Lipscomb downs Vols

[BrunswickDawg]

So is playing time more important than NIL to baseball players in the portal? Seems like $ #1 along with guaranteed starting spot in football/basketball. College $sports is the Wild, Wild West with very few rules. Saw we are after a WR that we will be his 4th school in 4 years if we get him. Does progress toward a degree even count anymore? The two previous portal classes in football saw less than 50% of portal entrees getting a landing spot. Don't know about baseball or basketball %. Most think they are going Pro and looks as though educational opportunity being lost and given up big time.

Baseball players want to play. If baseball players didn't just want to play, the 11.7 schollys would have killed the college game a long time ago. I think part of that is that is because of the minor league system. You can see across the country how hard it is to make it to MLB because we have so many minor league teams. You go and watch minor league games and think "these guys are awesome", and not a single one of them ever makes it to the Bigs. One of my best friends lived in Nashville before he moved to my home town. We were going thru his Nashville Sounds cards one day - Don Mattingly, Steve Balboni, Dave Righetti, all MLB guys. He throws one card out and says "this was the BEST guy on that team. He was a star, and the nicest guy. Never understood how he didn't make it to the Yankees." It was Buck Showalter (this was before he was an MLB manger).

It's also a sport where it is incredibly rare - like once or twice a generation - where you see a kid like Bob Feller, Dwight Gooden or Andruw Jones make to the Bigs at 19 or 20. At the same time you see guys battle to be rookies at 29-30 - or even a miracle guy like Jim Morris, who goes from High School coach to MLB at 35.

[Commercecomet24]

Baseball players want to play. If baseball players didn't just want to play, the 11.7 schollys would have killed the college game a long time ago. I think part of that is that is because of the minor league system. You can see across the country how hard it is to make it to MLB because we have so many minor league teams. You go and watch minor league games and think "these guys are awesome", and not a single one of them ever makes it to the Bigs. One of my best friends lived in Nashville before he moved to my home town. We were going thru his Nashville Sounds cards one day - Don Mattingly, Steve Balboni, Dave Righetti, all MLB guys. He throws one card out and says "this was the BEST guy on that team. He was a star, and the nicest guy. Never understood how he didn't make it to the Yankees." It was Buck Showalter (this was before he was an MLB manger).

It's also a sport where it is incredibly rare - like once or twice a generation - where you see a kid like Bob Feller, Dwight Gooden or Andruw Jones make to the Bigs at 19 or 20. At the same time you see guys battle to be rookies at 29-30 - or even a miracle guy like Jim Morris, who goes from High School coach to MLB at 35.

You learn over time if you've been involved with the game in coaching, teaching it, training that each step the level of talent gets greater and greater. When I was a younger man I thought guys I played with and against were gonna make it to the bigs and never did. I played with and against some great players, and very, very, very few made it to the bigs and most only had a cup of coffee. It teaches you to evaluate baseball talent a little differently and know how hard it is to make it. I've coached a lot of players that have played college ball and a few who have had stints in mlb, but it's just so hard and it's dog eat dog.

You're right about baseball players being built differently and wanting to just play. Heck made when I was younger I would've paid them to let me play in the minors, lol!