Fresh on the heels of a basketball SEC tournament title and a gymnastics national title, the Georgia baseball team wrapped up the 2008 SEC championship on Sunday in dramatic fashion at Vanderbilt. Georgia jumped out to a 12-4 lead on Sunday but had to hold on before Joshua Fields closed the door for his 15th save of the year and a 12-10 win.

If there was a single play of the weekend, it came on Saturday. Georgia’s lifeless offense roared to life in the final two frames after going scoreless all day. They scored two in the ninth to force extra innings and then added two more in the top of the tenth. Fields was brought on to close the door, but he didn’t start out in his typical dominant fashion. Fields walked the first batter on four straight pitches and then threw three more balls to the second batter of the inning. Matt Olson then made a sliding catch on a David Macias bloop into shallow right field for the first out of the inning. If that ball had dropped, Vandy would have had two runners on with no outs and a shaky Fields on the mound. Instead Fields recovered to strike out two of the next three batters to even the series and make Sunday’s championship-clinching win possible.

When you look at a list of Georgia’s conference titles in baseball, there’s no question that these are the golden years for the program:

1933
1953
1954
2001
2004 (shared with Arkansas)
2008

The regular season isn’t finished yet. We have the annual battle at Turner Field against Georgia Tech on Tuesday. Though Tech has clinched the season series, a win against the Jackets would be very important if Georgia wants a leg to stand on when it comes time for postseason seeding. The SEC title is a big trump card to hold, but a season sweep at the hands of Tech wouldn’t look very good.

The Diamond Dawgs wrap up the regular season with a home series against Alabama this weekend. Postseason seeding is also an issue in this series (a few more SEC wins could never hurt), and Bama will have a lot to play for with a logjam atop the SEC West. Bama is just 1 1/2 games behind LSU in the West, but they’re only half a game out of fourth place.