For the first time since 2019, Tennessee’s baseball team is going home without advancing to an NCAA Super Regional.
The Vols, despite having the second seed, were the first team eliminated from the Chapel Hill Regional with Saturday’s 5-4 loss to VCU.
Failure to get hits with men on base largely doomed Tennessee (38-22), which had just one hit with runners in scoring position across the two games. So ended the first campaign for the Vols under Josh Elander, promoted from his assistant role to the head coaching gig after Tony Vitello left to manage the San Francisco Giants.
VCU (38-24), which advances to face the loser of the North Carolina-East Carolina game on Sunday, scored all five runs across a three-inning span and capitalized on several galling miscues by Tennessee. The decisive runs came home in the fifth inning, after Elander lifted Vols starter Tegan Kuhns and turned to the bullpen.
VCU won despite getting outhit 10-7, but the two Rams hurlers combined for 13 strikeouts and only issued a single walk. Tennessee batters fanned 31 times across the two NCAA games.
Tennessee started strong. Reese Chapman crushed a two-run home run in the third inning to open scoring. VCU answered in the bottom half, with Trent Adelman clouting a homer to deep left field that was estimated at 417 feet. The Rams nearly tied the game in the third, but a fantastic throw from Garrett Wright to Stone Lawless nailed Michael Petite sliding at the plate.
Kuhns had established himself as the ace of the rotation but he didn’t have his best here. He lasted four innings, allowing three runs on four hits, a walk, a balk, and a hit batter with six strikeouts. VCU had several hard-hit balls against him, including the Adelman homer. Kuhns put two runners in scoring position to open the fourth on a leadoff double, then hitting a batter, then committing a balk. That allowed one run to score on a groundout, and another to come home on a sacrifice fly. All of a sudden, VCU held the 3-2 lead.
Elander turned to Brady Frederick to work the fifth inning but he didn’t even make it out of the inning. Four of the six batters he faced reached and two of them scored on a double by Nate Kirkpatrick, giving VCU a 5-2 lead.
Tennessee kept scrapping. A solo homer by Lawless in the sixth cut the deficit down to two runs. Lawless lofted a sacrifice fly in the eighth, which also marked the only run of the regional for the Vols that did not score as the result of a home run.
The Vols stranded nine runners, including leaving the bases loaded in the second inning.
Tennessee had few answers for VCU starter Elias Holbert, who looked like the second coming of Nolan Ryan. He had 10 strikeouts, a career high, and allowed three runs on seven hits over six innings without issuing a walk. At one point, Holbert struck out four straight batters.
Zachary Peters, arguably the top relief pitcher in the Atlantic 10, worked the final three innings. Peters got into jams in both the seventh and eighth innings, but retired the side in order in the ninth to notch his seventh save of the season and eliminate Tennessee.