Latest / Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball / Episode 132: You Can't Commit to the Transfer Portal

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Episode 132: You Can't Commit to the Transfer Portal · Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball

• 0:00
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• 1:11
  Speaker B: Welcome to this week's edition of the Dugout Dish podcast. I'm Andy Kittis, joined by my wonderful co host Keith Glasser. How we doing?
• 1:19
  Speaker A: Great. How are you?
• 1:20
  Speaker B: You're repping Maris Red Foxes. Foxes. I got Army West Point on today, which is former. Which is supporting a former Fox coach, Chris Trash. Shout out. Chris. Miss you. Hope you're doing well. Go Cadets. Today's topic, it's going to take us in a couple different directions. Take us in a conversation I think is is potentially overdue, but we're going to title this one, you can't commit to the transfer portal. And the reason we're having this conversation is because heard a lot of talk, travel ball coaches, high school coaches, parents in general, about more interest in where can I get so that I can go into the transfer portal versus really trying to find a good fit for my son. And the idea that if I can just get my foot in the door, I can level up because that's what I. That's how I think this works. And I think there's something valid in that statement because I do think that they're in today's world with the transfer portal. Yes, there's an opportunity for guys to go and be really good at the schools that they initially commit to and potentially level up. Coach Fuller or Fuller, I should say, you know, mentioned this the other day when we talked to him and, you know, that's how he put it. Like, guys have the opportunity to level up and if you outplay the level that you're at, yeah, the transfer portal could be an option for you. But I think what's happening is that, and this happens a lot in our world where people only scratch the surface of the conversation and don't get down to the nitty gritty in kind of the reality of how this all works. And everybody thinks that they're going to be the guy who goes into the transfer portal and has 10 offers the first day that they enter, and they're going to get paid a hundred thousand dollars to go play baseball somewhere. And the reality is, is that there are several thousand kids, and that is not a hyperbolic number. There are several thousand kids who are still in the transfer portal right now who do not have a place to play college baseball. And I think fundamentally taking the approach of looking at the school that you commit to as a stepping stone, I think it's fundamentally wrong. And I also think that it is naive to think that you're going to step on any college baseball field as a freshman and be so good that you've completely outplayed that level immediately when you step on campus. And I think that this comes down to a lack of understanding of how much talent there is across college baseball across multiple levels. And then also understanding that just because you have a good year doesn't qualify you to go in the transfer portal and get googled over for, you know, a bunch of schools to come and offer you. So that's my opening salvo on this particular topic.
• 4:40
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you can't commit to the transfer portal. There's no coach there. There's nothing there for you to commit to. I think that there's some people who think that they can leverage going to a school and then just getting in the transfer portal and hoping that it, you know, you can go somewhere else. But there's so much variable in that idea, right? You're going to go to the school. You have to be better than everybody who's in front of you first and foremost, which is going to be generally hard to do. You're going to have to perform at an incredibly high rate for the entire season to see where, you know, what your numbers look like. This is all bearing you actually getting on the fielding, having enough at bats or innings pitched to be able to have the stats, to be able to get into the transfer portal, to potentially be able to go somewhere else. There's just too much shit, for lack of a better term, that can happen to make that decision, to have that be your thought process on the front end, like your thought process should be. I'm going to this place for four years and you know, if something changes, then we'll address that when it comes along. But on the front end, to be like, yeah, I'm just going to go to the school for a year and transfer out, you know, you might not play, you might get hurt, you might not be academically eligible. There's a lot of different variables that happen that, you know, factor into having that thought on the front end. And look, you could have it and have an okay year, but just because you have an okay year at the, the level you're at does not mean that everyone is going to come calling in the transfer portal for you to transfer to their school. The flip side to it as well is if you do get into the transfer portal and you decide that, you know you're going to transfer somewhere else, you're restarting, which, you know, whatever, if that's what you want to do, fine. But you're now opting into more competition and better players. You're leaving a place where you very well could be a dude who's going to have, who might hit in the two hole and drive in a bunch of runs and be a guy for the next three years. You might be leaving to go to a program where you're the fifth outfielder and you're only going to play against left handed pitching in the midweek to give blows to a couple of the other guys for a couple innings, you know, so, you know, just because, and I think that there's, there's this thought there where you see guys who have gone from lower levels up to the upper