Former Commodore outfielder and current Vanderbilt baseball assistant David Macias is No. 79 on our list of 100 greatest VU players we've covered.
Honors and awards: 2007 Houston College Classic all-tournament team
2008 first team All-SEC
2008 All-SEC defensive team
In the VU record book: Single-season hits: tied-sixth (96, 2008)
Career at-bats: 10th (784)
Career hits: 10th (255)
Career runs scored: 10th (269)
Before VU: Macias, a middle infielder, came to Nashville from Houston powerhouse The Woodlands. (He played with Shea Robin, who lately became VU's starting catcher.) Hit .400 with five home runs, 35 RBIs and 10 steals as a senior. Perfect Game ranked him the No. 372 player in the class. He also played wide receiver on the No. 7-ranked team in the country.
Freshman (2005): Played 10 games with four starts, three coming in the last week of the regular-season.
Sophomore (2006): Played in all but one of the team's 65 games, and started 63, all in center field, for a 38-27 (16-14 SEC) squad that lost to Georgia Tech in the finals of the Atlanta Regional. Fielded .985 with two errors. Started all 30 SEC games, hitting .327/.451/.354, with nine RBIs and 26 runs scored and a 1.000 fielding percentage. Finished fifth in the SEC in on-base percentage in all games and fifth in hit-by-pitches (15). Had a 17-game hitting streak, had 21 multi-hit games and hit in 52 games overall. Went 8-for-20 in the SEC tournament as the Commodores lost the championship game to Ole Miss. Made the Cape Cod All-Star team in the summer.
Junior (2007): Started all 67 of the team's games in center field for a 54-14 (22-8) team that won the SEC regular-season and tournament. Fielded .965 and .955 in conference regular-season games. VU was ranked No. 1 most of the season, but fell in the Nashville Regional to Michigan. Hit .279/.376/.328, with 10 RBIs and 24 runs scored, in SEC regular-season play. Scored the game-wining run vs. Belmont on a wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth. Had a career-high four hits vs. Austin Peay.
Senior (2008): Started all 63 of the team's games. VU went 41-22 (15-14), made the quarterfinals of the SEC tournament and finished third in the Tempe Regional. Hit .347/.423/.581 in league regular-season play, finishing second on the team in homers in league play (six) while fielding .984 with two errors and five assists. Knocked in 23 runs, scored 28 and fielded 1.000 in SEC games.
Post-VU: The Chicago Cubs drafted Macias in the 19th round in 2008. Macias briefly made it to AAA with the Cubs in 2009 before retiring after 2011. Macias went into coaching, and was on the 2014 and '15 staffs, before going to the Seattle Mariners organization and managing briefly. Macias is now back at VU and was on the coaching staff for the 2019 national championship team.
Final thoughts, and why I ranked him where I did: Macias was the quintessential, gritty Vanderbilt player in the period where coach Tim Corbin was building the program from one that was good, and sometimes great (as it certainly was in 2007), before it became elite around 2011. He was a highly-regarded recruit but not an elite one, and spent his first year on campus mostly on the bench as he learned to play outfield.
His last three seasons, he missed one game and started all but two. Mostly, Macias just got on base any way he could. He was hit by 47 pitches and walked 99 times, and only struck out 101 times in 966 career plate appearances. The switch-hitting Macias added some pop (nine home runs) as a senior while becoming one of the three outfielders on the league's all-defensive team.
Between a peak that earned him first-team all-conference, a ton of winning (VU made the NCAA tournament all three of the seasons he started) and a top-10 placement on the school's career hits chart, there's little doubt that Macias belongs in our top 100.
* "RC/ARC-27" are how many runs a player "created" per 27 outs, according to a Bill James formula. The first is a player's raw total for that season, and the second is the same number adjusted to an average run-scoring environment from 2003-19.
