The Big Orange Machine

On Sunday night, at least one University of Tennessee player is going to get taken in the first round of the MLB Draft. Left-hander Liam Doyle is a lock to go in the top 15, with as many as half a dozen of his teammates (plus four or five Tennessee commits) also in the running to get picked later on Day One.

That’s not unusual these days; since 2020, the Vols have produced six first-round picks, second-most of any program in the country. But it is new. Tennessee had six players picked in the first round proper from 1985 to 2019 inclusive. That run includes Todd Helton and R.A. Dickey, both of whom are older than Tony Vitello, the man who turned a mediocre SEC program into the hottest ticket in college baseball.

Incidental to all this impressive talent development: Five straight Super Regional appearances, three College World Series appearances, and a national championship in 2024. Life is good, both for those in Knoxville and for those departing the scene for pro ball.

Most great college sports programs have a defined brand. For Tennessee under Vitello, it’s three things: pitchers who throw hard, position players who hit for power, and a big attitude throughout the roster.

That last part has made Tennessee a bit polarizing nationally. If there’s anything more annoying than a team that wins all the time, it’s a team that wins all the time and crows about it.

“I’m an extrovert. I interact with people well. I mean, maybe not on the field, in between the lines, right?” says infielder Andrew Fischer. “Some people don’t love the way I play the game, but I’m very comfortable in my own skin.”

Fischer transferred to Tennessee from Ole Miss before his junior year, and led the Vols in most offensive categories during his only year in Knoxville. He figures to hear his name called on Sunday.

It was Fischer who stood at the plate during a regional game against Wake Forest, when Wake head coach Tom Walter was caught on camera using a homophobic slur. That same at-bat, Fischer turned around and launched one of his 25 home runs, causing pandemonium in the Volunteer dugout.

“[Playing with attitude is] not a requirement for us, and therefore it’s not something we search for,” Vitello says. “I just would rather have a guy whose fire burns a little too bright, like Drew Gilbert, and we’ve got to try and control it, or get them to use it as an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage, than have to try and fire a kid up to play a game.”

This viewpoint is actually pretty common throughout sports, but Vitello’s example is instructive. In 2022, Gilbert got ejected from a super regional game against Notre Dame for arguing balls and strikes; in college baseball, a player who gets ejected from a game gets suspended from the following game as well, which meant Tennessee played half the super regional without its best player. And later in this past year’s regional win over Wake Forest, catcher Cannon Peebles got tossed in the eighth inning of the decisive game, putting him on the bench for Game 1 of the super, which the Vols lost to Arkansas.

In other words, in every year since the pandemic, the Vols have either had a starter suspended during the super regional, or they’ve made it to Omaha. Quite a dichotomy.

But as much as opposing fans might dislike the Vols, their rivals don’t seem to have a problem with a team that talks trash or argues with umpires.

“They’re a great team, coached by a great coach, great players, they bring that energy every single day,” says South Carolina slugger Ethan Petry.

Vanderbilt jack-of-all-trades RJ Austin knows the Tennessee-Vandy rivalry as well as anyone, but rather than harboring animosity toward his opponents, he mostly enjoyed playing against high-level competition.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” Austin says. “Honestly, it’s a lot of hate that goes into it, words, actions, that you probably wouldn’t do against other teams. But I just went to have dinner with three of their players, and they’re all cool guys.”

Florida State’s Jamie Arnold, one of the top pitchers in this year’s class, took a no-decision against Tennessee last year in one of the best games of the season.

“I think Coach Vitello does things a different way than most other coaches,” Arnold says. “From what I’ve heard, he’s a great players’ coach. I’ve had buddies that I’ve met from Tennessee, and a lifelong friend of mine played there last year, so I’ve heard good things about him. They’re a fun team to play against. They compete hard, and I think they really care about each other.”

The Tennessee players I talked to at this year’s Draft Combine all liked playing in an environment that allowed them to be themselves.

“It’s liberating to be able to go there and show your true colors,” says Tennessee righty Marcus Phillips. “People have a negative connotation towards the way that people do things at Tennessee, just because of the true emotion that gets shown. People seem to think there’s antics behind it, almost as if we practice for it… When you work as hard as we do to accomplish something, it’s kind of hard not to show true emotion behind that. If you can hit a ball 450 feet, you should be able to stand there and look at it.”

