If MSU, Ole Miss and Southern can all have competitive programs, that tells me that we really should be recruiting Mississippi the most. Yes, it takes a few from other areas, Matt Wallner is prime example.
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If MSU, Ole Miss and Southern can all have competitive programs, that tells me that we really should be recruiting Mississippi the most. Yes, it takes a few from other areas, Matt Wallner is prime example.
The baseball recruiting system is completely screwed up. Have a relative that is a MLB scout. He says that Perfect Game is absolutely scamming these parents, kids and coaches. Basically they promise you if you sign up for their teams (pay a s**t ton of money) from 9th grade on, get ranked then we?ll get you a scholarship. And they basically threaten you if you don?t then you won?t get noticed or a scholarship.
Meanwhile mlb scouts are shaking their heads at it all. These guys are making a ton of money off these parents, while not getting the best talent noticed. He showed me a video of a kid from a small town ms this weekend (6?1? 225) who is a switch hitter. Came up to JA for a game and hit bombs from both sides. Parents didn?t want to do the travel ball stuff so he?s not ranked. And likewise, his only offers are Juco and southern.
That's why those teams are doing well. They probably do not have as many daddy ball problems either, like TJ surgeryQuote:
Originally Posted by msugolf
Baseball recruiting has always been a mess. Polk was one of the worst and pissed off countless pro scouts. Polk would ask scouts who they were considering drafting and would offer scholarships. That and his camps were the extent of his recruiting efforts.
Recruiting can also be hindered by a coach with connections. I?ve seen a lot of talent wasted because the HC doesn?t recommend a player due to not seeing eye to eye. Also seen guys who have no business on a high school team get scholarships due to who Diddy knows and how much money is donated.
Well, it sounds like they're right. Maybe lazy college coaches are the problem, not PG.Quote:
Originally Posted by msugolf
I think it's an information & logistics problem not a lazy coach problem. There's a whole bunch of high schools out there and there's not nearly enough information out there for the coaches to get their hands on so they can start to narrow down on who they want to go after. Football and basketball don't have this problem because there's tons of recruiting services doing lots of leg work for the coaches already. Baseball isn't this lucky so they are forced to have to automatically narrow it down themselves by relying on the local travel teams to have the best players available in that area already on their teams.Quote:
Originally Posted by smootness
Also, those MLB scouts are not blameless. You could say that they are responsible for the obsession with velocity, since that is all they seem to want to recruit.Quote:
Originally Posted by msugolf
If you just recruit MS in baseball you will have a program that routinely misses the tourney and is rarely relevant.
The truth is that USM & South Alabama have better position players this year than MSU, LSU, Vandy, & Ole Miss.
The current difficulty that power programs are having in college baseball is that they are having to recruit kids so early (8th grade or 9th grade year) that they are naturally (human nature) committing & gravitating towards the more physically mature kids. Then once the non-physically mature kids (Wallner, Travis Swaggerty, etc) become good players their JR or SR years of high school, the power programs have no scholarship money left to give them or have stopped the scouting process because the class is full.
Canny will have top 5 recruiting classes at MSU, but, if most of those top recruits get drafted in the top 3 rounds & go pro, while USM & others are taking the late bloomers with real tools, then those schools will continue have better position players. LSU is terrible this year & MSU's recruiting class is about to get absolutely demolished in draft. Canny better learn to go out & find some under the radar, non-profile, quality position players that can impact the baseball but either due to speed or lack of projectable power don't appeal to pro-scouts, or like LSU, MSU will be stuck with very few quality position players. Think about this: Vandy is terrible this year but have what was 3 #1 ranked recruiting classes on their roster.
We all cheer that we are getting these big time recruits that won't make it to campus, but, if they are preventing us from being able to take late bloomers or we are stopping the scouting process because they classes are full, then it is hurting the program.
You could build the Camden Yards in college baseball & it simply won't make a huge difference. College baseball is about scouting & finding the niche of signing 4th-7th round high school draft prospects that turn into top 3 round draft prospects out of college. If you are just recruiting the top guys that are easy to scout & everyone loves, you won't get them to campus.
Just my take
Been there, tried it. It doesn’t work. We’ve simply sucked at recruiting. Cohen recruited slappers like crazy. He completely over thought the bat and ball changes, as well as the stadium. The years we had good years, we had a couple guys that could mash and good pitching depth. We have neither right now.
He also stopped recruiting & hired a JUCO assistant as his recruiting coordinatorQuote:
Originally Posted by Cooterpoot
Football staffs have 10 coaches, grad assts, and office personnel helping them recruit 85 guys for a full ride.
