CSTV.com's Extra Innings interview with John Anderson.

I'm learning a lot about Gopher baseball these last couple months so this is all new to me, but Coach Anderson was a player on the 1977 National Championship team. He started the season as a pitcher but was injured, became student manager and soaked up everything he could from then coach Dick "Cheif" Seibert. This is what led to his coaching career but here is a rather interesting story from the Q & A.

Coach Anderson:
In fact, interesting story, we were coming back from Iowa after winning the Big 10 on the last weekend of the season and I'm in the back of the bus playing cards and Chief calls me up to the front of the bus. He tells me that we have to have a vote for the team MVP. So he has me hand out slips of paper to everybody on the bus. I go back and collect them and hand them to Chief. A few minutes later he stands up in front of everybody and says, "Dammit, you guys get serious here! You just voted our student manager as MVP. Quit screwing around and vote again." So I passed the pieces of paper out again, they all voted and I got one more vote that time than I did before.

Coach Anderson stats of note...

942 careers wins
17th among active coaches
1 season of fewer than 30 wins (his 2nd season with 27 wins)
6 straight Big Ten title game appearances

Gopher Baseball coach John Anderson

Star Trib interview with #14 (coach John Anderson). Here are a couple of interesting points...

• 935 career wins and counting

• coach Anderson talks about the coming rule changes in 2008. These rule changes should significantly help to close the gap between Northern/Midwest teams vs. Southern/West Coast teams.