A decade ago, that would’ve been an outlier opinion. The culture in college baseball has changed so rapidly since then it probably merits its own article. But as recently as 2015, legendary coach Augie Garrido was using “The biggest thing wrong with college baseball today is entitlement” as an applause line. Vitello was still years away from his first head coaching gig back then, but he knew the prevailing mindset. His father was a Hall of Fame high school coach who had a similarly “militaristic” approach, to use Vitello’s word.

“It’s not just Augie and [former Rice coach] Wayne Graham, it’s my dad,” Vitello says. “Even if you get a walk, put your head down and run to first, and if you hit a homer, the same thing. Put your head down.”

At the same time, that façade was starting to crack at the major league level.

“José Bautista hits that homer and throws his bat. And Josh Hamilton a couple years prior — the Rangers start a celebration anytime they get to second base. All that was becoming more and more frequent in the game at every level, whether it’s celebrating or style or whatever you want to call it.”

Around the same time, Joe Maddon was leading the Cubs to the World Series with a laissez-faire managerial approach. As long as the players were doing the work, he wouldn’t micromanage them. Vitello learned from that coaching style and figured that embracing players’ individualism was the way to go.

“Even your phone case is personalized. Everything is individualized and customized in our world. So why would that not bleed into baseball a little bit?” he says.

“You get a level of freedom when you have a coach like that,” says Fischer, who described himself as “always on the gas pedal.” “It just frees you up to play, knowing he has your back no matter what.”

And individuality means individuality, says infielder Dean Curley, even for guys who are a little more buttoned-down.

“That’s not really my style of play,” Curley says. “But baseball’s gonna change. It’s a different era. [Vitello] lets us be ourselves and be comfortable in our own skin. We’ve got guys like Fish and Doyle who show it, and that’s who they are. It’s not fake, it’s who they are.”

Being the team that feels big feelings doesn’t make Tennessee as much of an outlier as you’d think. But having the ability to back all that up takes outlier performance. Remember, Phillips’ statement about celebrating your home runs was a conditional: You can stand at the plate until the ball lands… if and only if you can hit it 450 feet.

Fortunately, that hasn’t been a problem.

I asked Arnold if anyone from last year’s Tennessee lineup stood out to him. His response: “I mean, they had five guys with 20 pumps, so, yeah, take your pick. Anyone in that lineup was good.”

In 2024, the Vols hit 184 home runs in 73 games. The average major league team hit 182 home runs in a season of (as you probably know already) 162 games. Then there’s the pitching staff.

At the Combine, I spoke to three Tennessee pitchers — Doyle, Phillips, and Nate Snead — who put triple digits on the radar gun at least once during the 2025 season. Not much more than a decade ago, there’d be three guys a year who could say that in all of Division I. But that’s par for the course at Tennessee, where Vitello’s other students have included Garrett Crochet, Ben Joyce, Chase Dollander, Seth Halvorsen, and (for two seasons, before he transferred to Wake Forest) Chase Burns.

Here’s a fun fact: There have been 64 pitchers who thrown at least one pitch at 100 mph or more in the majors this season. Of those, 17 played college baseball since 2018, Vitello’s first season at Tennessee. Five of those 17 played at least one season for the Vols:

Vitello didn’t come to Knoxville planning to build this two-way power juggernaut. Upon taking the job in the summer of 2017, his first hire was veteran pitching coach Frank Anderson. (Incidentally, Anderson was Garrido’s pitching coach at Texas, where he won a national championship in 2002.)

“Me and Frank talked about [wanting] to pitch and throw strikes and play defense. If we planned anything, it was that,” Vitello says. “But what came out of it was all these guys making velo jumps, and then our guys hitting for power. I come back to our strength coach for a lot of this.”

Conditioning is a big thing. Vitello noted, with some pride, that Doyle dropped 19 pounds of fat during his junior year, which contributed to his superb draft year performance. Vitello says getting into Tennessee’s conditioning program can be a tough transition for some players.

“There ends up being, not even a love-hate, just a hate relationship there,” Vitello says. “But with Liam, he was determined to get it. So even though he was getting his butt kicked the first month and really couldn’t keep up with the group, he was very determined to get through it.”

And that strength program pays dividends even for players who ought to be reaching their ceiling. Snead says that when he started taking baseball seriously in high school, he was throwing in the low 80s, and he knows the exact date — December 28, 2020 — when he hit 90 for the first time.

