Tennessee’s Dylan Dreiling hit a home run in the seventh inning and Nate Snead countered a Texas A&M scoring threat in the bottom of the ninth to force a decisive third game of the College World Series finals with a 4-1 victory on Sunday.
One of the teams will win its first national baseball title and become the fifth consecutive Southeastern Conference champion when they meet on Monday night.
Dreiling sent freshman Kaiden Wilson’s 1-1 pitch 390 feet into the right-field seats to give the Volunteers (59-13) a much-needed jolt after Texas A&M pitchers kept up their prodigious offense with four hits.
To that point, the Volunteers were 2-for-20 with runners in scoring position in the first two games of the Finals and Texas A&M had not lost in any of its CWS games.
Tennessee built a three-run lead when Cal Stark, their No. 9 hitter, homered in the eighth. He went 0-for-16 with nine strikeouts in the CWS before launching a Wilson pitch over the left-field bullpen.
Snead, who picked up his sixth save, was called up after the Aggies’ first two batters struck out in the bottom of the ninth. He got a groundout and flyout before Kavares Tears went to the warning track to catch the fly from slugger Ryan Targac who remained in the park with the help of the blowing wind.
The Volunteers, who lost their finals opener 9-5 on Saturday, have not lost consecutive games since March 16-17 at Alabama. They are trying to become the first national seed to win the national title since Miami in 1999.
Jace LaViolette’s 29th home run of the season, the 50th of his career and his first in the CWS, put the Aggies up 1-0 in the first inning. It was also the first RBI in five games for LaViolette, who is playing through a sore right hamstring.
The Aggies had just one runner reach second against Drew Beam before Aaron Combs (3-1) took over with no outs in the fifth. They had runners on second and third with two outs in the sixth, but Combs took care of that by getting Ted Burton to fly out.
Tennessee struck out two runners initially. Beam caught Kaeden Kent in the third inning and Stark, the catcher, fired to Blake Burke to get Ali Camarillo to end the fifth. Kent and Camarillo were initially considered safe, but the calls were overturned following video reviews. Stark’s pick was his seventh of the year.
Aggies manager Jim Schlossnagle, having won on Saturday, decided to make it a bullpen day to save Justin Lamkin for a possible Game 3. Lampkin pitched eight shutout innings in two CWS starts.
Zane Badmaev found out Sunday morning that he would be making his second career start — and first since 2020, when he was at then-Division II Tarleton State. The 6-foot-2, 278-pound Badmaev was lifted for Chris Cortez after he gave up a single lead in the second round.
Tennessee loaded the bases in the third and fourth innings against Cortez but was unable to advance. Cortez came out sixth after drawing a four-pitch walk. An athletic trainer went to the mound to check on Cortez, whose right hand and forearm appeared to be bothering him. Cortez allowed two hits, walked five and struck out seven in 4 1/3 innings.
Wilson (0-2) came in and coaxed a double play from Stark in the bottom of the inning, but couldn’t hold off the nation’s best home run hitting team in the seventh and eighth.
Dreiling’s home run was his 22nd of the season and second of the CWS. Stark went deep for the 11th time. Tennessee has 182 home runs on the year, six shy of the 1997 Louisiana State team’s NCAA record of 188.
