College Podcast: What We're Watching For In Fall Ball

0:00Hey everybody, Jay, Jacob Rudner, baseball manager, college podcast. We're back together. Welcome back, Jacob. It's good to see you. Good to talk to you. And today, we're getting everything set. College football has started, which is kind of one of the first signs of fall. I know we're not officially in fall yet. Sure doesn't feel like fall yet. But we are here at fall ball. We're seeing fall ball schedules. We're here for fall ball. We're here for the fall. And you're kind of working on that. You're getting everyone ready for that. So that's what we're here to talk about today. But I'll kind of just start with, you know, how are you doing? And more than importantly, you know, for our for our listeners, for our viewers, kind of like, what is kind of like brewing? What do you have kind of coming down the pipe? Yeah, so this is as JJ said, when when the college football kicks off, it is also kind of a kickoff for college baseball because players are

1:00back on campus fall ball will begin soon. This off season, we will see more scrimmages between teams instead of interest squads. And we've seen in the past, thanks to some new NCAA legislature that came into pass four games against outside competition. So that'll be cool. And it really does kick off our fall coverage. So this Friday, that'll be September 11th, we will be rolling out our fall things to watch the storylines that we'll be paying attention to. And after that, for, you know, as many weeks as we can continue to provide them at a rate, which we will basically see, however many coaches would like to chime in, we will dictate how often we push these out, but our fall intel series is coming back, where we go around the country, and we break down what's new for teams, how the fall is going. And it's like a nice coach check in with with head coaches from around the country. Last year, and this is a one man show. So last year, we got to, I believe 81 teams in our series, and this

2:04year, our goal is 100. So yes, that is what is coming down the pipeline. So what we're going to talk about today is this kind of a couple of different things to look for in the fall. The first one that we're going to start with is something that you kind of touched on a little bit in our last college podcast, but kind of the significance of fall ball. And one of the things that we do see that we want to recognize, and again, that balance, that never ending balance of not overreacting, but not under reacting is, fall ball really is where you get kind of some of those indicators that, Oh, this player has unlocked a new skill. This player has found another gear. We saw that last year, I'm guessing that you're expected to see that again this year. No, of course, and I'll write about this, we did talk about it in our podcast two weeks ago, one of the values of the fall is just to see what's different. Some of these

3:05top guys will begin to separate last year. I think some of the players that you're referring to Jackson, Flora, really made a move towards the top of the board, Liam Peterson, who had a very productive fall, made a move towards the top of the board, Daniel Jackson, I think kind of put himself on the map in the fall. It wasn't really a, you know, this guy's going to be a first round pick, which is ultimately what ended up happening. But it was kind of a step in the right direction, because he got to campus and he was making more contact. His swing had changed. He had gotten stronger in the case of Flora. He added a change up in the case of Peterson. There were some, you know, mechanical cleanups to make a little less noise in his delivery. And all of those things came together to kind of give us a clear picture of how the top of the draft board needed to look. And the rankings will change slightly going into the spring, basically, right around the New Year's break, I think will be kind of a very important opportunity for us to sit down and rehash what we learned over the course of these next couple months. And so from a scouting perspective, and yes, we are being a little bit repetitive from our last show, there is a lot of value in going

4:07out there and understanding what's new. And we will, I think, be able to create a lot of separation this year, in particular, in a draft class that doesn't necessarily have a clear cut college number one, I think Dax Whitney had a chance to be that. I think Brendan Lawson is very much in that conversation. There's a list though, I think right now, Tom Thomas Vellinkis, I think is in the conversation. And the fall is kind of the first opportunity in the race to create a little bit of separation. Also with that, but I think it's even more exciting though, is there are guys who could go from 15 to 10 and 10 to 5. But there's also guys who could go from not on the ranking to on the ranking this fall, I would imagine. That was the case with Daniel Jackson. Last year, I think Daniel Jackson was somebody who was, I don't want to call him off radar, because we had known the year prior when he transferred to Georgia from Wofford that he was going to be a productive division one player that Georgia had expectations for

