The Michigan baseball team found a hidden gem this season in freshman left-hander Shane Brinham, who burst onto the national stage with a complete-game shutout of No. 13 Oregon. But just weeks after tossing 125 pitches against Ohio State in the Big Ten Tournament, Brinham entered the transfer portal, suddenly leaving the Wolverines without their brightest young star.
With Brinham now committed to Vanderbilt, the Daily’s baseball beat talked with Aria Gerson — a Commodores beat writer for the Nashville Tennessean and Daily alumnus — about Brinham’s decision, how the programs have been intertwined this century and what it means for the future of Michigan baseball.
Note: This interview transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
JKR: Tell me about Vanderbilt baseball. I know they have the number one recruiting class, and there just seems to be a lot of history between Michigan and Vanderbilt.
AG: So Vanderbilt really got good in the early 2000s, specifically in 2003, when they hired their current coach, Tim Corbin. When he was hired, he had previously worked as an assistant coach under Jack Leggett, who was the coach at the time at Clemson. Corbin was an assistant at Clemson, he took the Vanderbilt job, and one of the people that came along with him from Clemson that worked with him that first year was (former Wolverines coach) Erik Bakich.
He went back to Clemson?
Yeah, he was the head coach at Michigan, now at Clemson. So Erik Bakich actually worked with Tim Corbin for a few years right when Corbin first got started at Vanderbilt. And that had been a historically terrible program when he got there, but they really got good within about two years of him being there.
2007 was the first year they were really good … but that year, they lost to Michigan in the regional final, which was the first time that had ever happened for a team that was ranked number one overall. David Price was on the mound, Michigan hit a walk-off off of him. I believe they had actually been in the same regional the year before too, in 2006.
So Vandy got their revenge in 2019, then.
They did. They won their second national title in 2019, which was the year that they beat Michigan, and that year they had Kumar Rocker and JJ Bleday, who were the two most notable players on that team, major league wise. That team is often considered by one of the best college baseball teams ever. They won the SEC regular season, the SEC Tournament and the national championship.
They’ve fallen off a little bit over the past five years. They have not gone back to Omaha since 2021, when they made it back to the finals but lost. Vandy didn’t make the NCAA tournament at all this past year, which was the first time since 2005. So they were going hard on the recruiting trail and in the transfer portal to remedy that.
What do you think kept Michigan out of the tournament this year? I know there are a lot of factors that they look at when it comes to Q1 record and stuff like that. Or was it not deep enough of a conference tournament run? What weighs the most?
Sadly, I think it was the fact that they got swept by Ohio State the last weekend of the regular season. I think if that hadn’t happened, they would have made it. But it’s not really the fact that they got swept so much as what it did to their metrics. Going into the Ohio State series, I want to say their RPI was in the mid-30s, and it slipped all the way down to like the lower 40s.
In the conference tournament, they did well to not completely eliminate themselves, but I remember thinking that going into the Big Ten Tournament, Michigan probably needed to reach the semifinals, and they ended up only reaching the quarterfinals. So I think they just needed to win that game against Nebraska in order to really put themselves back in the conversation.
In terms of recruiting, what makes Vanderbilt an attractive destination compared to Michigan? In terms of program history, Michigan, from some of the 1950s, the 1980s and then even in 2019 seems pretty comparable to Vanderbilt.
AG: The first is that geographically, there’s more high school baseball talent in the south than there is in the Midwest, just because it’s not as popular of a sport in the Midwest. … And then I also think Vandy’s become the destination school for players who want something that’s really strong academically.
You add in that a lot of the kids that are being recruited these days were the ones who first grew up watching the teams with Dansby Swanson, et cetera. That was probably one of the first teams a lot of them knew in college baseball growing up, so Vandy has that brand cache as well, and then also NIL.
The SEC in general tends to put more money into baseball compared to other conferences. … Michigan spends a lot of money on hockey. No SEC team has a varsity-level hockey program, so they’re not spending anything on hockey. They spend that on baseball and softball instead.
So you have these kids that are getting paid, and now that you can give unlimited scholarships to anyone on your roster, and a lot of SEC teams are willing to give out scholarships to all of their players, so there’s that as well.
For Shane Brinham specifically, when we heard that he was coming, we thought Michigan was pretty lucky to get him on campus after he got drafted by the Dodgers. So it seemed like after the way this year went, we didn’t know if he was going to stay or not. But I guess the question is, why Vanderbilt as opposed to Texas A&M or another big name in the south? If you’re in his shoes, what are you thinking about that transfer decision?
