SEC: At Home In Hoover

By Jessica Garrison - May 24, 2006

Now this is baseball country. Hoover, Alabama, home of Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, favorite site of the SEC tournament. It's sunny, a reasonably humid 85 degrees, with a few fluffy clouds and baseball caps on the fans scattered around the stadium. Feels like mid-summer baseball in May, or maybe that's just because I'm less than five hours removed from this morning's cold and cloudy New York departure. We might as well be in a different hemisphere here: Second-seeded Kentucky and seventh-seeded South Carolina are both scoreless in the top of the 7th, no one except the players on the field seems convinced this is tournament baseball. Then again, it's not even noon. Kentucky sophomore left-hander Tommy Warner just struck out USC catcher Phil Disher, so it's the regular-season champion Wildcats at bat...and with the first good ping of the day, a long home run over the right field fence by junior Sean Coughlin opens the scoring. Look out Gamecocks, the 'Cats are a-comin'...