5:09him to start immediately, which he did that he was very athletic and he could catch. But it didn't really materialize in his first year at Georgia. Then the fall kind of comes up and everything seems a little bit louder and different. Like I said, he's stronger and hitting the ball harder. The angle at which he's hitting the ball improved dramatically. The frequency, which is a really important thing, how much you hit the baseball matters and he was doing it a lot more. And then the catching had started to come along. And I know there are still people who are detractors from what he may be behind the plate. But the reality is it took a step forward, I think, between his sophomore and junior seasons at Georgia. A lot of that became clear in the fall. He was one of our fall, you know, all stars. So to speak, I know that there are a number of former players who took issue with the fall all stars nickname that we had. But no less, he emerged. And he went from, you know, let's call it in the 300, which is basically the end of the 10th round and beyond group to somebody that was a very close inside the top, let's say 200 follow, which ultimately

6:13emerged to be a first shot pick. The post season run is heating up for Major League Baseball teams, Kratzi, you can go see all these games, all the important games, whatever your team is, they have a great chance almost all of them at being alive for the post season. So you can go on Seaky and find whatever team you want, whatever game you want, whatever matchup you want to try to help cheer your team on to the post season. Yeah, look ahead to your schedule, go on to Seaky. Essentially, your teams either in the playoffs or the team they're playing as a chance in the playoffs. So all these games in September, you got to get on there, get your green dot, figure out where you're going to sit, do it ahead of time and use the codes. And of course, I have a code for y'all, you can use code territory 10 for 10% off your next set of MLB tickets as Seaky. That's 10% off MLB tickets with promo code territory 10. Make sure you click the link in the description to download the app and have the code automatically added to your account so you can use it later. Get ready for MLB post season

7:13by getting the perfect ticket on Seaky. So the other thing the next thing I wanted to ask you about is something that there has been some news about, right? So we talked, we've talked on the podcast about ABS, you've written about ABS coming to college baseball. Since then, there has been kind of not a rollback, but a little bit of a slowdown, has there not? There has been a slowdown and it was one that I think was generally expected just based on the immediate feedback when news broke that the NCAA was going to have ABS. Effectively, if you can do it, you can have it. They were gonna just roll it out at large for any games in which the two sides agreed and it was a stadium that could host the technology to be able to accomplish it. Then the rules oversight committee gets together and they decide better to scale it back to experimental usage, which basically means that conferences will decide if their teams will use the new system in conference games

8:13only. So we will see it, I think, throughout the power conferences, I know the Sunbelt, there's debate publicly about whether that's a power conference. Baseball, it absolutely is. And if anything, it's one of the more invested conferences in baseball, the Sunbelt will have it. I would imagine that there are a couple other leagues like the Big East will probably have it. And even some more on the small side will probably embrace the change. But it is a conference games only thing, it will not be in the postseason. But it's interesting and it will still be an element of the season that will have an impact and it is one to tie it back to our fall conversation that I think teams will now have to start to train and prepare for. And I will say with that, like, if you're, if you're a catcher, a hitter or a pitcher, so if you're out there, basically, and you're flipping between ABS games and non ABS games, we've seen

9:14this before in, you know, in minor league baseball when they were experimenting with this. No matter what you do, they're going to be different zones. Like the zone that an umpire is calling a human umpire, and the zone that ABS is going to call and how you're where you're going to set that, they're going to be a little different. That's going to be a big, that's going to be a, I would say a, a tension point at times, this cup coming season, because it's difficult to adjust back and forth, right? Like you are going to have players, you're going to have pitchers who you're, they're going to be not, they're going to be like, they're going to be, you know, you want to ever want to be your weekend guys, right? But there are going to be some guys who are better on the mid weeks than, you know, if you're, because that's not going to be your non ABS games. And you're going to have other guys who's like, you really want them to pitch on the weekend, I would imagine, because again, the ABS zone almost without fail kind of encourages a little

