Tennessee baseball begins play at the College World Series Saturday night as they face off with No. 5 LSU at Charles Schwab Field.
It’s the fourth meeting between the Tigers and Vols this season with LSU taking two out of three in the regular season series in Baton Rouge.
LSU hasn’t lost a game in the NCAA Tournament, sweeping through both the Baton Rouge Regional and Super Regional. Tennessee swept through the Clemson Regional but dropped game one of the Hattiesburg Super Regional before winning the final two games to punch its ticket to Omaha.
Here’s everything you need to know about the College World Series matchup between LSU and Tennessee.
More From RTI: Everything Tony Vitello Said Previewing CWS Matchup With LSU
Game Time — Tennessee (43-20, 16-14 SEC) vs. No. 5 LSU (48-15, 19-10 SEC)
7 p.m. ET Saturday night
How To Watch
TV: ESPN. WatchESPN stream
What Tony Vitello Said About LSU
On what they can take from facing Paul Skenes earlier this season
“Yeah, he was more than solid. The one thing when you face a guy like Grice at Clemson, I’m glad our hitters had a better mentality than I did in the dugout because there were moments of doubt. You have to just keep playing, and I’ve been fortunate enough to coach some pitchers, and some of them have also been pitchers we’ve faced where you can see the other dugout kind of deflate.
The series was not our best effort, but the kids did keep kind of pushing forward in that series, and it was early, but it was one of the first signs of, okay, we got a little bit of the fight that we want in our program. We finished that weekend off very well on Sunday, but if you date back to Friday or Game 1 of that deal, Skenes was better than us. And I think there’s probably some info in there that we can pull out, and the guys can take some confidence in maybe we’ve seen him once before. He is probably a different pitcher now than he was then. It’s probably a different LSU team in some areas. I mean, they still have Mr. Crews and all that. We’re a different team too.
You want to have some preparation going into the deal and see what will be similar from that weekend and maybe try and get a head start on what could be different, but I also feel like this is a place where you don’t know what’s going to happen. Just like our last weekend, lightning, pitching changes, expect chaos and embrace it during the postseason. This group has done that very, very well. Maybe it’s those struggles that we had early on that built us for that.”
Projected Pitching Matchup
Tennessee has officially announced its starting pitcher. LSU has not.
RHP Andrew Lindsey (3-3, 2.79 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 69 K, 18 BB, 67.2 IP) vs. RHP Paul Skenes (12-2, 1.77 ERA, 0.78 WHIP, 188 K, 18 BB, 107 IP)
Bats to Know
Tennessee
Jared Dickey — .325 BA, .392 OBP, .924 OPS, 12 HR, 21 XBH, 51 RBI
