The exit velocity number flashed on the board: one hundred and four miles an hour.
Every scout around the batting cage started writing before the baseball even landed. I didn’t write anything down yet. I was still watching what the kid did after the swing.
I’ve been pretty fortunate to develop some great relationships in this game over the past 15 years. I went to graduate school with a dude who is incredibly well-respected in the scouting community, I’ve coached several players who are now college coaches and recruiters themselves, and I’ve seen thousands of athletes pass through the system.
If you look at the “showcase” landscape right now, it’s completely dominated by numbers that jump off the page. The major tournament circuits rank kids almost entirely based on measurable metrics: How hard do they throw? What is their exit velocity? What is their 60-time? All of that is integral to scouting. Nobody is denying that talent matters. But what rears its head more often than not in a real season is the elusive “6th tool”: the mental and character side of the game.
Yogi Berra famously dropped a classic Yogi-ism on us that runs through the baseball community alongside lines like “You’re killing me, Smalls” or “There’s no crying in baseball.” He said, “Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.” And yet, we keep watching highly talented kids miss out on a career because they never get that 6th tool in their belt. They’ve been told how great they are their entire lives. They’ve dominated up to this point, so they have never actually experienced real failure or deep accountability.
The Transfer Portal, the 10-80-10, and March Realities
We see these kids in every sport now. It’s the kid who transfers three times in high school and then four more times in college. The narrative is always that someone else is being unfair to them, or maybe they just enjoy the feeling of constantly being pursued. But more often than not, the reality is simple: things got hard, so they quit.
I have seen countless “can’t-miss” prospects do exactly that: miss. They were recruited strictly on measurable things, without anyone taking into account the immeasurables: What kind of kid are they? What kind of teammate are they? What happens when things go sideways? Are they a toxic personality in your dugout when they aren’t hitting in the three-hole?
This is exactly where the 10-80-10 Rule (a framework I borrowed from Urban Meyer) becomes a diagnostic tool for your culture. Every roster breaks into three groups:
- The Top 10% (The Nucleus): Relentlessly self-disciplined, driven, and pull everyone else up.
- The Middle 80%: Reliable and trustworthy, but they take their temperature from whoever is around them.
- The Bottom 10%: The fence-jumpers and coach-killers who coast, complain, and drain your program’s energy.
When a college coach gets blinded by rankings and measurables, they don’t step back and wonder why a Power 4 school suddenly dropped a highly-rated player in June. They just think they got a steal.
They don’t figure it out until March. That’s when that kid starts tearing the locker room apart at the seams, creating division and doubt among the coaching staff because he isn’t getting his way. By the next year, he leaves the program in absolute chaos.
You spend three years coaching character you should have scouted for in the first place.
The New Math of College Recruiting
Navigating this right now as a high school-level coach is incredibly tough, and it’s only getting harder. With the NCAA recently approving the “5 years for 5 seasons” roster rules, the landscape has completely shifted. Roster spots that coaches believed existed for incoming high schoolers are suddenly gone because college juniors now have two more years of eligibility instead of one.
Guys who would have been no-doubt Division 1 signees five years ago are now looking at Division 3 opportunities. I love Division 2 and Division 3 baseball. I firmly believe athletes need to go where they will actually play and develop, rather than just chasing a flashy logo for their social media bio (a trap I’ve been guilty of myself).
But I don’t blame the college coaches for this shift whatsoever.
An umpire at our game this past Sunday asked me why he doesn’t see scouts sitting behind the backstop at these 17U summer games anymore. The answer is very simple: those big schools don’t need 18-year-olds. Not when they can look into the transfer portal and land a 22-year-old with three years of proven college experience. An 18-year-old coming out of high school, unless they are the absolute elite of the elite, simply doesn’t move the needle for coaches whose livelihoods are on the line in a cutthroat, “win-at-all-costs” college landscape.
And with the MLB’s recent proposals regarding high school draft eligibility, the level of talent flowing into college baseball is only going to rise. If the standard on the field is rising, our standard for developing the mental and character side of these young men has to rise with it.
Main Character Energy and the Circus Dugout
We played a team recently that had six Power 4 commits on the field. They were good, and they absolutely handed us our rear ends. But what stuck out to me more than their performance was a kid sitting inside their dugout acting like a total tool.
He spent the entire game chirping at our pitcher and barking at our hitters. Can the kid play? Who knows. He had massive “main character energy” sitting on the bench because his name wasn’t on the lineup card that day. If he’s on a roster of that caliber, he undoubtedly has some physical ability. But if I’m a college coach looking for dudes who help me win championships, I am crossing that guy off my list immediately. He is going to fracture a locker room with those bush-league tactics.
The ironic part? The actual commits on that team (the guys bound for big-time programs) were incredible. There were no over-the-top celebrations, no “look-at-me” antics. They just went about their business, competed at an elite level, and proved exactly why they earned those spots.
As a player, if you’ve got the tools, why not just show them on the dirt instead of projecting toxic nonsense from the bench? You definitely got the attention of the coaches in attendance, but not for anything you did on the field.
The Posture of the Leader
As the men in these kids’ lives, it is imperative that we check that behavior. We cannot allow that culture to dominate our dugouts. Once it becomes okay for one kid to act that way, you have permitted everyone else to do it too. By the time you get warned by an umpire, it’s already too late: you’ve lost the plot, and you’ve gotten more of your players crossed off recruitment lists than added to them. Scouts want to watch an elite team; they don’t want to sit through a circus.
A few summers ago, I was on the field for an interaction that became a viral clip online. A young man who was a graduated senior, playing down in a 17U tournament, hit an absolute fence-scraper of a home run against us. It barely snuck over the wall.
Instead of running, he felt it necessary to stand in the batter’s box, admire it, and proceed to launch his bat 45 feet into the air. As he rounded the bases, he chirped every single one of my infielders. The field umpire stepped in to check his behavior, but instead of holding their player accountable, his own coaching staff started barking at the umpire as if he was the one in the wrong.
That “massive” home run he hit? It made the score 11 to 2.
As leaders, it is our job to hold our young men accountable, not sit there and argue with the officials when they are forced to do the job we refused to do.
Tools will tell you what a kid can do on a perfect day. The 6th tool tells you what he will do when he’s sitting on the bench, when the roster gets crowded, or when he hits his first real patch of failure.
Stop scouting strictly for the measurables. Start scouting for the nucleus.
Let’s get to work. — Coach O
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