A different day, and a very different result.
After being held to five hits during Friday night's series opener at Kentucky, the Tennessee Volunteers racked up five runs on five hits in the first inning alone Saturday afternoon to quickly even the series with a 9-4 thumping before a Kentucky Proud Park record crowd of 7,304. Kentucky starting pitcher Dominic Niman faced six Tennessee batters and never recorded an out.
"When you can come out and punch a team in the mouth in the first inning, and they've got to change their guy in the first, it's huge," Vols junior second baseman and leadoff hitter Christian Moore said. "It sets us up for tomorrow, because we got to see their pen a little more. It was definitely important."
Tennessee bounced back from Friday's 5-3 setback to improve to 32-7 overall and to 11-6 in Southeastern Conference play. Saturday marked just the second league setback for the Wildcats (32-6, 15-2).
The rubber match between the No. 3 Wildcats and the No. 4 Vols is at 1 p.m. Sunday.
"For our guys, it was about not playing our best and we're down 0-1," Tennessee coach Tony Vitello said. "We obviously want to win a series that's been talked about a little bit. All in all this was big, but no more than any other game."
The Vols pounced Saturday with Moore's leadoff home run to right field followed by a Blake Burke homer to right. Moore's homer was the 43rd of his career, briefly pulling into a tie for the all-time lead at Tennessee, but then Burke hit his 44th.
Burke's blast quickly extended his school-record hitting streak to 29 games.
Billy Amick then reached on a fielding error, which was followed by three consecutive RBI doubles by Kavares Tears, Dylan Dreiling and Dean Curley. The Wildcats got two runs back in their half of the first inning, but Tears made it a 6-2 game in the second inning on a homer to left.
A Dreiling homer down the right-field line in the sixth inning gave Tennessee a 7-2 lead, and his solo shot to right in the eighth made it 9-4.
Moore had a 4-for-6 afternoon at the plate, while Dreiling and Tears each went 3-for-5. Aaron Combs replaced Vols starting pitcher Drew Beam with one out in the fifth and allowed three hits and no runs while striking out seven batters.
"I had a lot of these situations last year, where I'm just coming in and trying to get strikeouts and whatever the situation needed," Combs said. "You try to get out of the inning, get to the next one and keep going."
Brown commits
Tennessee got its first basketball commitment of the 2025 signing cycle on Saturday, receiving a nonbinding pledge from center DeWayne Brown II of Hoover, Alabama. The 6-foot-9, 250-pounder is rated as the nation's No. 143 overall player and as Alabama's No. 1 player in next year's class in the 247Sports.com composite rankings.
Brown picked the Vols over Mississippi State.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.