echelon of Division 1 baseball and have success that, you know, that happens all the time and it doesn't, it does not happen all the time. Actually, the more likely outcome is that you don't find a place for you to actually go play or you don't end up at a school or the level in which it is that you had initially set out to be at is generally how it works out for the vast majority of people. And you know, I think that having that thought process on the front end is uber flawed and you know, not. And I, and I think the other side of it too. I mean, there's a lot of sides to this. So this is like an octagon here. The other side of this octagon would be that you have, you know, if, if the coaching staff feels like you already have one foot out the door, they're likely just going to not play you and tell you like, hey, just get in the portal, like you don't want to be here, like We're. We don't want to waste our time either. Like, there's that distinct possibility of happening as well where, you know, you just don't even have a spot at the end of the year. Like, they might just sit you and be like, yeah, no, we don't. We're not playing you if you have no intention of being here for the next three years. Like, we're not going to keep running you out there. Which in some respects does fly in the face of the things that, like I've said on this podcast of, like, they're going to play good players. But this is a completely different animal nowadays where if it's like, hey, I'm just gonna get in the portal after this year, like, all right, like, why do I continue to play you? Why am I going to invest more time in you if you have zero, zero intention of staying here any longer than the next two months? And that. That's a real. That is a real thought process, and that is a real thing that is happening. And whether you want to admit it or not or whether or not you want to believe it or not, it's true. Because if. If as a coach, you're looking at it like, why am I going to invest all this time in somebody who doesn't want to be here? I'll invest my time in the guys who want to be here. And that's a reality, you know, so, like, I'm not saying it's going to happen all the time, but, like, that those are realities that can find themselves to the surface in these types of situations.
• 9:59
  Speaker B: I think the other thing for me is it. And this gets back to taking a step back from your personal situation and taking a look at the whole landscape, right? So, you know, we talk about, you know, what it looks like to go into the transfer portal, and a lot of people just think, well, all right, if I go in there, I'm going to get recruited. But you don't really understand the level of competition that you're dealing with inside the transfer portal. And you have guys at the highest levels of college baseball playing in the SEC and the ACC and the Big 12 in the Big 10 that are going into the transfer portal. Those guys are going to go ahead of the Division 2 and Division 3 guys almost every single time, Right? Especially if they've had any success at that level. Right. And so in a lot of cases, guys who haven't had success at that level and need a change of scenery, right? So those guys are. You're going into the transfer portal with those guys, right? And then you're going into the transfer portal with the guys who tore it up in the Sun Belt as a freshman and are going to try to level up and go play in the ACC or the SEC or the Big 12, right? So you got those guys in the mix and then you got the lower level Division 1 guys, you know, schools like Marist. You're wearing a T shirt right now. Who, if you go into the Mac and you're one of the best players in the Mac, you're fairly marketable, right? Are you going to end up playing in the sec? I don't know. But Rider shortstop is going to go play it at Mississippi State this year. So you've got to compete with that. So if you're a Division 3 or Division 2 kid and you know you hit.310 with five or six home runs like, and you think, all right, well I'm pretty good at my level, I'm going to level up. I don't know if you fully understand the breadth of the comp, the competition that you're dealing with and understanding that, you know, you need to be in order to transfer up a level from Division 3 to Division 2 or Division 2 to Division 1 or Division 3 to Division 1, you need to dominate. You need to dominate, not just be a pretty good player, you know, third team, all conference player. Like you need to be the best player likely in your conference if you're a Division 3 player to legitimately go into the portal and get a ton of attention or you need to have a significant track record of success playing in summer ball, doing a little bit of different things. And I think that this conversation has been skewed a little bit because we, we had guys with a bunch of extra years, right? So they're seeing Division 3 guys go to Division 1, but they're not taking into account that guys like Aaron Whitley who was at Rochester, who went and had a really nice couple years at Richmond, that kid had 600 college at bats under his belt and he was the best player in that conference for multiple years in a very good Division 3 conference. So that guy has three or four years worth of college baseball under his belt to go play at a mid major school, the University of Richmond, the Division 3 freshman who thinks that they're going to step on campus, be a broken and then transfer to Division 1 school or Division 2 kid who thinks they're going to go to a good Division 2 school, tear it up. It's not that that can't happen, but we deal in our society, likes to reach out and talk about the outliers. The Greg Maddox thing always kills me. Well, Greg Maddox got people out at 88 to 91. Well, Greg Maddox was a complete freaking anomaly. You need to be an outlier in order to level up. Right. And that's kind of the reality.
