The University of Louisville baseball team will play against Vanderbilt in Nashville on May 4 for the annual Battle of the Barrel. The game is set to begin at 6 p.m. Eastern Time and will be broadcast on ESPN2, with radio coverage available on 93.9 The Ville.
This matchup brings Louisville back to Nashville, where last year they began their run to the College World Series by winning the NCAA Nashville Regional. In that tournament, Louisville defeated East Tennessee State, top-seeded Vanderbilt, and Wright State.
The Battle of the Barrel has been held every year since it started in 2012 except for 2020. Tuesday’s game marks the fourteenth meeting in this series, with Louisville currently leading seven games to six over Vanderbilt. Overall, Louisville has a record of fourteen wins and twenty-nine losses against Vanderbilt but won both meetings last season.
Several players have contributed notable performances this season. Tague Davis broke his own freshman home run record from last year and now leads nationally with thirty home runs and eighty-four runs batted in through forty-eight games. Lucas Moore leads the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) with thirty-two stolen bases this season and is second all-time at Louisville with one hundred two career steals. Jimmy Nugent has hit seven home runs over his last ten games after transferring from Lincoln Trail College, while Zion Rose leads the team with a .416 batting average despite missing time due to injury.
Louisville’s pitching staff and catchers have also limited opponents’ running game; opposing teams have succeeded only twenty-seven times out of fifty-four steal attempts against them this season—a fifty percent caught stealing rate that ranks second nationally—and have picked off seventeen runners so far.
