The VandySports 100: No. 96, Mike Baxter

Mike Baxter ranks 97th in our ranking of the 100 best VU athletes we've covered. Here's more about his Vanderbilt career.

Honors and awards: SEBaseball.com second-team All-Southeastern Conference (2005)

NCWBA National Player of the Week (April 4, 2005)

SEC Player of the Week (April 4, 2005)

Team MVP (2005)

In the VU record book: Career batting average: ninth (.345)

Before VU: Baxter transferred to VU from Columbia University. Before that, he starred at New York's Archbishop Molloy High, where he was first-team all-city as a senior, and first team all-Queens as a sophomore and junior.

Freshman (2003-Columbia): Baxter stated 42 of 43 games (19 at first, 23 at third), hitting .375 with 70 hits, 12 doubles, three triples and a home run, scoring 44 runs and knocking in 32.

Sophomore (2004-Vanderbilt): Started all 64 games on a team that fell to Texas in the super regional. Thirty-nine starts came at DH and 25, at first base. Had 26 multi-hit games and nine multi-RBI games, swiping 13 bases in 17 tries. Hit .290/.315/.371 in Southeastern Conference regular-season games, with 14 RBIs and 10 runs scored. Hit .316 with two RBIs in 19 at-bats in the Southeastern Conference tournament, helping VU to an appearance in the finals. Was 3-for-11 with a pair of runs scored in the Charlottesville Regional, helping VU to the championship of that event. It was the Commodores' first appearance in the NCAA tournament since 1980.

Junior (2005-Vanderbilt): Led the team in batting average with a .374 mark while starting all 55 games and stealing 27 times in 33 attempts. Hit .364/.439/.537 in SEC games, with four home runs, 24 RBIS, 20 runs scored and 13 steals in 18 attempts. Fielded .987 with six errors as the team's primary first baseman.

Post-VU: San Diego selected Baxter in Round 4 of the 2015 MLB Draft. He played 232 MLB games--185 with the Mets--in a career spanning 2010-15. Posted a bWAR of 0.5 and hit .228/.333/.331.The most memorable play of Baxter's MLB career came when he slammed into the wall after making a catch to preserve Johan Santana's no-hitter (see video below). Baxter was named VU's hitting coach in 2017 and has been in that role ever since. He's had great success and led an offense that established a school record with 578 runs scored for the 2019 SEC and national champions.

Final thoughts, and why I ranked him where I did: His first season was an average one, but he was an every-day starter for the team that put VU baseball back on the map after nearly a quarter-century of irrelevancy.

The next year, Baxter was an under-appreciated star on a team that gets forgotten because it was the last VU squad not to make the NCAA tournament. That wasn't a bad team as much as it was an unlucky one: VU went 13-17 in conference play despite out-scoring opponents by a 136-133 mark in league games. Six of those losses were by one run. Two came in extra innings. That team had a 20 RPI and played the 10th-toughest schedule in the country heading into the NCAA selection process.

Baxter is held down by a few things. He didn't play an impact defensive position. He didn't have as big an impact on big winning compared to other star players in the Tim Corbin era. He also had a short career, but the flip side to that is that he was good enough to lead school early. Had he stayed around for 2006, he'd probably made first-team All-SEC.

In short, he had enough of an impact at his peak to make the list, but not the larger or more significant body of work that most ahead of him enjoyed.

* "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.