• 13:35
  Speaker A: One of the best pitchers ever.
• 13:37
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:38
  Speaker A: Regardless of. Regardless of era, regardless of year, regardless of anything. He's one of the best human beings to ever take a baseball, toe the rubber, and throw it at a catcher with a hitter there.
• 13:51
  Speaker B: Yeah. And that's the guy that people fall back on, that you don't need a ton of velocity to be successful. Okay.
• 13:59
  Speaker A: Yeah. No, I just like.
• 14:00
  Speaker B: Just like Jose Altube and Dustin Pedro are the examples why you don't need to be 6:2. Well, yeah, those guys are hall of Famers. It's a little bit of a different. But what I'm getting at is that it isn't as simple as going to school, playing well, and being able to leave. Right. The competition that you face when you get there to your point, you're a freshman, you get on campus, you need to first prove that you deserve to play college baseball in the first place, and then you need to go and perform. And if you're at one of the Division 2 or the Division 3 levels, you likely need to have multiple years to prove that you're really good. You probably need to go play in a good summer league and prove that you can hang with guys that are 89 to 93 every single day, and you're not getting a bunch of hits on a Sunday against a guy who's 84, 85. Right. That needs to happen. And, yeah, I'm a little bit emotional about this, but I get frustrated when not understanding the full scope of the environment that you're in, in the landscape that you're trying to deal with, leads to simple statements about complex things, and you have to dig deeper, and you have to understand what's going on. And then the other thing, too, Keith, this is.
• 15:20
  Speaker A: We're getting into a Dexicon at this.
• 15:22
  Speaker B: Point in time to you, Keith, I. I say this to you. The grass ain't always greener.
• 15:30
  Speaker A: No, I. I think that you're dead right. You know, like, you have. Especially now. Right. Like, there's no. There's no fall limit for rosters at the Division 1 level, but it's got to be at 34 by December 1st. So you're opting into if. If that's the route you want to take. And that's where you're going to go. You know, you could be out opting into a program in which you show up in the fall, and there's 62 dudes on that fall roster. Gotta be at 34 by December 1st. So a lot of dudes are going to be, you know, in the transfer portal again, you know, so it's. And look, if you want to opt into that and you want to try it, by all means, but understand that. And I think this is true of a lot of things, especially in sports, where everyone thinks it's not going to happen to them, and that's not necessarily the reality. The more likely outcome is that your. You could end up back in the transfer portal, not playing at that school, and then you're left holding the bag of, why did I leave? I shouldn't have left that place. I was going to be a dude. And that place is likely moved on. You know, in, in a world of, you know, recruiting, you're not.
• 16:50
  Speaker B: You can't.
