March 30, 2007
South Carolina Weekend Preview
By Will Matthews
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NASHVILLE – There had to be a grain of truth in Vanderbilt Head Baseball Coach Tim Corbin’s mock expression of exasperation this week about the first leg of the Commodores’ Southeastern Conference schedule.
“I’m not sure what I did to deserve this,” Corbin joked after watching his team dispatch Middle Tennessee State 14-2 Wednesday night. “I must have done something to get the powers that be mad at me.”
All kidding aside, Vanderbilt’s relative cakewalk Wednesday against their mid-state rivals was surely seen as refreshing, sandwiched as it is between last weekend’s road series at No. 7 Arkansas and this weekend’s series at South Carolina, now No. 1 in the country after replacing the Commodores this week atop Baseball America’s national rankings.
Add to that the fact that Vanderbilt opened conference play two weekends ago by hosting No. 21 Mississippi, and it becomes clear why Corbin could be forgiven for having less than a sense of humor about his team’s first three series of conference play. Vanderbilt is being forced to navigate what is arguably the toughest early-season schedule in the SEC.
“I told the kids, `These first five weeks are going to be the stretch for you,'” Corbin said. “Because you have got three series on the road and I told the kids that they are going to be facing some very, very good competition. To play Mississippi up front, certainly to go to Arkansas and then to go down and see [South Carolina] right off the bat is certainly a test. But we just have to hold it together as best we can.”
Even after this weekend, the schedule doesn’t ease up much easier for Vanderbilt. They come home next weekend to host defending SEC Western Division champion Alabama and then travel to defending SEC Eastern Division champion Kentucky the following weekend.
“This schedule will make us play,” said Vanderbilt junior catcher Shea Robin. “We come out ready to play every single game, but there are times when we get in lulls just like any other team does. But we are being forced to come ready to play and it gives us a lot of confidence when we do succeed against these good teams.”
Success, however, has not come as easily as it did for Vanderbilt while the Commodores were barreling through their non-conference schedule, racking up 19 straight wins before playing a single conference game and seemingly firing on all cylinders.
Vanderbilt was pitching lights out, it was hitting in the clutch at a clip unseen to this point in Corbin’s tenure as head coach and the Commodores spent four consecutive weeks ranked No. 1 in the country by Collegiate Baseball Newspaper.
But in splitting their first six SEC games of the year, the Commodores have hit just .245 as a team and carry a 4.82 team ERA into this weekend’s games with South Carolina.
“The kids really need to keep their heads up because there can be negatives that come with playing this tough a schedule right away,” Corbin said. “You can start to think that you might not be going well and yet it is the other teams’ game that is putting you in that position. You have a tendency to get down.”
Corbin said Wednesday he has seen nothing in the past two weekends to change his belief that Vanderbilt is a team that will be reckoned with come June.
“I think we have got a good club,” Corbin said. “I don’t think I need anyone or any team to validate that we aren’t or we are. I think I’ve got a good feel about it. But we just have to get through the South Carolina series and take it one game at a time.”
Corbin says he recognizes within his team the intangible quality of resiliency that often is a hallmark of elite teams – a quality which Vanderbilt exhibited a number of times during its non-conference schedule but which was on full display during the Commodores’ opening SEC series against Mississippi.
The Commodores won game one of the series on the back of junior left-hander David Price who pitched a 10-inning, 14 strikeout masterpiece and got the win when Vanderbilt tied the game in the bottom of the ninth and won it with two outs in the 10th.
Vanderbilt won the rubber game of the series two days later by scoring twice in the bottom of the ninth.
“Ole Miss Friday and Sunday nights were huge for us,” Robin said. “Those games, we never felt like we were out of them. It doesn’t matter how many runs we’re down at the end of a game. That really got us going in the SEC. We came together as a team, we trusted each other to get the job done, playing small ball, doing anything.”
Yet for as tough as Vanderbilt’s recent competition has been, Corbin said Wednesday succumbing to that competition and accepting a loss from time to time should never be an option.
“I know people say that you have to learn lessons sometimes by losing and that may be true,” Corbin said. “But winning does a lot for a program that has not won before. So many people said `Tim don’t you think that a loss would help,’ and I said, `Do we need to go out there and lose?’ These kids want to win and they expect to win and for so long they didn’t expect to win here.”
To be able to win at the kind of pace Corbin expects, however, he said the club will have to hit better and on a more consistent basis.
“We really need to compete offensively and get better as an offensive team,” Corbin said. “That is the step right now that we need to take. It is an area that we need to get better in. We need more extra base hits and we have to start driving the ball against good pitchers and I feel like we are going to do that this weekend.”
Vanderbilt will surely not be intimidated by what promises to be an electric environment in Columbia this weekend. If nothing else, Corbin said playing some of the SEC’s elite teams on the road early in the conference season will acclimate his club to playing in front of the kinds of crowds Vanderbilt will encounter on the road throughout the rest of the year.
Arkansas drew crowds of as much as 10,000 last weekend in Fayetteville, and all three games this weekend against South Carolina will likely be near sellouts if not officially sold out as well.
“Our guys are looking forward to it now,” Corbin said. “They just think of it as a boxing match. They know they are going to get hit, but the deal is to just make sure you stay on your feet, keep throwing punches back and just don’t get knocked off your feet. That is what we try to do.”
Will Matthews spent three years as an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group in Southern California. He is currently in his third year at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
