice Tuesday afternoon to discover its name painted on a stadium façade down the left field line.
There was one problem, however: Commodores was spelled `Commadores.’
“Yeah, they kind of Rodney Dangerfield us on that,” said Vanderbilt Head Coach Tim Corbin. “Hopefully someone can get up there and fix it. Actually I’ll do it [Wednesday] with some spray paint. I’ll take care of it.”
Clearly, Corbin and his Commodores are not taking it personally. And in fact, choosing not to perceive the misspelling as a slight is somewhat emblematic of the muted tone Vanderbilt attempted to strike on the eve of their first game of the tournament Wednesday against rival Tennessee.
“We’re just glad to be here because this is such a tough tournament to get to,” Corbin said. “You want to be one of those eight teams at the end of the year. It just so happens that we finished first but that doesn’t really mean anything. We are just glad to be here.”
Though Vanderbilt enters the postseason on the heels of the most successful regular season in the program’s history – a campaign that included a school record 46 wins, the school’s first ever regular season title and victories in a remarkable 12 of 13 SEC series – the Commodores are not content to rest on their laurels and are trying hard to approach this week as if all of their regular season accomplishments are inconsequential.
“Just because we won the SEC outright doesn’t mean that our goals are accomplished,” said sophomore third baseman Pedro Alvarez, who was named Tuesday to the All-SEC first team. “That is just the beginning of the bigger picture. Our season starts now, basically and we have got to take it one step at a time. This is our first step right now. We just have to take it day by day.”
But no matter how hard Vanderbilt tries to downplay itself, there is little question that the Commodores are the team to beat this week and the club everyone else is gunning for.
But to hear Corbin tell it, it is a role his team – at or near the top of the national rankings since February – has become accustomed to.
“Is there a target on our backs any more than the last 12 weeks?” Corbin said. “I don’t think so. I mean we have just been wearing it. I don’t think anything changes right now. All year we have gone to opponents’ ballparks and we’d see in the morning paper that the comments are all No. 1 team, No. 1 team, No. 1 team. That is just something you wear. There is nothing you can do about it. We just have to take care of business and play.”
Vanderbilt’s first order of business will be Tennessee, a team two years removed from a College World Series appearance but which largely underachieved much of this year.
But after being swept by Vanderbilt in Nashville last month, the Vols have gotten hot at the right time, winning three of their last four SEC series including taking two of three games at Florida last weekend to secure their spot in the SEC Tournament.
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An opening round win over top-ranked Vanderbilt would go great lengths toward burnishing their NCAA Tournament resume.
“They are a good team and like any SEC team you can go into slumps and you can be in streaks,” Alvarez said. “That is what is unique about this conference. You can be in last place and still be a threat. It is just going to be another match-up like all three games of our series earlier in the year. It is going to be a hard-fought game.”
Vanderbilt will be forced to contend with Tennessee ace James Adkins, who enters the contest with a 6-7 record and a 3.12 earned run average. The Commodores, in a move aimed at keeping All-American lefthander David Price on a regular schedule and on pace to pitch the first game of a likely NCAA regional, will counter with sophomore Brett Jacobson who bounced between the bullpen and the starting rotation while compiling a 5-1 record and a 3.12 ERA.
“It is going to be a big challenge for Jacobson,” Corbin said. “Adkins is very good as we all know. He is one of the top left-handers in the country. We are going to have to be up to that task and the kids will be. And Jacobson probably looks as this like `Okay, everyone was expecting Price and now they get me.’ I think it is a challenge for him.”
As the No. 1-ranked team in the nation, Vanderbilt enters the SEC Tournament with very little at stake in terms of its national standing, a luxury that Corbin said he hopes allows his team to play with some measure of looseness.
But while the ultra-competitive Corbin has his team motivated to try and capture a tournament in which Vanderbilt has suffered championship game losses in each of its last two appearances, he also has not kept himself from peeking ahead to the team’s primary goal from the season’s opening day: a berth in the College World Series.
“We’ve said it all the time to where it really has become a team slogan,” Corbin said. “You get good at tournaments by winning them and that is what we are trying to do here.”
Will Matthews spent three years as an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group in Southern California. He earned his Master of Divinity degree in 2007 from Vanderbilt Divinity School. To email Will your feedback, Click Here