HOOVER, Ala. — Who says the baseball gods don't answer prayers?
After avoiding one another for a full regular-season slate and 16 games of the SEC baseball tournament, the conference's two definitive powers — No. 1 Vanderbilt and No. 6 LSU — will finally meet in Sunday's championship.
To reach that hallowed destination, LSU stifled Arkansas 3-1 in Saturday's first semifinal and Vandy pounded Mississippi State in the latter one, 16-8.
"It's a tale of two different days," said Vanderbilt head coach Tim Corbin, citing the disparate means of collecting a 3-0 win over Texas A&M on Friday, and then rolling for 16 runs and 19 hits against Mississippi State (43-17). "But that's what makes this tournament so unique."
For the nightcap, Vandy (51-8) exploded for seven runs in the second inning, a sequence that innocently began with an MSU error, one hits batsman and a Zander Wiel RBI single.
Wiel didn't start the game, but replaced Tyler Beede in the 6-hole before Beede (Friday's winning pitcher) even logged an at-bat.
After that, the Commodores notched a double (Vince Conde), a walk, another hits batsman, two sacrifice-fly RBI (Tony Kemp, Xavier Turner) and three straight singles (Mike Yastrzemski, Connor Harrell, Conrad Gregor) before Wiel ended things, mercifully, with a strikeout.
Three innings later, Vandy hung a 5-spot on Mississippi State's relief corps without an extra-base hit. Instead, the production derived from five singles, one steal, one sacrifice-bunt RBI (Kemp again) and one more hits batsman — an RBI for Yastrzemski, the grandson to MLB Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski.
"It was a long day, but it was a long day because of our offense," said Corbin, noting the Commodores' good rhythm and aggressiveness at the plate and along the base paths. Charting the game, Vandy tagged up on every mid-range or deep fly ball against MSU.
As for the buildup to Sunday, the freshman Wiel had trouble containing his excitement for a showdown that will determine conference supremacy ... but perhaps nothing after that — since both Vandy and LSU are relative shoo-ins to host two of the 16 NCAA regionals next weekend.
"It's SEC baseball. It's the two best teams in the conference, who might also be the best teams in the country right now," said Wiel (one run, three hits, three RBI). "It's what the people want, and it's going to be a good matchup."
The story of how the Commodores and Tigers notched 50-plus wins and achieved elite rankings runs eerily similar.
**Both programs suffered an early loss (Vandy to Long Beach State, LSU to BYU) but recovered quickly enough to proffer 18-2 starts after 20 games.
**Both teams cleared 30 wins at home.
**Both clubs won their respective divisions by four games or more.
**And both programs had already been in win-or-go-home mode, after incurring losses in the SEC prelims earlier in the week. Arkansas and Mississippi State actually had a day's rest (Friday) to reset pitching alignments.
Not that it mattered on Saturday.
"For whatever reason, (Vandy) has our number," conceded Mississippi State head coach John Cohen, who also believes his No. 10 Bulldogs are primed to host a regional next week.
A pre-College World Series collision of 50-win teams is a rare occurrence, a true "gut check" game, says Yastrzemski.
"It's something that doesn't happen every year," says Yastrzemski (one hit, one RBI, two hits). "We just want to play the best teams and test ourselves even more."
