KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - One year after Vanderbilt and LSU ran away from the field, there’s a much more wide open baseball race in the SEC this season.
Two weeks into conference play, five teams are tied for first place in the Eastern Division with 3-3 records in league competition. Auburn, Ole Miss and Mississippi State are atop the Western Division at 4-2.
That’s a major contrast from last year, when Vanderbilt had a 26-3 conference mark to set an SEC record for conference victories while LSU was 23-7 and won the Western Division by 4 ½ games.
Coaches say they’re not surprised by the scramble atop the standings. They believe last season represented the exception rather than the rule.
“I’ve always said that one year someone is going to win our league at 16-14 in a five way tiebreaker,” Mississippi State Coach John Cohen said. “There is tremendous parity in this league. It’s a battle every weekend.”
The SEC has averaged more than seven NCAA Tournament invitations per year since 1990, and it has sent 10 different schools to the College World Series during that stretch. Even during Vanderbilt’s record-setting season last year, it was Mississippi State - a team that went 16-14 in league play - that reached the College World Series championship series.
But the league may be deeper than usual this season now that Auburn and Tennessee have regained relevance with coaches who have College World Series experience.
Auburn hired Sunny Golloway away from Oklahoma to rejuvenate a program with one NCAA Tournament appearance (2010) in the past eight years. Golloway led Oklahoma to a College World Series in 2010 and NCAA super regional berths in 2012 and 2013. In its first season under Golloway, Auburn is 18-8 with 12 victories in its past 14 games.
Tennessee made a similar move two years earlier when it hired Dave Serrano, who reached the College World Series with UC Irvine (2007) and Cal State Fullerton (2009). In his third season at Tennessee, he has the Volunteers (19-4) tied for the Eastern Division lead with Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina and Vanderbilt.
That represents a major step forward for Tennessee, which has posted just one winning record over the past six seasons. The Vols haven’t reached the NCAA Tournament since getting to the 2005 College World Series with a team featuring current major leaguers Luke Hochevar,Chase Headley and J.P. Arencibia.
“I believe we’re at the level now that we should compete in the SEC,” Serrano said. “I wanted this to happen sooner, but it didn’t.
“That’s reality. We had to deal with that.”
Cohen said he believes those hires reflect the emphasis each SEC school places on baseball.
“The thing that makes this league hard is everyone cares,” Cohen said. “When I played baseball at Mississippi State [1987-1990] it’s fair to say that not everyone in the SEC really cared about the sport.Now every school, from the administration on down, wants to be good at baseball and puts resources into it. That makes things very competitive.”
The depth of this conference is evident from a look at the league statistics. Eleven of the SEC’s 14 teams have earned run averages below 3.00.
LSU Coach Paul Mainieri said the quality of pitching throughout the league became apparent to him last weekend as the Tigers won a series with Georgia, whose 3.96 ERA ranks last in the SEC.
“I don’t think we saw a pitcher throwing under 90 miles an hour the whole weekend. … If that’s the lowest-rated pitching staff in our league, that means everybody’s got a pretty good pitching staff,” Mainieri said. “When you have a good pitching staff, particularly in this era of college baseball when offense is way down, it’s going to be a formula for just having very even competition across the board.
“I’m not surprised at all to see everyone’s record hovering around .500 [in conference play] after two weekends. I’d be surprised if any one team separates themselves from the pack.”
WEDNESDAY’S GAMES Kentucky 9, Xavier 6 So. Carolina 4, Coastal Carolina 0 Arkansas 3, Miss. Valley State 0
TODAY’S GAME All times Central Missouri at Auburn, 6:30 p.m.
FRIDAY’S GAMES Missouri at Auburn, 6 p.m.
Texas A&M at Georgia, 6 p.m.
Tennessee at South Carolina, 6 p.m.
Arkansas at Mississippi St., 6:30 p.m. Kentucky at Vanderbilt, 6:30 p.m.
LSU at Florida, 6:30 p.m.
Mississippi at Alabama, 6:30 p.m.
Sports, Pages 24 on 03/27/2014