Well, one thing for Vanderbilt specifically is that they needed pitching. That was their biggest problem this past year. Not just pitching, but starting pitching.
The other thing is that Vanderbilt — and I know that Michigan has a similar deal — can’t take rising seniors in the transfer portal because of their rules about credits transferring. So they needed either younger players, like sophomores and juniors, or they needed graduates.
So Vandy was looking for starting pitching. They needed someone who was not a rising senior, and there were really not a ton of options in the transfer portal that met that. Shane Brinham … was a good fit because they needed someone with starting experience, and obviously, somebody who has been at Michigan is familiar with the academic requirements.
At Vandy, if you’re an undergraduate student, you cannot take fully online degree programs. You have to actually go to class and you have to keep a decent GPA. So some transfers can’t do that. But at Michigan, it’s the same way, so you would be used to that, and they also have a good NIL situation, which made it a good fit for both sides there.
Did you talk to Coach Corbin about any of the transfers yet, or is there anything about when Brinham specifically or any of these transfers were on their radar?
I haven’t talked to him about that specifically yet, but I’m sure that he was on their radar from the time that he went in the portal. I don’t know exactly when he visited Vanderbilt, but I do know that he committed on the Fourth of July. He had been on my radar for quite some time prior to that as well.
It’s cool to see Michigan is kind of like the Vanderbilt of the north, when it comes to the academic situation. … I’m thinking of (junior first baseman) Matt Ossenfort, who played at Vandy and then left for the ACC and came to Michigan. A lot of who Michigan and the other higher-tier northern teams can get are guys in the SEC and ACC who aren’t playing very much. But what does it say about the future of Big Ten baseball that all of the hotshot young talent is leaving to head south?
I feel like Michigan, even in its heyday as a program under Eric Bakich, was really having to target very under-the-radar Midwestern players. That’s where (former left-hander) Tommy Henry or players like that were coming from. So it’s never really been easy to do recruiting in the Big Ten.
But the biggest red flag to me was seeing all the players leaving Oregon and USC, because those were two teams that were really good, that went to super regionals, and basically pretty much all of their good players left and went to the SEC. That’s something that maybe I could have expected from a team like Maryland, but maybe not from Oregon or USC.
It’s reflective of the financial situation of where these teams are allocating money. … It used to be that the SEC was so dominant and won national championships. Now it’s Big Ten teams winning more titles in football over the past couple years since NIL became a thing, and the general perception has been that Big Ten teams are funneling more money exclusively into football, while SEC teams are trying to spread the money around.
It depends on the school which sports, but women’s basketball, gymnastics, baseball, softball, volleyball — all of these sports have SEC teams that are powerhouses in those sports that pay a lot of money for their players. Maybe that’s money that, in the Big Ten, is going to football.
Michigan is a school that wants to always be elite at football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, hockey, softball even without Carol Hutchins anymore. So where does that leave Michigan baseball? Where Erik Bakich took the team in 2019, is that the ceiling?
I would say unless something really changes with how Michigan wants to treat and allocate money to baseball, it’s hard to see them going much further than just making it to the NCAA Tournament at this point. Although you never know. Troy made it to Omaha this year, so anything can really happen. But I think that in order for Michigan to be like a real contending team, they would need to decide to put a lot more money into baseball.
That’s not making a value judgment on it, though. When you look at Erik Bakich leaving for Clemson, in addition to his ties to Clemson, it’s just a better program. It’s easier to get into regionals. It’s easier to get into super regionals. It’s easier to go to Omaha when you’re in the ACC. There are a lot of built-in disadvantages for Big Ten teams beyond just the money.
There’s so many factors that go into it, but what you’re saying is if you’re Michigan, your best chance at competing is keeping your Shane Brinhams.
I’d say that’s what a lot of teams are like. I mentioned Troy going to Omaha. They had a player, a catcher who’s supposed to be a first-round pick.
Oh, Jimmy Janicki, yeah.
He blew up after he went to Troy, and Troy managed to keep him, and I’m sure that their Omaha run helped them raise whatever money they needed for him, or bought them time at the very least to try to get that. But that’s a key for them. … When you’re an underdog team, even if you don’t have that much NIL money to get the top-tier transfers or anything, you need to be competitive at the very least at keeping your best players on campus.
I guess we’ll see if Michigan is able to do that in the future. I think that’s everything I have, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down.
Alright, thank you.
Have a good one.
Yep, you too.
