Tony Vitello breaks down approach against Paul Skenes, LSU

LSU and Tennessee are set to meet in the night game at the College World Series on Saturday. It’ll be the fourth meeting between the two programs after they played a three-game series in Baton Rouge, La., at the end of March.

That means the Volunteers know full well what they’re up against: LSU ace Paul Skenes.

“We finished that weekend off very well on Sunday, but if you date back to Friday or Game 1 of that deal, Skenes was better than us,” Tennessee coach Tony Vitello saiid. “And I think there’s probably some info in there that we can pull out, and the guys can take some confidence in maybe we’ve seen him once before.”

In that first meeting, LSU’s Paul Skenes went seven full innings and allowed just one run on five hits. He struck out 12 batters while walking just one. That was no accident, of course. Skenes is one of the best pitchers in the country.

So if the Volunteers want to avoid playing out of the loser’s bracket in Omaha, they’ll have to find a way to tame the Tigers flamethrower.

“He is probably a different pitcher now than he was then,” Vitello said. “It’s probably a different LSU team in some areas. I mean, they still have Mr. (Dylan) Crews and all that. We’re a different team too.

“You want to have some preparation going into the deal and see what will be similar from that weekend and maybe try and get a head start on what could be different, but I also feel like this is a place where you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Vitello explained what it will take for his squad to attack LSU’s Paul Skenes at the College World Series. It’s not necessarily aggression.

“You have to just keep playing, and I’ve been fortunate enough to coach some pitchers, and some of them have also been pitchers we’ve faced where you can see the other dugout kind of deflate,” Vitello said. “The series was not our best effort, but the kids did keep kind of pushing forward in that series, and it was early, but it was one of the first signs of, OK, we got a little bit of the fight that we want in our program.”

The Tennessee skipper knows the opener at the College World Series isn’t going to be easy. His players just need to have patience in their approach at the plate and understand that LSU and Paul Skenes are really good.

They can’t become frustrated if the hits aren’t there early on.

But the Volunteers have shown that kind of resilience and toughness in reaching the College World Series in the first place.

“Just like our last weekend, lightning, pitching changes, expect chaos and embrace it during the postseason,” Vitello said. “This group has done that very, very well. Maybe it’s those struggles that we had early on that built us for that.”