“The year after that, I hit 93, and then two years after that, I hit 96 for the first time, and then I went to college and I was consistently hitting 94 to 96,” Snead says. After one year at Wichita State, he transferred to Tennessee, and the velocity kept coming. “Last year, up to 101 sitting in the mid-to-upper 90s. This year, I was sitting in the upper 90s the whole time, hitting 100 or 101 almost every time I went out there. That was a really fun experience. Just knowing that’s not done yet is the fun part.”

Wait, is 101 not the end of the line?

“I hope not,” Snead says. “It’d be cool to see 102, maybe 103 one day, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

One thing Snead has in common with Phillips and Doyle, apart from fastball velocity: All three are transfers. So are Fischer, Peebles, and Gavin Kilen, a highly regarded infield prospect who’s also in this draft class. Joyce, Halvorsen, and Dollander were transfers as well, as you saw in the table above. And of all the current and former Tennessee players I’ve mentioned so far in this article, the only ones who were actually born in the state of Tennessee were Dickey and Helton.

Which, again, flies in the face of everything we thought we knew about college baseball 10 years ago.

“When we first got here, people were adamant about us ‘claiming the state,’ and it is the state school,” Vitello says. But even in a relatively large, talent-rich state like Tennessee, that wasn’t feasible. The Memphis area is actually more linked to Arkansas and the Mississippi schools, for instance, while Chattanooga might as well be an exurb of Atlanta.

“And also, we’re next to Vanderbilt,” says Vitello, who took over at Tennessee while Tim Corbin’s club was wrecking house three hours down I-40. “At the time, they had a better scholarship situation than anybody in the country. For us, we just came to grips with the fact that we needed players anywhere we could get them.”

Some of those finds are easier than others; Fischer and Doyle are from the Northeast, but both transferred in from another SEC school. Hardly a difficult scouting mission. But Curley came to Tennessee straight from high school in Southern California. Snead came from Wisconsin via Wichita State.

But recruiting success breeds more recruiting success. The more Tennessee guys get to the majors, the more those alumni — such as Crochet — have been able to lend a hand in recruiting. Perhaps more importantly, the nationwide scouting dragnet pulls up more talent as time goes on.

Phillips, for instance, comes from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Which is, I can say from experience, a lovely city. But in baseball terms, it’s beyond the middle of nowhere. You’ve got a better chance of being recruited from Brigadoon.

“Rob Allison, the guy that runs PBR Minnesota, he was the one who made the call to get Drew Gilbert down to Tennessee,” Phillips says. “I went to all his events growing up, and he reached out to Frank Anderson about me and said, ‘Look, you’ve got to get this guy.’ Frank was like, ‘Why? Why would we go get some random guy from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who hasn’t even picked up a ball in junior college?’

“And [Allison] pretty much just said, ‘Well, I got you Drew Gilbert, a future first rounder, didn’t I?’ And so there was some credibility, and they went out and got me.”

And at a certain level, playing SEC baseball sells itself. Vitello puts it this way: A high school draft pick, if everything goes well, hopes to get to the majors in five years. Emerging from college as a well-rounded, polished prospect, can cut that number down. Crochet skipped the minors entirely; Christian Moore reached the big leagues in under a year.

“But the other thing is, a kid from Wisconsin now can work on his craft six hours a day if he wants, because of all these indoor facilities and everything else that’s available. So these kids, they work their ass off, and if you’re going to work that hard, you might as well enjoy it. I think all of us, especially coaches, we don’t take the time to enjoy stuff.”

As a kid from Wisconsin who worked his ass off at an indoor facility, perhaps Snead has thoughts on that hypothetical.

“It’s a lot of fun, especially being there. That place is really special,” he says. “They take great, great care of people, and it’s a beautiful place to be, too. I guess you could say it’s an organization a lot of people want to play for. Coach V is the best of the best, and Coach Frank, he’s the man.”

“[Vitello] is even more than a coach to me now, he’s truly just a friend and a great person to be around,” Doyle says. “He has that competitive spirit that makes you want to be even more competitive than you already are. Playing for a guy like that, it’s truly surreal.”

It does seem like the key to all this is making the players feel supported, making them feel like they can be themselves. And then having them work out until the best version of themselves throws 100 mph or hits 20 homers a year. In the trappings of a major SEC program, that’s quite an attractive proposition for a college ballplayer. There’d be no shortage of Volunteers.