Tennessee's dominance through the first month of the season has become so apparent that one of the most authoritative college baseball media outlets demoted an LSU team on a 15-game winning streak from No. 1 in its Top 25 and replaced the Tigers with the Volunteers on Monday.
At 20-0, the Vols are the only remaining unbeaten team in Division I. They're off to the best start in program history and coming off a three-game home sweep against what was a top-10 Florida.
D1Baseball.com promoted the defending national champions over a now-No. 2 LSU (15-1) that went 4-0 last week and swept Missouri. D1Baseball said that since it began its rankings in 2015, it had never taken a No. 1 team off the top perch after an unbeaten week.
Tennessee, ranked No. 1 by Baseball America for a third straight week, is now the consensus top team. Arkansas (18-2) remains No. 3.
“Just got to keep going,” said Cannon Peebles, whose pinch double gave Tennessee the lead in a 7-4 win Sunday. “Last year we were very fortunate to do what we did. Last year doesn't really matter anymore. Every single person on this team is focused on this year and we take it game by game, and I think that's why we've had this start.”
There are no weaknesses. Liam Doyle, who leads the nation with 53 strikeouts, heads a staff that ranks first with a 1.72 ERA and 5.61 hits allowed per nine innings. Offensively, the Vols lead the nation with 2.65 homers per game and .662 slugging percentage and are second at 11.3 runs per game.
Tennessee hosts East Tennessee State (15-4) on Tuesday before traveling to a top-10 Alabama (20-1) for a Thursday-to-Saturday series. The Crimson Tide swept Texas A&M on the road over the weekend.
It took 66 at-bats for Stanford freshman Rintaro Sasaki to break through with his first collegiate home run. Japan's all-time high school leader went deep three times over six at-bats Saturday and Sunday as the Cardinal swept Duke. He was 6 of 14 with eight RBIs in the series and is batting .338/.424/.500 through 18 games.
Northwestern's Trent Liolios had three homers in a 13-5 win over Penn State and a total of four in the doubleheader split Saturday. Liolios had nine homers and batted .209 in 52 games last season. So far this season he has eight homers and a .382 batting average through 17 games.
Arizona State's offense, held to a combined four runs in two straight losses last week, unleashed some pent-up frustration in the second game of its road series with TCU on Saturday.
The Sun Devils won 26-9, the most runs they've scored in a conference game since 2000 and tied for the most TCU has ever allowed. ASU's 28 hits also were a TCU opponent record. Kyle Walker hit the first of ASU's five homers leading off the game. The Sun Devils won 12-11 on Sunday to take the series.
Kansas (17-3) hit nine home runs while winning two of three against Baylor. The Jayhawks, who are third in the nation in scoring at 10.4 runs per game, have gone deep 46 times through 20 games. Jackson Hauge, a transfer from Division II Mankato State, has a team-best 11. ... Oregon State's Ethan Kleinschmit has allowed just six hits and a run with two walks and 15 strikeouts in his last 11 2/3 innings over two appearances. ... Florida State left-hander Wes Mendes allowed no earned runs and struck out eight over a career-high seven innings as the Seminoles beat Boston College 6-2 Saturday to complete a three-game sweep. ... Texas Southern stole 17 bases in a 20-7 win over Mississippi Valley State on Friday, the most since Alabama State had the same number of steals against Tuskegee in 1991.
AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
FILE - Tennessee head coach Tony Vitello pictured before an NCAA College World Series baseball game against Florida State on Wednesday, June 19, 2024, in Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Mike Buscher, File)
A key adviser warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of “all clandestine activities” and breaking up the CIA.
The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that 47% of the political officers in U.S. embassies were controlled by the CIA.
Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Thursday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it.
Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercuts the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also say they understand why doubters gravitate toward the theory.
“You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,” said Gerald Posner, whose book, “Case Closed,” details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman.
Critics of the Oswald-acted-alone conclusion had predicted that previously unreleased material would bolster their positions. One of them, Jefferson Morley, the editor of the JFK Facts blog, said Thursday that newly public material is important to “the JFK case.” Morley is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination.
Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is still more unreleased material, including 2,400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family.
Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.
“It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn’t pay close attention,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century"
Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the “origin story” of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA.
Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later.
Schlesinger told Kennedy that all covert operations should be cleared with the U.S. State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled.
Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now are “non-CIA,” and in most places, ambassadors do not automatically defer to the CIA.
“CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors, because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information.
But he noted: “If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you’re going to have a different picture. You’re going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations.”
Schlesinger's memo ends with a previously redacted page that spells out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley sees it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating.
The plan never came to fruition.
Sabato said that Kennedy simply “needed the CIA” in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964.
“Let’s remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,” Sabato said.
Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK’s presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations “avidly.”
“I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community,” Naftali said. “You can you can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he’s directing it.”
Associated Press writer David Collins in Hartford Connecticut, contributed to this report.
FILE - Secret servicemen standing on running boards follow the presidential limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy, right, rear seat, and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, left, as well as Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie, in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963. (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)
FILE - In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas. (AP Photo/Justin Newman, File)
FILE - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harvard University historian and President John F. Kennedy's former personal assistant, holds a brief lecture as his book "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House" was presented to Italian public on Jan. 24, 1966 in Rome. Sitting at left is Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini Jr. who introduced Schlesinger to the audience. (AP Photo/Gianni Foggia, File)
FILE - This Nov. 22, 1963 file photo shows President John F. Kennedy riding in motorcade with first lady Jacqueline Kenndy in Dallas, Texas. (AP Photo, file)