10:16bit different type of pitcher. It's kind of hard for it not to be narrower, because at the end of the day, even if you put a little bit of fudge factor on the edges of the zone, how you design it, having watched ABS at multiple levels over the years, it's, the plate doesn't move. And with a human umpire, working with your catcher, you can move the plate a little bit by how you pitch. What do you think are some of the things that are teams are going to see as they start kind of diving into this and fall? So I will say that the players have done well in the limited exposure that we've seen to ABS at the college level in the SEC tournament. That's where we saw it last year. The overall success rate for all players combined was 56.2%. They were 59 for 105 catchers in particular were very good. There were only catcher challenges. No pitchers decided to challenge pitches. And they were 63% success, which correct me if I'm wrong, JJ, but even

11:19relative to professional standards, that's exceptionally high to be at 63% as a group with that many challenges. I hate to say it. But yes, and nothing against the umpires, you know, umpiring these games, I would expect that we are going to see higher success rates and amateur baseball that we do in Proble. The batters were also quite good, which I think was a surprise for a lot of people. They were 40.6% success, which I think maybe to the untrained ear sounds quite low, but that's pretty good. For batters, the umpires were generally not so great. There were a couple who were excellent, Eric Gose, shout out to Eric Gose was five for six in challenges in the SEC tournament. And there were a couple of others who were similar with their success rates, but the majority were quite poor. So I do think that it may go better for the players than people think it will. I think also one thing that will be important. And then I'll talk about, you know, the implications on the fall. I do think that it will go faster than fans think a lot

12:21of the bemoaning of this change that I've seen from fans have been from people who think it's going to take a long time. Again, you can jump in and correct me if I'm wrong. It was excellent in the SEC tournament. It was very well facilitated. No one who says that has actually watched this in action, right? Like you, you cannot watch this. If you're watching majorly games, it is not something where we go, I get it. The people who are complaining about that are thinking of the end of a basketball game. They're thinking of a college football game where sometimes you sit there go, this is obvious, why are we waiting five minutes? This is I challenge. There's the result. Let's go. Right. If it needs to, yeah, you're taking away some of the back and forth where like the coach feels the need to kind of work the umps a little bit because he doesn't feel like his pitchers getting the calls or whatever. That kind of goes away a little bit with this. So yeah, I don't think that's going to be an issue at all. Like time of getting

13:23conversations in conversations with some of the coaches, the SEC coaches after the tournament. The feedback was pretty much unanimously twofold. One, everybody loved it. I think it was a massive hit throughout the conferences, you know, coaching ranks. And two, I think that they felt as though it ease the tension a little bit between umpire and team because there is now an objective process. There is no longer an avenue to this, you know, very subjective, high argumentative, high stakes situation because the players now have the keys. They can challenge a call if they don't like it. And if they don't do that, then the coach can take issue with the player who should or should not have made a challenge call. So in that regard, I think it's good. Are there going to be games or individuals who struggle with this, whether it's on the mound at the plate? I think at the plate will be a real test because there will be, you know, overzealous hitters who go out there who are going to want to make challenges that they are not equipped to be making. That will be a learning curve, I'm sure for some. And I think that there will be

14:26probably a little bit of a learning curve from a game operations standpoint, mostly for catchers who need to get in tune with the fact that if you don't like a call, you got to move on it fast. Because one thing that we saw in Hoover and the SEC tournament was that if you were not instantly on your helmet, you were not going to get the call. So you do have to go fast and making that changes is something that they're going to need to work on. I would imagine. I will say this though, my focus, I'm actually the one person, you know, maybe looking at this who does not focus as much about the challenges, the challenges are to me, if you put an ABS, the challenges are this very tiny fraction of the effect, right? Yes, you do have to work on your strategy, you do have to understand that your picture never gets to challenge. The catcher is sitting there with a much more neutral approach. You have hitters on your team who never can challenge and other hitters like you have the green light or unless I give you the red light, you have the green light, you have all that. That strategy is important. But what

15:27I would say is more important is it, we've seen this wherever there's ABS, it changes the strike zone for hitters and pictures, which does mean, I mean, to be honest, most times we've seen ABS, ABS has made the game a little bit more offensive at least, because there's just a reality of it is that and I do have worries like we've seen again, at the major league level with the best pictures and baseball we have seen one of the thankfully, the challenge system is, you know, with a challenge system, you can still kind of know, okay, it's the eighth inning, it's 10 to 2, no one's going to challenge, you can still call that pitch a little bit wider, right? Like that's the key thing about this, having a challenge system. But it does mean that your zone's probably going to be a little, you know, a little narrower, a little more top to bottom, that's going to probably help some teams. I can actually give you, yeah, sorry,

