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Ryan McGee, ESPN senior writer
OMAHA, Neb. –And that’s why they play these games.
On paper, Tennessee should have had no trouble with Texas A&M in Game 1 of the Men’s College World Series.
The Volunteers are the No. 1 team in the country and have been since the beginning of May. Entering Saturday night’s contest, the Vols had posted a near-perfect 8-1 NCAA tournament record, this coming after their Big Orange floor victory over Hoover, Ala., in the SEC Tournament en route to the title. After blowing up their side of the MCWS bracket, they entered the best-of-three title fight with a healthy and ridiculously well-rested roster that features at least two players whose names will be called in the first round of the MLB Draft next month. Las Vegas oddsmakers had rightly installed UT as their favorite.
Meanwhile, Texas A&M was knocked out of the SEC tournament in two games, including a 7-4 loss to Tennessee, lost its surefire first-rounder for the rest of the playoffs due to a broken ankle, and lost its pitcher No. 2 because of an arm. injury the next day, had his primary home run hitter tweak a base-running hamstring and saw his catcher/spiritual leader and designated hitter carry more blocks of ice than a colony of penguins. Every time the Aggies walk through the lobby of their hotel adjacent to Charles Schwab Field, they look like a TV commercial for an EMT supply store. During Friday’s prefinal press conference, Texas A&M coach Jim Schlossnagle kept apologizing for it all, saying over and over, “Man, I really wish we let’s be 100 percent sorry.”
So, naturally, it was A&M that handed the Volunteers a 9-5 upset loss to Texas on Saturday night. As a result, it’s the Aggies who are one victory away from a first MCWS title and the Vols who are licking their wounds. Mental injuries.
“You learn different ways to react,” Tennessee coach Tony Vitello said after his first game of the MCWS finals. “You can either get frustrated that tonight went the way it did, or you can get more determined…and where determination shows, the game speeds up.”
Moments later, in the hallway, he added: “And if you don’t come out of a night like this more determined, then you don’t worry. You’ll get kicked out again.”
Because it’s not a Strat-O-Matic. The Men’s College World Series isn’t played on paper or even in a sports book. This is real life. With real-life lessons. Now we find out who learns what and how they use it in a Sunday afternoon Game 2 that will either bless the Aggies or set up a decisive Game 3 Monday night.
“We’ll get on the bus and I’ll congratulate them on the win,” Schlossnagle said of his plans on how to manage his team after the win puts the Aggies in control of the MCWS — easily explained but psychologically difficult “it’s just another game” mentality before the biggest game of their lives. “They know it’s just one game. We all know what’s at stake. There’s no Lombardi talk. We’re just trying to keep the game as loose as possible. We’ll be hitting the cages and Let’s get our ground balls tomorrow and play. I know it sounds coachable, but if you start thinking about things other than that, Tennessee is going to blow you.”
For Vitello, the relatively good news on a bad night was that his team overcame the seemingly invincible slump of a 7-1 third-inning deficit and a 7-2 score that continued until seventh, somewhat calmed by a more characteristic return. — back-to-back home runs that cut the lead to four and finally began pushing A&M through a bullpen it had been able to ignore for a week. Then another string of hits helped tie the game in the bottom of the ninth. More importantly, a bench that in years past has struggled to keep its composure on the big stages continued its upward trend in 2023-24 of not letting adversity become a unnecessary emotional issue at decidedly awkward times.
Saturday night, the water came close to boiling point several times, but the Vols found the button to turn down the heat.
“I think you’re just playing baseball,” Vitello said of his message when he saw his team — and himself — start moving their emotional tachometers into the red. “You make sure you don’t put too much emphasis on crowd size and things like that. You lose sight of the fundamentals. The important things that happen in a game, like communicating, focusing on a task It’s true, whatever you talk about in life, simple is better.”
For Schlossnagle, there are the good vibes of the hot start, the big initial lead and, of course, the victory itself. But there’s also his team’s ability to keep its cool when Tennessee threatened to rally and — even in the midst of that mess — still managed to use just four pitchers on the night and none during plus the four rounds worked by ace Ryan Prager. The last of those pitchers, reliever Evan Aschenbeck, dug himself out of that ninth-inning hole, retiring the final two batters with runners on the corners, the last of A&M’s 17 staff Ks – the most recorded in a nine from MCWS. final inning contest – against America’s deadliest college baseball offense.
“We held maybe the best lineup in the country over five races with the wind blowing and in the middle of such a great setting,” the coach said of the Aggies’ effort in front of a standing-room-only crowd of 26,498.
As he began his outing that night, to make that low-key ride on the bus, one win away from Texas A&M’s first MCWS title, he added, still in possession of the final stat sheet with this limited outing from Tennessee: “Dude, if I can get anything out of this, I gotta get another job!”
“We all do this to be in this position,” Aschenbeck said. “All you want is a chance to do something special. But minding your own business one night doesn’t guarantee you’ll do it again the next.”
Again, this is why they play these games. Are there still one or two of these games left before this national title is determined? If we learned nothing else Saturday night, it’s that there’s no point in assuming we know what’s going to happen until the games are actually played.