Quote Originally Posted by WeWonItAll(Most) View Post
I guess it depends on what you define as life changing money. If you told me I could have 410k and start slogging through the minors or wait a year, have fun playing another year of college ball, get drafted 5 rounds higher, and make 120k, I would be mighty tempted to take the money. School can wait, and if I'm not mistaking, it would be on the MLB's dime if I decided to go back after baseball. Not everyone is like Graveman and makes a jump from the 36th round to the 8th round in one year. And you're much more likely to get cut than make the big leagues.

I think all our back and forth is proving is that it's a pretty personal decision. I'll be thrilled if he stays, and wish him best of luck if he goes.

I hope Cann can figure out scholarship issues, the problem is he'll have to hit loopholes to get it done here, whereas at LSU it was built in with the TOPS program. I do think Cann has the personality of a coach that players WANT to play for that Cohen never quite had (evident by that article about some of the LSU guys crying when he announced he was coming here). So hopefully that'll count for something.

As an aside, I think I've seen where Louisiana might be doing away with TOPS in the near future. It'll be interesting to see how that affects their program, if at all
To me 3-4 million is life changing money. I can tell you from family experience most MLB players don't do logical things like start 401K's. Usually they go out and buy a sports car and a big house. They also have to live off of their bonus the entire time they are in the minors so if you're Jack Kruger and you spend 7-8 years in the minors that 410K goes pretty quick. Stats show that if you go to college to play baseball first your odds of making it to MLB increase a good bit.

Sometimes MLB will pay for school- but what they don't tell you is there's a chance your 410K bonus is going to be exhausted by then and your wife/family are going to be stressed while your going to school and basically taking on debt for a year.

The way I see it- if you are a college junior you're probably best off leaving after your junior year if you are drafted in rounds 1-12. I don't expect us to retain very many players drafted in those rounds- unless it's a situation where someone like say for example Rooker gets drafted in the second round and he thinks he can get in the first round by coming back which is probably going to happen about 5% of the time. I don't expect Cann to keep most of those guys.

Rounds 12-20 is kind of a crapshoot. Those are kind of the critical ones because they're usually pretty good players but not elite most of the time. They're the ones that can kind of set you up for a championship run. These are the players where I think Cann can possibly really help us out a lot more than in the past.

Rounds 21-40 you should probably go back to school. We should be able to keep around 90% of these players.

I'm not sure why Cohen couldn't retain more guys than he did. He obviously was able to get a few back like Graveman- that could have been because of Butch. It may have been in part because of the assistants we had- after all the LSU players came back because of Cann and not Manieri. I don't think Mingione was that great of a hitting coach and while he was a nice guy and good recruiter, I don't think he's the kind of guy that can elevate most guys to MLB and certainly not anything like Cann. It will be interesting to see but I think he probably is going to be about average at Kentucky with a bunch of JUCO's once Henderson's team leaves/graduates. A lot of our pitchers probably figured that Wes wasn't coming back and didn't want to go through pitching coach number three.