• 16:50
  Speaker A: Be just standing still, right? So if you tell me that you're getting in the transfer portal, then I'm going and finding other players to fill that role. And if it doesn't work out for you, sorry, I've already moved on, you know, so I don't, I don't, I don't. I'm on here saying that I don't hate the transfer portal, and I don't, because I do think that there, there are some benefits to it, but under the current, in the current landscape, I do think there are. There has to be some semblance of tweaks with some of this stuff. And I do think the pendulum is going to swing back. Right. Like you mentioned the COVID years and the amount of guys who had, you know, years left over. And, you know, some of those guys, I would probably argue that a good portion of those schools, you know, that these kids came from, you know, either didn't have grad school or, you know, they were able to, to get some scholarship money somewhere else to get grad school, you know, more affordable for them. And to your point, when you have, you know, 3, 4, 5, 600 at bats under your belt, that's a far different argument than having 60 at bats and thinking that that's going to be the, your ticket into the next level where, you know, from a coaching standpoint, you're going to look at it and be like, 60 at bats and he had 380, like, yeah, okay, see what he does in the summer. See what he does next year. Maybe. But there, there's the other side of it too is what can you defend? That like defending at the Division 1 level is more difficult than defending at the Division 3 level. It's just, it's still a high level of baseball, but it's the highest in some of those places. So you're going to be playing against better athletes, better players by and large on the field. So your defense needs to hold up as well. And if you can't defend, you might not find yourself on the field. And same thing, pitching wise, you know, you can go punch out. You know, if you're playing at a lower level Division 3 conference and you're punching out the world, you're, you know, facing hitters at the Division 1 level that are a little bit better, it's going to be a little bit more difficult and tougher sledding for you. So what does that look like? You know, so it's, you know, and we just finished a podcast that we Talked about Division 3 not being, it's a high level baseball, but again, the, the, the overall athlete at the Division 3 level for the most part is going to have a one or two more deficiencies than the Division 1 athlete would be a fair thing to say. It's still high level baseball. But, you know, you're one through, you know, you're one through nine hitters at the Division 1 level are what, you know, you're. Excuse me, your six through nine hitters at the Division 1 Level are likely going to be top order Division 3 hitters, if that makes sense.
• 19:55
  Speaker B: It does.
• 19:57
  Speaker A: In and to be fair, like pretty much everyone who hits in college was like hit one through four in high school. So it's just, you know, it's extrapolate that out. Right. Like kind of six, you're five through nine hitters at the Division one level would probably be, you know, one through four or five at the Division three level in most places.
• 20:18
  Speaker B: Right. Yep. The other thing is, I think this is a classic case of car before the horse at. When you're talking about worrying about stuff that's too far in the future. And I think that this happens in the recruiting process in general where, you know, specifically with the younger kids, 27s, 28s, they're worried about getting recruited when they really need to worry about being a really good high school player first. You know, you got 28 that are trying to be, you know, trying to work towards getting committed next summer. And it's like, well, you need to make your high school varsity team first before that's probably going to be a reality. You know, same thing with 27s. You got guys who are going into their, you know, their, their junior years here coming up and you know, some of those guys may not have had significant burn at the varsity level yet. Like, we need to play varsity first and go and prove that we can compete and do really well at the high school level before we're going to be recruitable. We talk about it. You need to be recruitable before you get recruited. This is a similar case where you have people who are curious about what are my opportunities after I get to college to go somewhere else to play college baseball. It's like, well, let's, let's play college baseball first. And if you go and tear it up, you're, you know, it's a champagne problem, first world problem, if you will, where, hey, if you walk onto a college campus at any level, Division 1, 2 or 3, and you go as a freshman and you go hit 350 with 10 pumps and you're playing shortstop every day, like, yeah, call us, we'll help you in the transfer portal. But you got to do that first and you're going to have to work hard to earn it. You know, you got to get on the field first. You got to prove that you belong first. You know, the reality is whatever level you, you ultimately go to play, you're going to go play against guys who are borderline men. There's 22 year olds playing college baseball at the Division 3 level. You're 17, 18 getting onto campus. Those guys have been in the weight room for four years. They've got 600 more college at bats than you do. You need to be that guy out before you worry about where your next school is. I don't know. Yeah, no, maybe my thinking's flawed, but.
• 22:50
  Speaker A: Like, no, your thinking is not flawed in the context of the conversation of like, saying that this is what you're going to do before even going and doing it is, is a flawed method of going about the recruiting process. You still have to show up to that school. You still have to prove that you should be a guy that's going to play all the time. And then you have to go do it consistently. Not like you were good for the first three weeks and then fell off a cliff. You're going to have to be good for the entire year.
• 23:28
  Speaker B: Like, and I think, I think the.
