Aria Gerson, Nashville Tennessean
·4 min read
Vanderbilt baseball shook up its staff in the offseason, firing assistants Mike Baxter and Tyler Shewmaker and replacing them with Jayson King and Ty Blankmeyer.
Baxter had been with the program since the 2018 season, including in its national championship season in 2019. However, moving on became necessary when the Commodores finished 13-17 in SEC play in 2024 and finished second-to-last in the conference in home runs.
Shewmaker was with the program from 2022-24, spending his first two seasons as a volunteer assistant before being elevated to a paid role in 2023.
With the changes, Vanderbilt will look to improve its offensive output and supplement the roster.
Here's how the new assistants could impact the program:
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Jayson King
King is experienced as a head coach. He's led his own program all but one year since 1997, including stops at Division III UMass-Boston and Division II Franklin Pierce before landing the job at Dayton, where he had been since 2018.
Because of his experience running a program, King should have the organizational skills necessary for a program like Vanderbilt and should be familiar with the level of attention to detail needed.
He has a strong reputation as an offensive coach, but his exact track record is somewhat difficult to ascertain. Although Dayton hit 65 home runs in 2024, less than all but one team in the SEC, that number was good for third in the Atlantic-10. Flyers batters also had the third-highest walk rate in the A-10, while Vanderbilt in 2024 struggled with plate discipline. Over King's six full seasons, Dayton finished in the top half of the league in on-base plus slugging (OPS) four times.
Two position players from the Flyers, Riley Tirotta and Mariano Ricciardi, were drafted in 2021. They were the first position players drafted from Dayton since 2010.
For King, there will be several areas to target with the hitters that are already on the team. Vanderbilt's 9.8% walk rate was the second-worst in the SEC and its isolated slugging percentage of .179 was the third-worst. Additionally, 43.7% of the balls the Commodores hit into play were on the ground, the second-highest in the SEC.
Even without a change in the team personnel, better plate discipline and recognition of breaking balls would likely lead to better results, as would an effort to hit the ball in the air more frequently, which would lead to more extra-base hits.
Ty Blankmeyer
Blankmeyer comes to Vanderbilt from Duke, where he was the recruiting coordinator. He is 30, which is much younger than the rest of the staff. Before Duke, he worked at Wake Forest. He has history in the Big East as a player at St. John's, and his father, Ed Blankmeyer, was the longtime head coach of the Johnnies. The elder Blankmeyer also employed Scott Brown as pitching coach before he left for Vanderbilt in 2012.
Blankmeyer has experience at two private schools in Duke and Wake Forest that have strong track records of player development. His time recruiting for the Blue Devils should suit him well in dealing with the academic restrictions at Vanderbilt, particularly when dealing with transfers. In this offseason, Duke has picked up several transfers from Ivy League and other academically minded schools, the same types of players who could be a good fit for the Commodores.
Because Blankmeyer was hired before the 2023 season at Duke, it's hard to ascertain which of the Blue Devils' recruits he was specifically responsible for. Duke's 2025 class so far is the fourth-best in the ACC and 15th-best nationwide according to Perfect Game. The 2024 class was 11th in the ACC and 48th nationwide and the 2023 class was eighth in the ACC and 26th nationwide. These recruiting classes have also featured a number of players from the northeast, an area Vanderbilt also likes to recruit.
Where Blankmeyer could help the Commodores is less in the ranking of the recruiting classes. Every year under Baxter, Vanderbilt brought in a top-10 recruiting class. But several of the highly regarded recruits in those classes haven't panned out, and in recent years the Commodores have gotten little out of lower-ranked position players in their classes.
In 2023 and 2024, Duke saw three players (pitchers James Tallon and Andrew Healy, and outfielder AJ Gracia) who were ranked 200 or lower by Perfect Game as recruits be named Freshman All-Americans. A fourth, infielder Andrew Fischer (who has since transferred to Ole Miss) was named to the ACC All-Freshman Team.
Blankmeyer's success in identifying lower-ranked recruits could be attributed to a scouting background, and that should help Vanderbilt's evaluations with greater resources that should enable the Commodores to still bring in top-ranked classes.
Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at agerson@gannett.com or on Twitter @aria_gerson.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Vanderbilt baseball: Evaluating Tim Corbin's hires to coaching staff
