Shortstop Ryan Klosterman, a regular on VU's 2004 super regional participant, checks in at No. 87 on our top 100 players we've covered.
Honors and awards: 2004 SEBaseball.com third team All-Southeastern Conference
2004 All-SEC Tournament
2004 All-Charlottesville Regional
2004 team MVP
In the VU record book: Single-season triples: tied-first (eight, 2004)
Single-season runs scored: fifth (72, 2004)
Single-game assists: first (11 vs. ETSU, 2003)
Before VU: Starred at Clermont (Fla.) High, hitting .410 with two homers and 28 RBIs as a senior. Made first-team all-county and honorable mention all-state as a senior, and was all-county as a junior. Spent two years at Clemson while Tim Corbin was an assistant there.
Freshman (2001-Clemson): Played 16 games and had 14 at-bats. Got his first collegiate hit (an RBI double) vs. North Carolina State.
Sophomore (2002-Clemson): Redshirted.
Sophomore (2003): Transferred to Vanderbilt after Corbin was named its head coach. Started all 55 games at shortstop for a team that made the program's first SEC tournament in seven years. Hit .258/.348/.400 with three home runs in SEC regular-season games, and finished second in the league in stolen bases (28) and attempts (37) in all games. Fielded .954 in all contests and .948 in league play.
Junior (2004): Had a banner year at shortstop, playing in (and starting) all but one of the team's 65 contests. VU went 45-19, broke a 24-year NCAA tournament drought (and advanced to the Austin Super Regional), went 16-14 in SEC regular-season play and dropped the SEC tournament championship game to South Carolina. Started all 30 regular-season SEC games, hitting .370/.429/.543 in them. Fielded .973 and .986 in league regular-season play, and established a school record for assists in a season (177), since broken by Dansby Swanson. Also set the school record for runs (72) at the time, which has also since been broken. Hit .333/.400/.778 in the SEC tournament and .318/.333/.364 in the NCAA tournament. Swiped 16 of 19 bases that season.
Post-VU: Klosterman was drafted after his redshirt junior season (2005) in Round 5 by Toronto. He played professionally from 2006-11, spending the last two seasons at AAA, but never making the Majors. He then spent eight years on the baseball staff at Central Florida, serving as hitting coach and recruiting coordinator. Bryant University named Klosterman its head coach last July, and the Bulldogs went 4-11 in his abbreviated first season.
Final thoughts, and why I ranked him where I did: Klosterman was an offensive and defensive force at shortstop in two years that set the foundation to change the trajectory of Vanderbilt baseball. Klosterman was not only steady in the field (he got to a ton of balls and made 19 errors over 118 VU games, for a .963 fielding percentage), but made a remarkable number of huge, spectacular defensive plays late in 2004 and was on ESPN's Plays of the Day many times. (Those videos no longer exist, but you can find a reference to them here.)
Klosterman benefitted from being a fourth-year junior at a time when most stars are out of the college game, but was also young for his classification (he turned 22 during the 2004 SEC tournament). His career didn't have a long peak, but he did virtually everything well and was a star for that 2004 team. He deserves a place here for those reasons.
* "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.
