Gophers seasons ends at hands of host LSU

There’s little doubt that Minnesota baseball head coach John Anderson was one of many looking forward to this season after the train wreck that was the Gophers’ 2008 season. And although Minnesota’s 2009 season came to a grinding halt Sunday with a 10-3 loss to Louisiana State in the NCAA Baton Rouge regional final , he’ll certainly still take it.
“If you’d have told me at the end of last season that we’d be 40-19 and playing the level of baseball that we did, I’d surely have taken it,” he said.
With a runner-up regular season finish in the Big Ten and an appearance in the Big Ten tournament and NCAA regional championship games, the bitter memories of the Gophers’ worst season in more than 60 years were erased as Minnesota returned to the form that’s become expected of Anderson’s squads. If 2008 was a collapse, 2009 was something to build on.
“They played pretty consistently and at a pretty high level for 59 baseball games, and that’s hard to do sometimes,” Anderson said.
Of course, the day after the season ends, the next one begins. But looking too far forward would be a mistake, because the building blocks the Gophers will have to work with in 2010 remain unclear.
At first glance, they look to be in great shape. Just five players will be lost to graduation and, of those, only three — designated hitter Matt Nohelty and starting pitchers Tom Buske and Chauncy Handran — saw consistent playing time.
But two weekend starters and a career .366 hitter will surely be missed; couple that with questions about whether juniors Eric Decker and Derek McCallum will return for their final year of eligibility, and Minnesota may have some major holes to fill.
McCallum, a junior second baseman from Shoreview, Minn ., is fresh off one of the more remarkable offensive seasons in Gophers history. Along with his single-season record of 86 RBIs, McCallum recorded the sixth-highest batting average (.409) and slugging percentage (.741) in school history, the fourth-best hit total (95), and the third-most home runs (18) and total bases (172).
He will almost surely be selected in the 2009 Major League Baseball first-year draft, which runs from June 9-11. Whether he signs with a team remains to be seen, but needless to say, should he choose to forego his senior season, Minnesota will miss him dearly.
Perhaps even less likely to return to the Gophers’ lineup is fellow junior Decker, a centerfielder from Cold Spring, Minn. Decker was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in the 39th round in 2008 , but it’s likely that football will keep him from returning as a senior.
Decker has insisted for months that he has yet to make a choice between football and baseball, but after setting a slew of school records last fall and being named a Biletnikoff Award finalist, given annually to college football’s top receiver, his future looks brighter on the gridiron. If that’s the case, there’s little chance that Minnesota will have its speedy centerfielder next season.
Anderson said the Gophers could be losing a lot of quality players should Decker and McCallum leave, but he said the team will find a way to replace the departed.
“I do think we have more numbers of quality players that maybe not one guy can replace [McCallum, Decker, Nohelty and Buske], but maybe combinations can,” Anderson said. “That’s going to be our challenge, to try to find a little more depth in our team, but it’s really there.”
In fact, with freshmen that redshirted this season becoming available and a new class coming in, Anderson goes so far as to say Minnesota’s roster will be stronger next season, even if it loses that core group of players.
“I think we’re going to have a better 25-man roster next year than we had this year, no question about it,” he said. “We’re going to have more options and choices.”