Everything Tony Vitello said following Friday's game at Alabama to begin SEC play
Tennessee baseball coach Tony Vitello spoke briefly following his team’s Southeastern Conference opening 11-3 win over Alabama on the road Friday night.
Below is a written transcript from the Tony Vitello media availability.
On AJ Causey’s performance…
“Yeah, he was tremendous. Part of what happened there was he was throwing strikes [ on home runs in the first inning] to a good team. I don’t know if it was the cost of doing business or something that can happen at some point, but he really fielded his position well tonight. I thought he had good presence. He reacted to a little bit of adversity well. Overall, he seemed like he was getting better as the game was getting going. I don’t know that we had to take him out of that situation, but this early in the conference season, you’d like to be a little bit sure or careful with the pitch count.”
On the offensive performance tonight…
“Obviously, you get some highlights on both sides with both teams hitting some impressive homers but some of the best at-bats we had were the ones where there wasn’t a Sportscenter type play or action that took place. It was forcing the starter (Ben) Hess to throw a lot of pitches early in the game or battling with two strikes or Burke just fists one into left field in a difficult situation. To me, a little bit of extra toughness out of some of those at-bats went a long way tonight.”
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On Dylan Dreiling’s start to the season…
“The good thing about Dylan is he’s incredibly selfless and we’ve kind of moved him into a bunch of different spots in the lineup, wherever we feel he’s best suited that particular day. But to be honest with you, dating back to his high school days, he’s best suited just to be in the lineup. He’s a natural hitter. He’s turned himself into a really physical kid with adding a lot of strength working with Coach Q (Quentin Eberhardt) and kind of seems to be a guy that’s very stoic all the time but internally seems to be better when moments are a little bigger or maybe there’s more intensity. I don’t know if you’d call it clutch or what. I know he really enjoys being in there when the game’s on the line in the batter’s box.”
On the bullpen work of Andrew Behnke and Aaron Combs…
“They did what they needed to do. Basically hold down, again, a pretty physical and talented offense that has a lot of experience. To not let a fire get started was huge because you don’t want to have to end up using three or four guys and you certainly don’t want to give a team momentum going into the next day. I don’t know if that necessarily exists but both guys did what they needed to do for us and got back into SEC play.”
