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Tennessee baseball shuffles opening weekend slate due to impending weather

On3 imageby:Eric Cain•about 22 hours•

_Cainer

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Icon Sportswire / Contributor PhotoG/Getty

With plenty of rain forecasted for the next two days, Games 2 and 3 of the Tennessee baseball and Hofstra opening-weekend series have been altered.

Saturday’s Game 2 will move up first pitch time by two hours from 4 o’clock PM to 2 o’clock PM eastern time. Sunday’s Game 3 will move up one hour from 12 o’clock PM to 11 o’clock AM eastern time. Friday’s Game 1 was played on schedule with the Vols handling the Pride 15-0 in seven run-rule innings.

Tennessee scored the most runs (15) in a program season-opener since plating 16 against Xavier back in 2010. Vols plated runs in each of their first four trips to the plate, leading 8-0 through four inning and tacked on seven more in the sixth. Tony Vitello’s club finished with 15 runs on 13 hits while the Pride struggled for no runs and just one hit in the ballgame. Stone Lawless doubled in two runs in the sixth inning to put Tennessee in position for the run-rule.

Liam Doyle (1-0) dazzled in his scoreless Tennessee debut, earning the win after tossing an efficient five innings while facing the minimum.

Hofstra finished the 2024 season with a 24-33 overall record and a 13-14 mark in Coastal Athletic Association play. Head coach Frank Catalanotto, who played in the majors for 14 years and for Team Italy in the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classic, doesn’t have much experience returning with just two everyday players and no weekend starters. In fact, there’s 23 newcomers on the roster, including 18 freshmen.

Hofstra was preseason picked to finish No. 9 in the league and will play 17 of its first 28 games of the season on the road.  

The Vols (60-13) finished the 2024 season with the first national championship in program history and became the first team from the Southeastern Conference to eclipse the 60-win marker in a single season. Tennessee went an impressive 10-2 in the NCAA Baseball Tournament and snapped the ‘curse’ of No. 1 overall seeds not winning the title, a streak that dated back to Miami in 1999.  

Tennessee’s 60 wins last year were the most of any team since Florida State in 2002 and the most of any national champion since Wichita State in 1989. It was the second straight trip to the College World Series in Omaha for Tennessee, the third in four years and the first time the Vols played for a national title since their first trip there in 1951. 

The Vols won everything they could in 2024 – winning the SEC’s regular-season championship, the SEC Tournament championship, Knoxville Regional and Knoxville Super Regional. The team lost back-to-back games on March 16 and 17, then never lost consecutive games again. They went 7-0 while facing elimination in the SEC Tournament and NCAA Tournament, including coming back from down 0-1 in the best-of-three College World Series championship series against Texas A&M. 

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