Knoxville, Tenn. - Baseball is a game built and dominant around the lines. Baseline. Foul line. Batter box. Deck ring. Even the walls are filled with bright yellow boundaries. Constantly linear reminders that allow someone to literally see these boundaries and seemingly endless rules to manage them.

There are a lot of people in baseball games - most people can easily say - they operate safely on these itineraries. Then, some people think their work is to delay these restrictions. To tip over, or at least put all 10 toes on the edge of all these lines.

This brings us to Tony Vitello.

He is a Tennessee volunteer and coach to defend the men's college World Series champion. He led Walls for the fifth straight super regional this weekend as Tennessee No. 14 Arkansas State had a SEC showdown with Hoggs coach Dave Van Horn, one of many legendary college baseball minds Vitello worked from 2014 to 2017.

All of the above should make a person loved nationwide. Instead, Vitello is the Tennessee-based orange axe that makes the college baseball community feel so clean about him, yes, between love and disgust. Those who don't care about him pointed out that they think those holy baseball guardrails are ignored. Those who applaud him couldn't see a man bent over and ignored the baseball. They saw a calves with a curved border.

"I don't think you know where the line is before you cross it. Then make adjustments." Vitello said his eighth season in Knoxville is coming to an end. "I don't want our guys, if they give them a coloring book, I don't want them to just color online. You know, come up with something different."

At this point, we should explain that the 46-year-old is also obsessed with Matt Damon's movies, even more important than baseball.

"In the 'Good Hunting,' one thing he said to a person is,'At least I'm not plain.' If there is a team party, there is a terrible thing left in the locker room, and no one immediately says: "There is a weird guy," or "There is a psycho guy," or "There is a guy who makes everyone laugh." If you walk in and no one has anything, that's bad for me.

College baseball statisticians and historians believe that the Vitello era at the top of Rocky has been unexpectedly successful. From 1947 to 2016, Vols was one of the most crafty giants in the game, traveling to Omaha only four times in the first seventy years of the Men's University World Series. Now, they are seeking their fourth visit in five years. The first three of these berths ended in disappointment around the 2022 season clip, critics pointed out that it was a testament to Vitello’s misleading management style when the undisputed first team was packed with 10 MLB draft picks that failed to pull it off the Knoxville Super Super Regional.

The most fair or unfair problem is the recurring appearance of these lines. Vitello's Ireland-Italian blood overheated itself, after a healthy motivational cook, boiled his top and allowed his players to do the same. See: For eight years, chest tilted referee, upside down canoe, three suspensions and five ejections.

But big emotions have also become the trademark of large orange, heart-on-heart hard balls, and finally in June last year, Tennessee’s first national champion in ten and a half years was rewarded.

"This work is about evolution," Vitello said. "I think life is about evolution. What is effective? What is what is? I'm not the smartest person you've ever met, but I'm smart enough to learn from my behavior and the results, what is the result, or no results. At least, I think I'm smart enough. I think some people would say that isn't right. But, honest, honest, the only person I care about is this building and the people who support us."

Also, be honest. He is a filmmaker, and every actor from Denzel Washington to his beloved Damon says it's more fun to be a bad guy.

"Okay. Yes, we can play some villains. But we're trying to win."

Vitello loves to use his business as a satisfying series of accidents and coincidences. In the St. Louis area, he was the youngest of four, the only boy, a high school fielder, not a great batsman, but wearing solid gloves and rubber arms. He made a roster at Alabama's II Division Spring Hill College and then moved into his home country program, the perennial Missouri Tigers. Then he started throwing hitting balls at his teammates with that arm. This led to his full-time assistant coaching position at his alma mater, which led to a series of assistant docks, studying from Van Horn and Jim Schlossnagle, where coach Vols of the Texas A&M team beat last year’s championship.

He is known as the Road Warrior Recruiter, in schools that expect to own them, but also joins the All-Star roster in Mizzou.

"You can teach a young coach," Schlossnagle said of Vitello on the eve of the MCWS showdown. They worked together at TCU from 2011 to 2013. "What you can't teach them is driving. Work ethics. From your DNA, you can work from the moment you wake up to bed. No one has to teach Tony. He's been taught before he's arrived at us."

The lessons came from his father, Greg Vitello, a Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, baseball and football coaching legend who worked at Demet High School for 46 years, where he taught his son. Before that, he took the boy anywhere outside the field. Young Tony stuffs his way under the scorer's table. He was watching his dad’s paint line on the sports field. He watched his father run and practice. By the teenage years, Tony became a Spartan, everything he knew had arrived long ago, left very late, and did everything he could to win. Not only that, the mission of daily expression is to turn young athletes into young people.

"That's his focus," Tony Vitello said. "Trust me, he's competitive, but if you win the game, it's a by-product. Never said we need to go into the last four games or we need to go to this championship or that championship. So when the last four championships arrive or the championship does arrive, it's a pure emotion, that's a pure emotion. My dad is a manly man.

"I had to back him because he was your son," Greg Vitello said. "You want him to do the best. Then, there will always be conversations around you. 'Hey, the only reason he played is that his old man is the coach!" But you know he proved himself. ”

The moment Tony Vitello still couldn't talk without grabbing his throat was in 1997, when he was the fourth member of Greg's five Missouri championship football teams. The moment the game ended, Tony retreated to the locker room and collapsed.

"I can't stop crying," Tony said. "It's a relief because I want to help him win one of the state championships. I'm having a weird fear of it, 'If I went to high school for four years and played three sports, never, never happened, then?' It was an exciting moment, but it's a strange feeling of relief."

The world didn't see that moment in '97, nor did it hear Tony call his father to cry, saying he got his first head coach job, which is Tennessee. ("In the SEC!" Greg shouts now.)

But we all saw it last June. At that time, his son, before posing with the great Tennessee Peyton Manning, or before he posed for post-match photos, stood on the head of an Omaha canoe and reached his arm around his father.

"I think I'm a dad, he's a kid," Tony said of the moment he hugged his father, when confetti fell on the surrounding turf. "Because he won't stop crying."

"It was an incredible experience," Greg recalled. "We didn't say anything. Hey, this is heaven, man. It should be. Paradise in Omaha."

So if you don't like Tony Vitello, that's fine. If you think he is too primitive, it doesn't matter. He could tolerate spending more time online, rather than re-drawing them. That's OK, if you think his players are showing up a lot and want to blame it on you might see it as a bad role model when he rushed to Auburn on the court like May. Or, if he was in the regular pitching changes with Mississippi State University, like in the SEC Championship. Even after he escaped a frustrated bid for another potential super-region, he was calling up a reporter, just like Tennessee did after winning the MCWS berth in Tennessee through the surviving Upstart Evansville Aces a year ago.

But what you can't do is blame the person for being unprimitive.

"I'm not everyone. Maybe this team isn't for everyone. But we're with each other. We're for people who wear orange, living and dying every day." "We may not always win. But we win often. We're definitely us."