re: Vanderbilt Baseball Season (51-21): CWS Runner-Up: UMPS WIN!

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Fresh of a 21-0 regional-clinching victory, Vanderbilt tore through Illinois like a rocket sled demolishing a school bus full of watermelons: They hit relentlessly, ran the bases aggressively, fielded the ball cleanly and brought to bear a level of starting pitching that their opponent is simply not used to seeing.

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The all-conquering Illini, surrounded by a crowd of 3,605 — most of them wearing orange and shouting — enduring a merciless, clinical beating from invaders from the south, dressed in prison pajamas from the 1930s.

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here are losses — even double-digit losses — in which little things go wrong and the situation snowballs, and despite the score, the game would’ve actually turned on one play. This was not one of those games. Two controversial calls didn’t go Illinois’ way, and neither of them mattered: Duchene plunked Tyler Campbell in the third inning, and Campbell might or might not have made an adequate effort to get out of the way; in the fifth, Jeren Kendall was awarded home after getting caught in a rundown and juking (I believe) out of the baseline and into Jason Goldstein. At the risk of angering the fallacy of the predetermined outcome, the next batter after Campbell was hit grounded out to end the inning without further scoring, while Kendall’s run was Vanderbilt’s seventh of the game. And besides, you don’t lose a game by 13 runs because the umpires screwed you.

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