Basketball coaches have 5 guys recruiting 13 guys with full rides
College staffs have basically 5 guys recruiting a squad of 35- and trying to figure out how to divide 11.7 scholarships.
It's easy to see how things get missed
Sign dirtbags. Target guys that if drafted won't be drafted till late. We can win a natty with a team full of dirtbags because we won't be scrambling to try to fill 6-8 spots a year on signees taking the money. Don't even go after them if they are high draft picks. Sign dirtbags instead.
Agree. But it's virtually impossible to know who those guys are when they are in 8th or 9th grade. The mid-major have tons of scholarship money left over & are getting the those kids.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dawg61
I agree with this for the most part. Signing top flight guys is a pipe dream. Those guys are signing with colleges just for leverageQuote:
Originally Posted by Dawg61
We don't have to call them dirtbags though. It's not about how hard they play.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dawg61
There is actually a profile of player that you have to target.
Pro scouts like guys that profile. Meaning, center fielders that are fast, corner outfielders hit for power, SS that can field & hit, 1B that hit bombs, etc
In college baseball recruiting you have to recruit "tweeners". Just like in football recruiting, the tweeners are the guys that are good players but don't quite fit a position.
If you can corner the market on good tweeners in college baseball, you can consistently get to the CWS.
This all day. Maybe one kid on any travel team makes it go a higher level. Two reasons are first alot of kids quit round the 11th grade and 2nd injuries, TJ, Rotater Cuffs etc. Kids who play other fall sports are more likely to move on. Alot of older major Leaguers, Dal Murph, and doctors. Anderson. hate travel ball and encourage parents to let their kids play other sports..Quote:
Originally Posted by 5049
I am with you. I like the sound of recruiting the top talent but I do not think the reality matches up well with that. I think, being in Mississippi, with no extra scholarship money, we should be targeting the 4 star type players, or the tweeners, as you say.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShotgunDawg
The only way to entice the top guys to come is going to be money. The Floridas, Vanderbilts and LSUs will always be able to do that more readily than us. Especially Vanderbilt.
MSU has more funny money that you would think due to the school waving out-of-state tuition with an extremely reasonable ACT score. We don't really lack on scholarship money.Quote:
Originally Posted by 5049
Vanderbilt has tons of scholarship money & LSU doesn't have much advantage over us. Thing is though, those schools have the same current problems we have. They have not gotten their top recruits on campus & thus have below average position players as a result.
Both LSU & Vandy's lineups this year are trash
Seems to me like if you sign the 4 stars and the 5 stars, and all the 5 stars sign with MLB, you are in the exact same situation. Are you saying we just are not signing the other guys?Quote:
Originally Posted by ShotgunDawg
What I don't get is that, at least in my mind, baseball scouting should be one of the easiest things to project. When I was growing up in the pine belt I watched a lot of little league baseball. The kids that had the smoothest hands and could square the ball up on the bat almost all played D1 ball even though a lot of them weren't the biggest/strongest kids at the time and may not have been the guys that carried their teams.
So I always get a little shocked when we have guys, not only on the team, but starting that are overmatched at the plate on a consistent basis.
On the flip side it's the hardest sport to recruit because you can't sent guys to every tournament, not everyone is showing up at camp and if you try to scout at the lower HS level (like Renfroe) - you go and watch the other team walk the guy 4 times and you end up just wasting time.. Then the 11.7 scholly restrictions make it a math game sometimes.
Here's an idea. Stop recruiting 8th or 9th grades. Flat out stupid to recruit a player that young and undeveloped physically. It's Tim Brewster signing an 8th grade football team stupid. If you can't get a player to sign recruiting him his jr. and sr. years in HS you are never getting that player anyways. Recruiting players before the 10th grade is a total waste of time. Save the time you'd spend wasting on an 8-9th grader by finding the guys getting unnoticed in the 12th grade. Oh and dirtbags is a high compliment for baseball players. Means they are a tough scrappy player that likes getting their uniform in the dirt. Basically a different way of saying a blue collar guy. Go get some country strong mother****ing dirtbags. We are in Mississippi. There's bus loads of these types within 200 miles in every direction. Stop relying on the Dodgers team and go watch the two best HS teams in every nook and cranny in this state and you'll find enough dirtbags to fill 3 rosters and none of them will be draft risks. There are so many good baseball players that don't understand how to recruit themselves correctly for MSU to find them so they just die out after high school.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShotgunDawg
I think you recruit about half your class early and leave scholarships open for the other half till closer to signing day.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dawg61
I agree with this. You deflected on recruiting 8-9th graders though. It's a total waste of time.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShotgunDawg
On PG- that's inconsequential to anything related to our baseball program. I wouldn't be surprised if even the worst JUCO players have PG profiles. It is what it is. And sometimes it's that a player gets a profile from playing a travel ball team that plays in a PG tournament. To me, nowadays playing on a reputable travel ball team is probably even more important than going to a PG showcase. The travel ball teams play in tournaments/showcases at Dudy Noble too and that's where we sometimes find players. I will say us taking a hard stance about not recruiting anyone that went to a PG showcase would be like what we did with Rick Ray and AAU except maybe even worse. I don't think anyone wants to go there.
