Good morning.
The Vanderbilt baseball team will host the Evansville Purple Aces (which... cool nickname) at 6:30 PM CT at Hawkins Field. This game will be televised on the SEC Network+ and WatchESPN. While Vanderbilt has had weird struggles in recent weeks in midweek games, Evansville just is not a very good team — the Aces are currently 6-23 and have lost 12 in a row. If we’re having trouble with this team, that’s a very bad sign.
Baseball’s Austin Martin was named the SEC Freshman of the Week for last week.
The women’s golf team will play their practice round before starting the SEC Tournament, which runs from Wednesday through Sunday at the Greystone Golf & Country Club in Hoover, Alabama (of course it’s in Hoover, Alabama.) Hey, it’s a slow news day, okay?
The SEC women’s tennis tournament also starts tomorrow, though Vanderbilt, as the #1 seed, won’t play until Friday at 2 PM. We are, of course, going to have a live thread for such an event. For some reason, the tournament will be played in Knoxville, Tennessee. Also, junior Summer Dvorak was named the SEC Player of the Week. Dvorak, of course, won five straight games in the final set for a comeback win that clinched the SEC title for the Commodores.
New rankings: the baseball team is up to #10 in the country this week after taking two of three from Ole Miss over the weekend.
Off the West End
Luke Kornet was named to the third-team All G-League on Monday.
This Kawhi Leonard thing is sort of fascinating. Imagine if you told your boss that you were sick, you went to the doctor and your doctor said you were sick, and then your boss said you were faking it, sent you to his doctor and his doctor said you weren’t sick and you should just suck it up and go to work. That’s basically what is going on here.
I think it’s sort of dumb that professional sports leagues (and colleges) still test for marijuana, but the tests are incredibly easy to beat, because really, most professional sports teams actually have no interest in busting players for smoking marijuana. (The NCAA, on the other hand...)
If there was ever going to be an American professional sports team that claimed to be based in the British Virgin Islands, it was going to be the Florida Miami Marlins, because of course it is. Also, you really do have to love how the Marlins’ new ownership group managed to alienate a fan who calls himself “Marlins Man.” This would be like if the Vanderbilt athletic department managed to alienate the guy in the Mr. C costume. Anyway, I really do feel for Marlins fans, because they got excited about Jeffrey Loria selling the team only to find out that the new owners were actually somehow worse. And yet in the offseason, there were inevitably commenters in every MLB post on the main site defending the Marlins’ decision to trade away Giancarlo Stanton and Christian Yelich and field a minor league team. That AAA team lost to the Yankees 12-1 last night, by the way.