16:28to interrupt you, I can actually give you the exact dimensions that they're going to use. So it is a larger zone than what the MLB zone currently is. It should be. It's pretty significantly larger. And it will, so these are, let me clarify, these are not the exact dimensions that it will be for sure. But the reporting that we've done and that we have is that the zone for a team that used Trackman this year will closely resemble the ones that were used in the SEC tournament, where the upper boundary of the zone was set at 58% of a hitter's measure height, while the bottom boundary of the zone was set at 23%. So it is a taller zone than the one I think a lot of people are used to. And it will be slightly wider as well. But okay, the key part there is the slightly wider part, because again, I do think you need a wider zone in college baseball. If you don't have a wider zone in college baseball, all you're going to do is have games that are intermable. And so that's good. That's good. I would say that this is going to be something

17:32that, as you said, this will be partly the acclimation process that we go through and fall. When we come back from the break, we're talking about something else that's also going on right now. The coaching carousel, it spins at different times of the year now that it used to. We'll touch on that right after this quick break. So Jacob, as we're recording this, the coaching carousel has had another spin. So we've seen that basically, I would say that that that that wake forced appears to be, you know, has basically has now hired Dan Hennigan from the Astros from their Big League Club to be their hitting coach. This is part of something that we're seeing, which is, this is not a one way street. This is a, a two way, you know, to freeway, there's a divider in the middle, you know, not everyone's going

18:33back and forth, you know, all the time. This isn't just a regular country road or anything like that. But it is something where you are seeing coaches go from college baseball to pro baseball. But as much, I feel like a lot of times you're also seeing coaches go from pro baseball to college baseball. And again, we are seeing it's not, oh, well, they hired someone who has spent a year, you know, as the class A hitting coach, it is sometimes names. It is sometimes people who have done some significant things in pro baseball and in the major leagues. Why is this kind of layout for us? Why we're now having carousels at different times of the year from when we used to? Well, we, and we touched on this in our last podcast as well. But we are now seeing pro teams dip into the college ranks, especially the mid major ranks and take head coaches in some cases and put them in various roles throughout

19:33front offices. Last year, we saw a lot of field coordinator hires were filled by college mid major head coaches. A lot of minor league coordinator type roles were filled by college head coaches. And we saw a pretty reasonable eagerness from that group to make the jump if they were afforded the opportunity. It sounded like based on some of the conversations I had that some of the motivation for some of these guys was basically to cut down on the amount of recruiting and administrative tasks that they had to do at their various schools and to go focus on baseball and whether that was scouting or player development, all kind of the same. The goal was to be able to get out of the college coaching space and just baseball all the time. So I anticipate seeing that again, it's hard to predict to predict exactly what that's going to look like this off season minor league baseball lockout or not at the major league level will continue. So, you know, maybe teams are still going to pursue hires in the amateur or minor league coordinator or

20:37scouting type roles. And I would imagine for the second year in a row at a significant rate, we'll see some mid major coaches get plucked away for those jobs. So with the timing of now, how is that different? How is that better, worse or just different than it would be? You know, kind of the more traditional end of the off, you know, end of the season going through the summer kind of hiring period. Yeah, so the biggest thing is honestly on the player side because in the transfer portal era when a coach leaves, it opens a special 30 day window for the team's roster to enter the transfer portal. Now, there are some caveats to this in the case of Tony Vitelow and Tennessee, for example, those players were effectively stuck at Tennessee because it was so late in the process that there was nowhere that they were going to be able to go and roll and subsequently play. So it would have been too hard for Tennessee's players to just get in anywhere else, which we're getting there right now, right? Not quite. Right,