On recruiting 8th-9th graders. That's a double edged sword because some of those 8th graders turn out to be pretty good players. Our fans would be upset if we didn't recruit and offer Blaze Jordan right now because he's a freshman while he committed to Ole Miss because they recruited him harder. You can say it's a "waste of time" but the fact of the matter is all of the elite programs are doing it and it's because if you don't show a player interest early on it can be hard if not impossible to catch back up later. That's one of the many things that burned Polk back when it was just sophomores. Now, there has been talk of the NCAA making it illegal to take commitments from players that are in 8th-9th grade but I don't think anything will change unless that passes. The SOLUTION is what Shotgun said- make sure you leave enough room for players that mature later. We'll revisit if the rules change.
On dirtbags- A lot of this is knee jerk reaction. If all we recruit are "dirtbags" we're going to end up with a USM quality team in the SEC. And you may be thinking- "Hey! That's what I want! Look how they kicked our ass!" Well, that's just looking at the moment and forgetting the fact that we have beat them head to head every year since 2016- meaning this weekend if the first time their juniors have ever had a winning record over us. Their seniors got a win back in 2015 when we were awful. Also, aside from this year we have beaten them every year we have had a winning record except for once since Cohen took over in 2009. They have one CWS appearance and I believe they missed the postseason altogether between 2012-2015. What happened this weekend would be like Kentucky with a bunch of freshmen losing to an Eastern Kentucky team that has a bunch of fifth year seniors and was fired up to play them because Kentucky knocked them out of the Big Dance the year before (hypothetically speaking). Now while the EKU guys would get to talk about that one time they beat Kentucky their overall ceiling as individual players is not going to be as high. Because what is going to happen is the player from Kentucky are going to get better and by the time they are the same age as the EKU guys- the Kentucky guys are going to be better over the long term in terms of collegiate success and a pro future.
So, if we had a dirtbag team- we would be good in the SEC about once every five years and I don't think anyone wants that. USM, South Alabama, and whoever else may be better "on the field" and at the moment than LSU, Vandy, and whoever else. But in the BIG picture- who among those teams I mentioned has been to Omaha more and has more National Titles? So, even if we lose to USM once every five years- I would definitely trade that for LSU/Vandy/Florida success overall in the long run.
About our recruiting- What Cohen has done with us is about like what Jackie did as far as JUCO's go. And it's really messed up our roster to the point where we're starting about 4-5 freshmen now. The reason USM is good right now is because they have a lot of upperclassmen. We need to get to the point where we have upperclassmen every year and aren't having to rely on freshmen once every five years. You do that by balancing out your class- not signing any pitchers this past year is Hevesy level recruiting or worse. We need to have contingency plans for guys that get drafted and leave that doesn't involve JUCO. Cann is supposed to have all of these scouting connections at his disposal and if our class is about to get gutted he needs to figure who exactly is leaving and replace them ASAP with a guy that is good but will come to school. If band nerd me can figure out that player x is likely going to leave by talking to people and reading articles on the Internet- I don't understand what the problem is with Cohen or Cann on that. Maybe it's them being optimistic but I'd rather go after a back up plan just in case and have an extra SS than none at all.
Now that said, I do think Cann is balancing out our classes better which is good to see. And I don't mind going after the higher end draft pick guys. People wonder how Vandy gets some of their pitchers- well, they recruit them first and get them to commit. That's the first step. We have several guys on our team now that were drafted- Jordan Anderson and Ashcraft were draft risks and we got them. So, we've done it before and we will do it again with other players.
