Tony Vitello got Tennessee baseball on Rocky Top, but can he do it again? - ESPN

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Baseball is a game that is built around and dominated by lines. Baselines. Foul lines. The batter's box. The on-deck circle. Even the walls are edged with bright yellow borderlines. Constant linear reminders of where one is allowed to be, lest someone literally run afoul of those boundaries and the seemingly endless rules that govern them.

There are many people in baseball — it would be an easy argument to say most — who operate safely within those lines. Then, there are those who view their job as being to push back on those restrictions. To step over, or at least to place all 10 toes atop or up against the edge of all of those lines.

And that brings us to Tony Vitello.

He is the coach of the Tennessee Volunteers, the defending Men's College World Series champions. He has led the Vols to their fifth consecutive super regional this weekend, as No. 14 Tennessee travels to No. 3 Arkansas for an SEC showdown against Hogs coach Dave Van Horn, one of the many legendary college baseball minds under whom Vitello worked, with a 2014-17 stint at Arkansas. He's 46, single and, in his own words, «married to the game,» but also isn't allergic to traveling to Nashville or the islands for a good time.

All of the above should make a man nationally beloved. Instead, Vitello is a Tennessee Orange ax, splitting the college baseball community's feeling about him as a very clean, yes, line between love and loathe. Those who do not care for him point to what they believe is a disregard for those sacred baseball guardrails. Those who applaud him don't see a man bent on baseball disregard. They see a border-bending maverick.

«I think you don't know where the line is until you cross it. And then you make an adjustment,» said