Aria Gerson

Literary fiction is also pretty niche as it is. I don’t think there’s an inherent societal need for people to read litfic, so I don’t think it’s per se a problem that its product is preferred by a particular demographic

Tim Corbin gives Vanderbilt baseball injury updates after fourth straight loss Here are Vanderbilt baseball injury updates on Austin Nye, Matthew Shorey and Miller Green.

Pessimistic Vanderbilt injury updates from last night on Matthew Shorey and Colin Barczi, neither of whom sounds particularly close to returning. There was no update on Austin Nye.

On the positive side, Brodie Johnston + Rustan Rigdon are set to return today: www.tennessean.com/story/sports...

Mikayla Blakes of Vanderbilt women's basketball wins SEC Player of the Year Mikayla Blakes became the second Vanderbilt women's basketball player to be named SEC Player of the Year. Aubrey Galvan won SEC Freshman of the Year.

Vanderbilt women’s basketball became just the sixth squad to sweep the SEC Player, Coach and Freshman od the Year awards as Mikayla Blakes, Shea Ralph and Aubrey Galvan were honored: www.tennessean.com/story/sports...

I am begging literary fiction authors to learn about paragraphs. It doesn’t make your book more meaningful to make it unreadable 😭 I swear this is some weird litfic rite of passage that it can’t be real litfic unless it’s nonsensical

(Also this is all about a book I actually like!!!)

Fun Vandy women’s basketball stat: Vanderbilt completed the regular season without having a single player foul out of a game even once

The way I had to explain to New Yorkers after their cold snap why it’s better to walk than take transit if the distance isn’t too long in those temps 😂

60 degrees out today and my barre instructor told me it was too cold outside for me to be walking…

Oh honey I walked 3+ miles a day in negative windchills in college in the midwest 😂😂

needing coaches to have been alumni

people also do not know the real history of "Michigan man" which, while it still came from Bo, was in reference to not allowing a coach who had already left for another school to keep coaching Michigan. (The Lane Kiffin situation, but in 1989.)

The original context was never about...

I just remember it being a huge deal that Michigan was in one of those games, and that the games that happened to be on ABC were incredible and tons of people watched them. That's what prompted ESPN and ABC to start showing way more women's sports games on TV

(If you asked people when was the first year since the widespread adoption of the internet that women's NCAA tournament games were on network TV, all of them would get it wrong. It was 2021.

And Michigan was a big part of it, their Sweet Sixteen game vs. Baylor outdrew men's games the same day!)

historic lack of support for women's athletics throughout big athletic departments, football coaches pushing against the existence of women's sports and the NCAA and TV networks making women's sports hard to watch.

They haven't had the chance to grow that football has.

not specific to Michigan, but one of the most bothersome pieces of college sports discourse to me is the idea that female college athletes don't deserve big NIL/revenue sharing money bc their sports can only exist bc football players are underpaid.

it's not that simple if you know the history of...

I am not sure what it’s like now but at least when I was there, I never heard any men’s teams except football use it, but most of the women’s teams did. The players surely didn’t know, but some of those coaches had been around long enough that they definitely knew…

Back then there was even more I wanted to write that I didn’t. It always struck me the usage of “the team, the team, the team,” which would’ve been a good mantra had it not been clear that Bo didn’t include everyone in “the team.”

(At that point it was actually the women’s teams that used it most…)

I wrote this SIX years ago and there’s only been more and more since then www.michigandaily.com/sports/aria-...

How Mikayla Blakes' premonition came true in Vanderbilt's win at Tennessee Here's how Mikayla Blakes became the piece that helped Vanderbilt women's basketball beat Tennessee three straight times.

Mikayla Blakes famously committed to Vanderbilt while the team was on the bus home from a loss in Knoxville.

She called her shot. Two years later, make no mistake: her Commodores are the dominant team in the state. www.tennessean.com/story/sports...

But if he can continue to hammer fastballs and in-zone sliders while avoiding in-zone whiff as he has so far, that will help him immensely to avoid some of the issues he had last season while hitting for a high average with strong power production

And the results included 2 singles, a double, a home run + reaching on an error.

In SEC play I expect teams will attack him the same way as UCI and Arizona by going primarily with offspeed pitches. He will need to avoid too much chase there since that's where he gets in trouble.

On top of that, when he has seen fastballs, he hasn't missed. He has not swung and missed at a fastball or sinker in any of these 5 games, and the EVs on the balls in play against fastballs or sinkers were 87, 112, 106, 103, 98, 95, 89 and 110...

The other thing he's done better is situational recognition. Example: UC Irvine game when he came up with runners on second + third with two outs. Recognized he was unlikely to see anything to hit. Took a 5-pitch walk.

So far he's hammered in-zone sliders and fastballs, while keeping minimal chase on sliders. Curves and changeups are where he has chased and whiffed more (so far has missed at 5/15 curves + changeups he's swung at, 4 of which were out of the zone)

However, there are a few things worth noting here. First, his performance on sliders. So far, he's only chased 1 of 9 out of zone sliders he's seen. He also made contact with 5/6 sliders he's swung at and those resulted in balls with EVs of 107, 96, 95 and 111 (plus a foul ball)

Now, the zone recognition with these pitches is still a work in progress. Across these 5 games so far, he swung at 11/18 in-zone offspeed pitches (61%) and 10/31 out of the zone (30%)*

*Baseball Savant zones may not be 100% accurate

Because of this reputation, all of the teams he has faced in the tournaments so far, save TCU, have thrown him more offspeed than fastballs. Arizona and UC Irvine have thrown him almost no fastballs, because we all know what he can do to a fastball.

A data-driven look at Brodie Johnston's approach early on in 2026 (shoutout Baseball Savant)

Brodie came into the season with a reputation as a whiff-prone slugger who would get himself out if you could get him to chase out of the zone.

Per the Baseball Savant data, Nye was sitting 91 and throwing the fastball 33% of the time tonight, compared to sitting 95 and throwing it 51% of the time during his week 1 outing against Texas Tech

Pitcher Austin Nye leaves Vanderbilt baseball vs Arizona after 1 inning Austin Nye left his start after just one inning for Vanderbilt baseball vs. Arizona.

Austin Nye left Vanderbilt's game today after one inning after experiencing a significant drop in velocity from his previous outings, though a reason for the departure was not immediately given www.tennessean.com/story/sports...

Extremely condescending and unwelcoming to small market fans or fans who got into it via the minors. I am an expansion agnostic, but I am refreshed by a perspective that centers these fans rather than saying living in one of the world’s biggest cities is the only ethical way to consume the game

As a baseball fan and writer who has lived in multiple minor league cities (and multiple expansion target cities), I don’t think enough focus has been put on the harm done by contracting the minors when it comes to growing the game + building a fanbase. Instead, too often the coverage is…