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2023 college baseball/softball thread

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by dixiehack, Mar 3, 2023.

  1. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    Batman and HanSenSE like this.
  2. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    Tough year to be an Aggie fan. They generally had a pretty good baseball program, the last coach did well and got the Wazzu job. They also had some guy and his son coach there for about 40 years (the Wards?) in the not-so-distant past. They need to be in the MWC but that will never happen because they're UNM's red-headed stepbrother.
     
  3. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Bringing this over from the NFL thread, @mateen , so as not to clutter that one up with college baseball talk.
    What the hell happened to Minnesota's baseball program? I just got to looking at their record the past few years and ... yikes. They made the NCAA Tournament a couple of times and even got to a super regional in 2018, and have absolutely cratered since then. It looks like the fall accelerated after 2020, so did they get killed by COVID or what?
     
  4. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    I talked to the coach's brother at a tailgate in Surprise. He said John Anderson (42 years) will go as long as it keeps being fun, but I got the impression he's not having much fun. I do think Covid hurt them. They do have a guy who threw 100 MPH.
     
    Batman likes this.
  5. mateen

    mateen Well-Known Member

    It's hard to figure out - COVID hurt but then it hurt everybody, and the issues from being so far north hadn't kept them from being generally competitive in the Big Ten for almost 40 years.

    For whatever reason they're not getting all the high end Minnesota players they used to get. I think the spread of the traveling club stuff made those kids more visible nationally (Tennessee had a first-round pick last year who was a Minnesota kid).

    I can't imagine Anderson holds out much longer, but I'm sure they're going to let him do it on his terms if possible. I have never heard a bad word about the guy, and it's a remarkable story - while a student manager he was voted MVP, by the players, of a CWS team that included Molitor, and he's been head coach since he was 28.
     
  6. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    Drew Gilbert would have driven Anderson crazy. At Tennessee they didn't care about the stupid shit he did. Microville Tech has/had a couple good pitchers from Minnesota (one was Gilbert's teammate at Stillwater) and had another from Webster, WI., before he transferred to Ole Miss. In the old days they all would have been Gophers.
     
  7. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    I know Southern Miss, of all places, made some recruiting inroads into Minnesota. One of their best players of recent vintage, Matt Wallner, was from there and is one of the top prospects in the Twins' organization. He originally signed with North Dakota, which dropped its program, so he wound up at Southern Miss. While recruiting him, the coaches found a few other guys up there as well.
     
  8. mateen

    mateen Well-Known Member

    Anderson's long-time assistant/chief recruiter going back to the mid-80s retired in 2018, right before the decline started, and I've seen speculation that this explains part of it.

    Minnesota's 2023 high school class has kids committed to Wichita State, Texas A&M, Washington State, Arizona, and Duke; kids from 2022 went to Arizona, Oregon, N.C. State, and Wichita State. Minnesota kids just didn't go to those places 10 or 20 years ago.
     
  9. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    If you are only getting a fraction of a scholarship and still have to account for living expenses, the Twin Cities have to be a bitch I’d imagine.
     
  10. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    For somebody who's supposedly the savior of Tennessee baseball, Tony Vitello sure can't seem to teach his players how to run the goddamn bases.
     
    TigerVols likes this.
  11. goalmouth

    goalmouth Well-Known Member

    Tulane -- off to a 2-11 start under new coach Jay Uhlman, former assistant to Travis Jewett who was fired after the 2022 season -- gives up 13 hits, 13 walks, and six HBP in 17-7 loss to Campbell.
     
  12. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    East Carolina unveils its new "Powder Purple" uniforms.

     
    dixiehack likes this.
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