21:39like let's say if somebody leaves in the next two weeks, I would imagine that there will be some transfers that will successfully find landing spots. If you are deeper into October, which is kind of the range of when that happened last year, then yeah, it is very much too late. So with every day that passes, it gets closer. That being said, if a coach were to leave tomorrow, then his players, and this is only for head coaches, can enter the transfer portal for 30 days. And as far as, you know, implications for schools, it usually means an interim situation. And that's what we saw last year. There were no none that I can recall jobs that were filled this late in the calendar for a coach that went to Pro Ball. There were no jobs that were filled with external candidates. They all made internal hires. And I would imagine that that would be the case this fall as well. If we see it again. So the last thing, the last of our fall themes to look for, I would say, is one that we have the perfect example of, right, which is there are a lot of prominent transfers. There are a lot of teams

22:41that have had a lot of success with transfers and kind of riding that to Omaha. We've seen that you could just rattle off team deer after a year now. But we also probably no one's done it better than LSU did back to back years. Certain Paul schemes, we could go down the list. But obviously, but at the same time, LSU and Jay Johnson kind of set it himself like they didn't get it right last year. It's a tricky. It's a different. It's a higher level of difficulty to blend the chemistry to put it all together. When you're moving it that quick as opposed to you're building a team over multiple years. I assume that you're going to be paying close attention to LSU and how things are either, you know, what things look like and how are they different this year from last year? Well, let's let's address two things here. We're going to we're

23:43going to talk about what you said in a second briefly before we do that though. I just want to I want to say because sometimes JJ when we talk about LSU, we write about LSU, there is a feedback above that occurs, basically to suggest that we can't stop, you know, dealing with reporting on covering, giving coverage to LSU. So in a sense, fair, we can't. And the reason for that is because if you win two national championships in three years, you become so historically relevant and rare that it would be a shame to not cover that team extensive. It's a little let's put it this way. If you're doing if we were doing a college football podcast during the Nick Saban era and we're like, oh, you know, you seem to talk about Al Wabama a lot. Yes, of course, yeah, to the directory of the sport, they are very relevant. And so LSU is a LSU has done. I'm not apologizing for it.

24:44Like LSU has done enough both ways the last few years that, yes, we're singling them out to talk about them here because there is no other team that fits the profile of, hey, back to you know, you got me two titles, got two titles, and then you got not making the tournament. That's a wild. It's a it's a bumpy road. And remember also the year the year in between the two national championships, they did not host. So it was another, you know, rollercoaster season. That all being said, no more defending ourselves. That all being said, this is a really big off season for the Tigers. Because last year, as you said, they did not make the tournament. Jay Johnson, who has no reason to be, you know, shy about his feedback for his team, said a number of times that he needed to go back to the drawing board on their player acquisition process. He was very disappointed in their work in the transfer portal and how they use their money in their

25:47approach to using their resources and being able to put together a team that was competitive and able to accomplish their goals the way that they want to accomplish them. And he said that it was going to be a complete total overhaul. And so they go out, they sign a tremendous transfer class. I mean, it is a star studded group that is full of guys that are sprinkled throughout our top 50 on our individual transfer rankings. They have the number one picture in the transfer portal in land and hood. And I think that this is a team that has the potential visually of being another exceptional group, one that should have an absolutely strong chance of reaching the college world series and hoisting a trophy there. That being said, we said the same thing last year. We we watched LSU put together its team. We saw it in the fall. And we ranked LSU closely. I should add second behind UCLA in our preseason rankings. That was obviously we got it wrong. And that

26:50is something that we have to go back and look at what did go right. And I think that this is potentially an immediate do over opportunity to go and look at LSU and figure out exactly what the Tigers are going to be. And this fall, I think, will go a reasonably long way in setting the foundation for those thoughts. So okay, before we because again, we don't know yet, we're saying that's something we're going to be looking for. But do want to ask this. And I'm not asking their college players, we don't need to single out players. But when Jay Johnson talks about that it got wrong, I feel like part of it is that again, this is my theory. Please tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like that they ended up. Obviously they misvaluated a couple of bats as far as their hitting impact. But I would say as much as that, it was also, it was a team that it didn't end up fitting together very well. Is that fair? Like, and I mean that front partly from a defensive and kind of a positional like they had kind of been

