Aria Gerson
@aria-gerson
Vanderbilt and college baseball for Tennessean/USA TODAY Network | K-BB% enthusiast | Lover of spreadsheets, collector of minor league t-shirts, hater of replay 📧agerson@gannett.com 🐦aria_gerson 📷agersonsports
But Vanderbilt has found/developed a lot of hidden gem arms. This is seeming to hold true among their current players. Unranked HS arm Austin Nye is the best draft prospect among current pitchers. Jury's still out on whether Stillman can throw enough strikes to be a top prospect
Between 2017-19, Vanderbilt landed a top-100 draft prospect pitcher in each year, and landed 4 in 5 years between 2015-19. Between 2020-24, Vanderbilt landed just one top-100 draft prospect pitcher, but it has had one in each of the last two classes (Aiden Stillman, Joseph Contreras).
With Johnson and Waite potentially becoming Vanderbilt's highest-drafted position players since Enrique Bradfield Jr. The 2025 class was the only one in this timespan that didn't contain any position players seen as draftable out of high school.
and 1 more stayed about the same. Seven hitters who were not seen as draftable prospects out of HS eventually were drafted, including one first-rounder (JJ Bleday) and three more top-200 picks (Connor Kaiser, Dominic Keegan, CJ Rodriguez)
Vanderbilt to every power-first bat with bad plate discipline after getting Brodie Johnston to draw walks
I’m assuming this person just went to the fangraphs position player leaderboard (which doesn’t include the pitching for Ohtani) and this is what it currently looks like
Vanderbilt incoming freshman Michael Holt hit a 452-foot, 107 mph home run in the Appy League last night with a wood bat. For reference, that was harder than any home run Brodie Johnston hit in the Appy League in 2024. Multiple commits in this class show plus power:
Vanderbilt has posted a job opening for a baseball director of player strategy and personnel. Here are the listed duties for the role:
Here's a chart of the number of innings pitched by true freshmen every year of the Tim Corbin era. This year is on track to be the highest percentage of innings to freshmen since 2003. In the past 15 years, the better teams have had a freshman innings percentage below 25%, and often below 20%.
If I showed you these images and said "this is a third baseman fielding a bunt, where is he about to throw this ball to get the out"......you would all be wrong. Brodie Johnston, everybody!
This trend truly drives me insane bc: 1. There are no morally correct sports teams, some of these things that are dealbreakers to people are true of your favorite team too or the sport as a whole 2. Just let people hare sports teams! Way better to channel hate into that than hating other people
Made this sign for my Red Sox fan bf for his half marathon. Red Sox, you’re welcome!
this is also advice I’d give but not necessarily DC for sports…but a pro sports city. the very best building block you can have to another job is a high number of years living in a pro sports city, even if you’re not beat writing. it’s the No. 1 thing I wish someone had told me when I was in college
This is a take I can get with (if you hit a double, then overslide second, it’s still a double). Along with that I still strongly believe that reached on error should count towards your OBP! It’s still getting on base
Looking into some women's bracketology stuff and... Vandy on the left, Ohio State on the right. Hard to find two efficiency profiles more similar than this!
One of my Vanderbilt women’s basketball predictions in the preseason:
Who has the toughest schedule in SEC baseball this year? I created a metric based on the SEC preseason coaches poll, taking into account home vs. road, to determine who has the most difficult schedule. By this metric, Ole Miss is the toughest and Arkansas the easiest
These are all games Vandy played against P4s this year…compared to buy games where they’ll play 10 or 11