• 23:31
  Speaker A: Easier way to kind of put this is if you were a guy who says, like, I'm going to go to said school and my plan is to go there for a year and then get in the transfer portal. You need to be rookie or freshman of the year candidacy. Good. To, to be able to legitimately think about even getting into the portal. If you are not going to put up numbers that the league and the coaches in that league are going to be like that guy put up legit rookie of the year numbers and he should be voted on on or in the running for being rookie of the year, you're not going to get recruited out of the transfer portal. Now, I shouldn't say that you're not going to get recruited to the spot in which you think you are going to out of the recruit out of the transfer portal. You might get recruited by another school, but ultimately it's probably not going to be what you thought it was. Right. But like that's where those are the type. Like that's, that that's the type of year you have to have. You have to go out and be rookie of the year, freshman of the year, newcomer of the year, whatever these people do nowadays in all these conferences. Good. In order to legitimately have a shot at trying to get to where you want to go. And if you, if you don't do that, the likelihood of you executing your plan is probably 1 to 2%. So 98 to 99% not going to happen.
• 25:09
  Speaker B: Yeah. And the other thing that I would throw out there is that if this is your mindset of I want to go somewhere, I want to play and I want to leave, go to junior college, it's built into the process. Right. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of guys that, there's a lot of high school kids who are fixated on playing Division 1, 2 or 3 baseball that if you really want to play baseball, going to junior college could be the absolute best option for you. You play more way less restrictions, you get your academic stuff squared away for a couple years and you open up the door for you to go to a multitude of other four year schools, you're two years better, you're two years more developed. And for families that are looking at it this way, the education clearly isn't a driving factor. Right. It's a baseball decision. Well, junior college is sitting right in front of you. And we just talked about this. You can't just go and play junior college baseball. At a lot of places there's junior college programs that really good high school players simply will not play at. Right, Right. Just junior colleges that will take anybody and they'll give You a fair shot, right? But there's also junior colleges where, hey, man, if you're not really good, if you're not a college baseball player, period, you're probably not going to get a chance to develop because you're probably not going to play that much. But if that's your mindset of I want to go somewhere and I want to try to level up, go to junior college, it's built into the process and you're going to get to play a lot more and you're going to be able to do it less in a less costly manner, and you're going to open up yourself to be recruited for two more years actively. Right? You don't have to enter the portal. Right? You can actively be recruited after your freshman year, after your sophomore year. So you open up that window and you give yourself a better opportunity to move. If that's what your, your plan is and what your, what your desire is, is to, you know, maybe you're not getting the looks that you think you should get right now. Well, go to junior college and prove that those guys were wrong. Go put up some legitimate numbers and then you have the opportunity to move on as a part of that process where it's expected. You're not going to ruffle feathers at a junior college because you're looking to transfer out of there after your freshman year. It's fairly normal. Where, you know, to your point earlier about if coaches get the idea that you're not all in on the program, like, that could be detrimental to your playing time and, you know, something that coaches are going to frown upon. You know, guys enter the portal for different reasons. We've gone over that, probably don't need to exhaust that. But, you know, I just think it's important for people to understand the whole landscape here. And it's not just as simple as, like, well, I'll pick a school, I'll go dominate, and then I'll leave. It's. It's just not how it works.
• 28:14
  Speaker A: No, it's not.
• 28:15
  Speaker B: For some, maybe, but it's a super small percentage of guys. And honestly, the guys who do that probably don't enter that situation with the intention of doing it. It kind of happens because they're bought into what they're doing or they make a significant jump. Right. I think for pitchers, it's a lot easier to be really honest with you because metrics and velocity and spin rates and trackman, they paint a really good picture of like, where you could potentially pitch, you know, because guys have the ability to Discern that through movement patterns. And they can look at box scores, they can look at trackman reports and all that kind of stuff and go, okay, that. That stuff plays at our level, where hitters, it's a little bit more nebulous because now you need to factor in the quality of pitching that they're facing every day. You have to factor in the defensive component, which is a hard one. The physical component is. Is another piece of the puzzle. You know, do you have the prerequisite bat speed to face 89 to 92 every single day? You know, maybe even better than that, depending on where you end up going. So for pitchers, I think this is an easier equation to try to solve, but once again, you need to go and be good. There's guys at the Division 1 level who are 93 to 95 who went into the portal with 11 eras, and they ain't getting recruited because that's not going to work. You know, throwing up strikes, you're breaking ball's not good enough, whatever it is. Right. So just try to understand the whole situation and don't make these broad assumptions about how this works, because it's way more nuanced, it's way more complicated, it's way more competitive than making a simple statement of, I'm gonna go to college, I'm gonna dominate, and then I'm gonna leave as soon as I have the opportunity to do so. And I think it's just. I think it's just bad juju. Yeah, Yeah, I think it's just bad juju. Like, if. If you commit to a school and you never intend to really be there, like, you'll get sniffed out, man. You get sniffed out, and it's just. It's probably not going to work. It really is probably not going to work. Wherever you go, you need to have both feet in, and you need to be committed to that coach. You need to be committed to that institution. You need to be committed to your teammates. And if you play yourself into a situation where you can sit down with your coach at the end of the year and legitimately look him in the face and go, you know what, Coach? I think it's time for me to see if I can go level up. Good for you. Yeah, I don't.