27:55this team that was a juggernaut that just rolled over and both could absolutely obliterate you offensively. But obviously shut you down pitching wise as well. Last year, they kind of, I mean, obviously went wrong in about every way in some ways. But same time, I did feel like that their lineup was both not as fearsome and their defense was not as good. Correct. And yes, Jay Johnson talked about fit. He talked about errors, defense, the way that the team was constructed. I think that makeup was maybe even a little bit of a part of the conversation, just how they evaluated who they were getting in addition to what from a tool standpoint. And all of that equaled, as you just said, a team that was very much disjointed. I will also say injuries were a factor for this team last year. And that counts for something too. I just don't think

28:55that it was the team for whatever reason that Jay Johnson anticipated hoped for when he recruited it. And this off season, you would you would think this off season, I there were changes that were made. I trust the guy that's one two national titles in the last three seasons to make the necessary changes and evaluate his program accordingly. And I would imagine that's what happened. And so yes, we don't know yet, we will watch LSU this fall, there are determinations to be made about certain guys readiness for certain roles. And once we have better answers to those questions, I think we'll be able to go back to the drawing board on our process to use it J Johnson and evaluate where exactly that belongs in the rankings. And I can tell you right now that LSU will be ranked in the top 25 of the season. That's just that's what's going to happen. But when you acquire that much talent, raw talent alone, the potential of that team automatically gets your rank. Where that belongs in the rankings is a conversation that is starting now

29:58for the most part. And will evolve over the next four months before we make a determination. Right, we don't we know that they're probably going to be in there, but we have no idea. And we shouldn't know yet, because again, a lot of that is to be determined, I will never forget having conversation a couple of people, after the fall, few years ago, and it's like, you know, Dylan Cruz isn't the best prospect on this team, I don't think I think it's a guy named Paul Skienz. And it's like, and then it's like, and I don't know if he's going to hit well, he didn't hit, but he did get a lot else. You know, that's going to be again, that's going to be one of the fun things to look for. You know, it's going to be again, there's going to be a lot to pay attention to. And there's going to be more to kind of chew over like we said, like you said, there's going to be more games, which is kind of awesome. We're going to have that kind of every weekend for a pretty good stretch there. It's going to be pretty cool to pay attention to Jacob and anything else before we wrap this up. I would just say to dial it back in team, we I have been away a little bit for

31:04the last couple of weeks, getting married and then going on an awesome trip to a Ruba, which I highly recommend if you can swing it. It's a pretty cool place to shout out a Ruba. But no, we're we're back into the saddle. We there's going to be a lot of content coming just like last fall, whether that's Intel series, which was something that we had a lot of fun with. Again, that's that checking opportunity with coaches from around the country. We've did a lot of analysis last fall about impact transfers, impact players, sleepers. And if you go and take a look back at a lot of that, remember, remember, you know, cut me some slack sleepers. You're not going to hit on everybody. But we did have some other sleepers if you do. Yeah, correct. So we you know, we did pretty well last fall with some of the guys that we singled out, we're hoping to do better this off season and you know, better off season after that. So dial it back in. We're it's baseball time, even though it's the fall. And also I encourage you to get on out to your local college baseball games this fall, because it is a blast.

32:04And I think that you if you're listening to this podcast, 31 minutes in would probably enjoy the experience. So check it out. Well, that is the baseball America college podcast for this week, Jacob Runner and myself, JJ Cooper. Do check out everything that Jacobs doing over at baseballamerica.com. Do check out. We got a lot of other stuff too. We got some cool baseball card stuff. If you like baseball carbs, James Anderson has joined the staff. So we have one of the preeminent fantasy writers in the country is now writing for baseball America as well. We've got a lot of stuff wrapping up the minor league season. We've got major league coverage. And yes, Jacob, I got to throw one more thing with with James with relation to James Anderson, use code Anderson. Yes, that's a a a a a a n d e r s o n not e n o n at baseball America, you get 30% off the first year of an annual subscription. So do that while you can. Yes, I think that that is time is running out on that. So so time is running out. So do check that out. That's the baseball America podcast. He's Jacob. I'm JJ so long,

33:05everybody.