Tony Vitello usually hides in the corner of the dugout when he has to make a pitching change.
Or he simply ducks his head when he has to take the ball from someone on the mound.
Those are the first world problems the Vols’ skipper is dealing with these days as his teams boasts pitching depth to the point where future big leaguers can’t crack the starting rotation.
It’s particularly a problem — if you want to call it that — this weekend as No. 1 Tennessee hosts Georgia for a three-game series.
“You (media) guys kept bringing up — ‘Oh, you got this big problem that's coming around the bend,’” Vitello said Thursday night after the Vols beat the Dawgs 5-2 in the opener. “Well, this is the first weekend we've had four healthy guys that are the guys you all have talked about. And next week, it’ll take care of itself, because we go to Hoover after, so there's four starts. They’ll each get one; which day it is, I don't know. But, we liked our plan going into this weekend.”
Tennessee’s pitching plans were different this weekend for essentially the first time all season.
True freshman Chase Burns had been the game one starter all year. Fellow freshman Drew Beam had been the game three starter, but this weekend, Vitello and pitching coach Frank Anderson elected to start sophomore’s Chase Dollander and Blade Tidwell consecutively.
“We’ve got our two freshest guys starting,” Vitello said. “You saw how we approached the game. We started the guy we felt best to start, we brought in our our best weapon out of the bullpen stuff wise (Chase Burns), and then we went to our closer (Redmond Walsh) immediately — or early, if you want to call it that. So it's not as if we're conceding anything at all, but I think the best thing for us to do this particular weekend is to throw our two most fresh guys.”
Dollander and Tidwell are the two freshest starters for the Vols at the moment because they’ve each battled injury at different points.
Tidwell missed the first month and a half of the season due to shoulder soreness. As he was returning, Dollander missed 17 days of action in April after taking a line drive off his pitching elbow.
Burns and Beam have been the two constants in the rotation. Nobody has thrown more innings than the freshmen duo, as they’re the only two pitchers on staff to have pitched at least 60.0 innings.
With Dollander and Tidwell back in the fold, this weekend allows Tennessee to give the freshmen a little bit of a rest before the postseason starts.
“It's not like we baby guys at all,” Vitello said. “But, Frank (Anderson) and I see eye to eye, and the one thing we don't ever want to do is run guys into the ground at any point. And you know, when you’ve got younger guys like Blade Tidwell last year, basically, senior year (of high school) gets erased due to COVID, and now all of a sudden, he's thrown into a weekend starting role, and he’s, ‘Hey, throw 100 innings for us,’ even though he barely threw it all last year.
“I think you’ve got to take some of that stuff into consideration. So the one thing, too, again, the laundry list of things we get into, I think for us to be ready in any situation, it helps if those guys at least know what it looks like at least once to come out of the bullpen. So for all practical purposes, to me, our guys need to think that we're in playoff mode right now.”
Dollander was impressive in game one against Georgia, allowing just one run on three hits over 6.0 innings of work. The Evans, Georgia native didn’t walk a single Bulldog and struck out six.
Burns came out of the bullpen for the first time all season, relieving Dollander to start the seventh inning. Burns threw 29 pitches over 1.2 innings. He allowed one run on two hits, but struck out three and didn’t allow a walk.
"I thought (Burns) was great,” Vitello said. “A lot of this is these guys are kids, and they're young, and they’re fresh of mind, fresh of body. They want to just go play.
“But you also don’t want to look at it, like, ‘Man, I don’t know about this guy’s career in pro ball, because we just rode him like a rented mule.’”
Tidwell will start game two on Friday evening against the Bulldogs as the Vols go for the series win and at least a share of the SEC regular season title. First pitch is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. ET on the SEC Network.