The very few 8th-9th graders that end up being studs and don't go the draft will be far offset by all the guys we don't have to fill holes for wasting our time on guys that go pro. Again if you can't sign a guy by recruiting him hard from 10th-12th grades you are never signing him anyways.Quote:
Originally Posted by Todd4State
Our floor would be USM's best if we focus on dirtbags and low draft risks. Our baseball history, park, SEC etc.. will recruit a few extra better players than a USM team would see so the very worst we'd be is USM at their best. Once we are consistently top 3 in the SEC every year we will see a domino effect start to happen where our previous years success will land us even more of these guys. We just have to get the train rolling and we do it with dirtbags. If we can't make regionals every single year and supers every two years with the ballpark we got and our history there is a serious problem with our approach.
Your first paragraph is close to what Polk did his second tenure here. How did that work out in the long run? And while we did have some success we missed on a LOT of good players that essentially were the core of Ole Miss and in some cases USM's rise at that time and that unnecessarily limited our ceiling until eventually the bottom feel out. I know recruiting 8th graders isn't ideal- but that's just the reality of baseball recruiting right now. And I'm not saying it's a good thing- a lot of people feel that way too which is why it may get changed. A lot of the 8th grade commits get dropped at other schools as time goes along which is another issue too. Recruiting is a selling job and it's about relationships- and sometimes if you're not the first one in the door and if Ole Miss, LSU, Alabama, and whoever else have a two year head start on that relationship- one of those schools is more likely to get the player than us. And that could hurt us in the long run.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dawg61
Our ballpark and history and all of that is secondary to whether or not our coach can get them to MLB. Every player- even the most diehard MSU fans- want to play in MLB. The ballparks and crowds are a nice perk- but doesn't really matter as much especially in the SEC. The Pirates have the nicest ballpark in MLB allegedly and you don't see players exactly flocking there to play. Our problem right now isn't the type of player we're recruiting- Stovall, Mangum, MacNamee, Billingsley, etc. I would consider to be dirtbag players. Would you not? Cody Brown? Holder? I could go on. And we have several guys that were low draft risks- Hatcher, Tanner Allen, Jordan Westburg, Skelton and others like Rooker. At the moment the problem is we're starting a bunch of freshmen and we've focused too much on JUCO players- which is part of what has caused us to be young.
What we really need to do are three things:
1. Get our classes balanced at every position.
2. Find a way to keep our juniors from going pro if they are drafted past round 15.
3. Stop relying on so many JUCO players.
To me, it's more unacceptable that we are having to start this many freshmen IMO than just about anything else. It happens every once in awhile though.
One thing with recruiting guys early is they plateau and never get better, but that one or two great seasons keep a schools offer on table because they saw potential. I played with a guy who as a 9th grader was being projected to be drafted top 10 rounds. He never really got any better and by his SR year of high school he had only D2-3 offers. Had he progressed on the same trajectory from 9-12th grades as he did from 8-9th he would?ve been top 5 rounds. Other guys I played with tore the cover off the ball 10-11th grade years, and sucked SR year. Signed with big schools and never regained their 10-11th grade level.
Baseball is odd that some players who are slightly above average in high school, get better at every level the move on to. One guy I worked out with in off seasons comes to mind, Matt Lawton. He was never really the best on any team he ever played on but he knew his swing and how to work on it. He got better at every level and eventually was an All star with twins. Baseball is a sport where you can transform your ability with proper teaching and mechanics. Matt could coach his own swing and adjust it without a coaches input. He taught me a ton of hitting technique. I think a lot of these top guys aren?t coachable and Dont progress as much as an above average guy who is higher. There are always exceptions to every rule, but I?d rather have a 3 star guy who is coachable and baseball smart than a highly rated guy who thinks he knows best and cannot be coached.
People just develop so much between 8th grade and their senior year and even sometimes college. A lot of times the guys that are really good as 8th graders are just a little more physically mature than their peers. And some of them are Bryce Harper. And some guys are really good and lose interest and decide to do something else other than baseball.Quote:
Originally Posted by RougeDawg
It's kind of like the Little League World Series. Every year there is some kid that dominates- usually on the mound and then they go to high school and no one ever hears about them again.
I watched all the batters at a close distance at the Friday game. Southern's batters were generally larger/stronger. I was told by a USM player alum. that Berry recruits these type players. Well, it showed with their bat swings and power.
Yes, you are correct. I?ve just been around many baseball coaches who remember one or two foot seasons and stick with a guy too long, hoping that potential they once saw, develops. And it never does. Baseball is much more unpredictable than even basketball recruiting.Quote:
Originally Posted by Todd4State