After a crazy conclusion to the race for the SEC regular-season championship and the late ending of a game between Ole Miss and Vanderbilt that decided where almost everyone in the jumbled middle of the conference ended up, we have the details for the first round of the SEC baseball tournament, such as they are. The first pitches will be Tuesday.
The SEC has made an art in recent years of making a bracket almost impossible to draw (if you really want to see one without names, it's here and will probably be updated shortly), but we can look at how the first-round games play out. Check your local listings for the early games -- the SportSouth games will be carried on Sun Sports in Tallahassee, for example. Again, all these games will be played Tuesday.
| First Round Bye | |
| 1 | LSU |
| 2 | South Carolina |
| Game 1 · 10:30 a.m. ET · SportSouth | |
| 4 | Kentucky |
| 9 | Ole Miss |
| Game 2 · 30 min after Game 1 · SportSouth |
|
| 6 | Arkansas |
| 7 | Mississippi State |
| Game 3 · 5:30 p.m. ET · CSS | |
| 3 | Florida |
| 10 | Auburn |
| Game 4 · 30 mins after Game 3 · CSS | |
| 5 | Vanderbilt |
| 8 | Georgia |
LSU's first game would then be Wednesday against the lowest-ranked winner in Games 1 and 2. And South Carolina would face the lowest-ranked winner from Games 3 and 4. The highest-ranked winner in Games 1 and 2 and the highest-ranked winner in Games 3 and 4 then get a bye of their own. (Some help from @matthewcstevens on figuring out how to unknot the three-team tie for the Nos. 5-7 seeds)
Each bracket has an extremely hot team in it -- Vanderbilt has gone 9-3 over its final four SEC games in the regular season. Mississippi State is 11-4 over its last five SEC match-ups. Not that the top seeds are what would you would call slouches. Georgia, which just became the first conference team to lose a series to Alabama since late April, goes into the tournament on something of a slump. So does former front-runner Kentucky, with a three-game set against Alabama being its only SEC series win since late April.