Inside The Night The Finally Felt Right For Vanderbilt Baseball, Its Battle Of The Barrel Win Over Louisville
NASHVILLE—As if he wasn’t expecting it, Rustan Rigdon fell back a step in the moments after bumping chests with Mike Mancini. You’d think by this point Rigdon would’ve expected something like this to happen, but he went against the odds and fell backwards.
Mancini and Rigdon’s chest bump had just came after Mancini’s second homer of the night and Vanderbilt’s 100th of the season. Perhaps this hasn’t all gone to plan, but the moment was symbolic of everything that’s gone right for this program this season and everything that went right for it on Tuesday night.
“That looked like I can dunk,” Mancini joked in regard to his jumping chest bump with Rigdon. “I hit him hard. I think I got up to like 10 feet. I don’t know what my vert is, but I kind of want to go up against Eli Stowers.”
Perhaps Mancini still can’t reach the heights that Stowers–who set a record with his vertical leap at the NFL Combine–but his version of heroism was on display on Tuesday night as he was at the forefront of this Vanderbilt team’s bounceback in response to Alabama sweeping it in Tuscaloosa over the weekend.
For one night, things finally felt right for this Vanderbilt program. The record didn’t disappear and the NCAA Tournament wasn’t clinched, but Vanderbilt was good enough on Tuesday night to hold off all that talk until Wednesday morning. In this grueling Vanderbilt baseball season, it was finally fun again.
On Tuesday, its 12 runs, 11 hits and the combined outings of the six pitchers it used were good enough for Vanderbilt reliever Luke Guth to walk off the field with a barrel in hand.
More than this is about what Vanderbilt gained in the RPI–spoiler alert, it only rose three spots–it’s about what it avoided against the No. 104 team in the RPI. Vanderbilt is still alive as a result of Tuesday night. That’s what matters most coming out of the night.
It doesn’t diminish how this night felt, though. When Vanderbilt shortstop Ryker Waite dove on the second base bag and clinched a Vanderbilt win, nobody inside Hawkins Field was thinking about the RPI or the big picture. All they could think about was that Vanderbilt baseball finally had a night that felt like Vanderbilt baseball should feel like.
“I just want to win games,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said. “I’ll have a glass of milk in celebration of that.”
Corbin’s Tuesday-night presser included him belly laughing with reporters, a number of references to the glass of milk that he likely downed at some point on Tuesday night and nearly 20 minutes of him fielding a wide array of questions–a rarity for a midweek presser. Mancini’s also ended in a prolonged belly laugh.
Perhaps it was a result of the delirium caused by a seemingly endless rain delay that resulted in a game that was around the five-hour mark. Perhaps it was just this night and the general sense of jubilance surrounding it.
This was just a midweek win in a season that could end as the most unsuccessful for this program in a number of its players’ lifetimes, but it sure didn’t feel that way.
“When you create that momentum, you create that positivity, the game becomes a little bit lighter, Corbin said. “I just don't want it to be too heavy. We got back from Alabama on Saturday, and I met with them right away. I just felt like I just don't want that series to just keep replaying in their brain on Sunday. We just didn't need to do that. We needed to shed it really quick because it doesn't matter. Now it's not important. It's everything that you do forward that is important.”
The last time these two teams met, Corbin lashed out at a reporter he believed was bringing up ancillary bulls*** at the top of Vanderbilt’s Huber Center while Mancini flanked him and searched for any answer that would be satisfactory and non controversial. It was Vanderbilt’s second loss to Louisville of the season and would eventually be the catalyst in it leaving the NCAA Tournament in regional play despite being the No. 1 overall seed in the field. But the past is the past, and–as Corbin says–it doesn’t matter anymore.
Tuesday was a whole lot more enjoyable for this program than that night or the one in which it dropped a regular season game on the road. It included three Vanderbilt home runs, Corbin’s program bouncing back from a first-inning grand slam and no mention of ancillary bulls***.
Just a glass of milk and a barrel this time.
“It always feels good when you’re battling for something, the barrel,” Mancini said while downplaying the effect of last season’s losses to Louisville, “I’m glad to get that back on our side.”
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Joey Dwyer is the lead writer on Vanderbilt Commodores On SI. He found his first love in college sports at nearby Lipscomb University and decided to make a career of telling its best stories. He got his start doing a Notre Dame basketball podcast from his basement as a 14-year-old during COVID and has since aimed to make that 14-year-old proud. Dwyer has covered Vanderbilt sports for three years and previously worked for 247 Sports and Rivals. He contributes to Seth Davis' Hoops HQ, Basket Under Review and Mainstreet Nashville.
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