Vanderbilt baseball has given the sporting world many great things.
Hawkins Field has been the backdrop for the rise of Tim Corbin, one of the most successful coaches in NCAA history. It’s been the layover between high school and a trip to Major League Baseball for All-Stars like David Price, Walker Buehler, Bryan Reynolds, and Sonny Gray. It’s responsible for two of the university’s five national championships — as many as the school’s powerhouse women’s bowling program.
With that jump in profile has come a backlash. That’s come, in part, thanks to the Opportunity Vanderbilt financial aid program that dares make the SEC’s most expensive school only slightly more pricy than the University of South Carolina via scholarship.
But it’s mostly due to two men who simply won’t shut the heck up during games.
They are the Vandy whistlers. They are the bane of the rest of the SEC and, beginning in June, any fanbase locked in a Regional, Super Regional, or College World Series with the Commodores.
Their incessant “chirp, chirp, chirp” (clap, clap, clap) call-and-response has overtaken “black/gold” chants at Vandy games as the backdrop to big moments. Commodore fans generally agree it’s tolerable. Few others share that sentiment, which leads to furor on social media whenever Vanderbilt winds up on a national broadcast.
Please, for the love of baseball, do something about the Vandy Whistler this year! They are ruining everyone else's experience.
— J Padge (@j_jkp0809) May 23, 2022
Thanks to former Vandy beat writer Adam Sparks at the Tennesseean, we know exactly who they are. The whistlers are two senior citizens who are regularly threatened with violence both online and in person.
Jeff Pack is a 69-year-old from Hermitage, Tennessee. Preacher Franklin is a 77-year-old from Smyrna, Tennessee. Franklin is the one you’re more likely to hear on broadcasts peppering at-bats with three short whistles followed by a series of claps. Many opposing fans will try to jump on this and turn it into a chant for their own team. This generally fails to pan out, with one notable exception being a Mississippi State crowd that absolutely flooded Omaha en route to last year’s College World Series title.
Both have been threatened with ejection for their whistling, though neither recounted actually being asked to leave a game, per Sparks. They’ve both been physically assaulted at games for whistling. They both show up at Vanderbilt football games as well, though no one complains about that because watching Vanderbilt football is a punishment in its own right and when you’re in hell you don’t complain about the catering.
Pack and Franklin have Corbin’s support and the general tolerance of the Commodore fans around them. But each June, the rest of the college baseball world comes together in a stunning display of unity to agree that these guys are the dirt worst.
Which doesn’t seem to bother the whistlers, as long as the Vandy Boys keep winning.
