Tennessee and Vanderbilt briefly became the best of baseball buddies Saturday afternoon.
After the No. 1 Volunteers completed a three-game sweep of No. 24 South Carolina with a 4-1 victory before a crowd of 5,759 inside Lindsey Nelson Stadium, they needed the Commodores to avoid a three-game sweep at No. 2 Kentucky in order to share the Southeastern Conference championship with the Wildcats.
Vanderbilt delivered several minutes later with a 12-4 triumph in Lexington, providing the Vols a second league title in three seasons.
"It's always a good feeling being at the top," Tennessee senior catcher Cal Stark said in a news conference. "We were all in there jumping around, cheering and hollering. That was our first goal, and we've got a couple more left that we'll keep striving towards."
The Vols finished the regular season 46-10 overall and 22-8 in conference play, and they will be seeded first at next week's SEC tournament by virtue of taking two of three games against Kentucky in Lexington on April 19-21. The SEC tournament starts Tuesday morning in Hoover, Alabama, but Tennessee is not scheduled to play until Wednesday afternoon at 5:30 Eastern.
Tennessee, incidentally, has become the first SEC school ever to win regular-season championships in basketball, baseball and softball in the same year.
"This is a very difficult thing to do, so congrats to any team in this league that finished with with a winning record, because that ain't easy," Tennessee coach Tony Vitello said. "For 24 hours, I'm going to let these guys be kids. When you finish in the top four, it's a little easier to manage the situation."
Arkansas, which finished with a 20-10 league record, will actually be the No. 2 seed in the league tournament after winning the SEC West, with the Wildcats (22-8) seeded third and Texas A&M (19-11) seeded fourth.
The Vols and Gamecocks (33-21, 13-17) were scoreless Saturday until the fourth inning, when a Kavares Tears double to right-center field scored Hunter Ensley for a 1-0 lead. That would be Tennessee's only extra-base hit of the contest.
Blake Burke, Billy Amick and Dylan Dreiling had RBI singles in the fifth inning to increase Tennessee's advantage to 4-0, which would be more than enough for Vols starting pitcher Zander Sechrist, who worked six full innings.
"He threw a lot of strikes," Stark said. "He threw every pitch for a strike and got ahead in counts early. He pitched to contact and used his defense well. The defense made plays behind him, and we kind of just rolled with that."
Sechrist allowed only four hits before turning things over to Nate Snead and Aaron Combs, who combined to pitch the final three innings.
"Just being able to attack and hit my spots better today was definitely why I was able to go long," Sechrist said. "That was the first time in my career — college or high school — that I've gotten three double plays. We call those defensive home runs, because those are momentum swingers."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.