• 30:55
  Speaker A: I mean, it's going to get sniffed out very quickly, and you're going to, like, the kids are going to know very quickly. The coaches are going to know. It's. That stuff does not stay covered for.
• 31:08
  Speaker B: Long.
• 31:11
  Speaker A: Because it only takes. It takes a Saturday night. You know, hey, yeah, no, this is my plan. And the next thing you know, it chirps, you hear it, you know you're gonna have the conversation. No, no, no, I don't mean that. And then you're on high alert from that point forward. And that's just like, that's the reality of these types of situations where, you know, if, if that's what you're going into, you run way more risk of not being able to execute said plan. And it's not a good plan to start with. But like, you run the risk of not being able to even come close to executing it. Because if I'll be honest with you, if I was still coaching and I got wind that someone was only going to be there for a year and transfer, the likelihood of me investing a lot of time, like, we're going to have the conversation, right? Like, I'm going to bring you in my office, you're going to sit down across the desk for me and we're going to have a conversation about what you're legit intentions are. And if you, if that's your intention, I don't know, like, I'm not going to invest time in you. If you have zero intention of staying in my program, I'm probably going to tell you that you're better off just go ahead and getting in the transfer portal now, because it's not. I, I want to work with the guys that want to be here, not with somebody who has one foot out the door because that was their plan all along.
• 32:47
  Speaker B: Well said. Anything else you want to add to this conversation, Coach?
• 32:53
  Speaker A: I don't. I think we made our points and what ended up being a maybe multi layered was a better, A better metaphor. Too many sides for me. We were peeling back the onion there. That was probably a better metaphor than.
• 33:11
  Speaker B: I like having sides on the other side.
• 33:12
  Speaker A: On the other side. I was just, I was, I had a lot of sides going on over here.
• 33:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's a it. And like a lot of these conversations, it's. It's not summed up in a tweet. It's not summed up in a post. It's not summed up in some broad, sweeping statement. It's why we, it's why we do this. To try to unpack some of this stuff and get people to think about it. If nothing else, you know, I hope that this conversation for the listeners at least made him think about it. I don't think, you know, if you don't go into this process with these intentions, I still think this is a valuable conversation to have because at the end of the day, some of the big talking points were like, this is hard. College baseball is not for everybody. It is a privilege, not a right. And you need to work hard and you need to go and earn your playing time and you need to go earn respect from your teammates and you need to go earn respect from your coaches. And that's where it all starts. And the sooner you can wrap your head around that and the expectations in what is required of you as a college athlete, regardless of the level you're at, junior college and AIA Division one, two or three, you have to be committed to what it takes to be successful. You have to be committed to the time that it's going to be required of you, bare minimum. And the guys who are really good at it go well beyond that. You know, they don't just show up to practice. They're going to get the extra work in, they're going to get that extra lift in those Division 3 guys, the guys that we coach that were really good, they weren't just lifting the three days a week that we had them scheduled with the strength coach. You know, they weren't just hitting when before practice. You know, they're hitting every day. You know, they're taking ground balls, they're taking their conditioning seriously. That's what it takes to be good. And it doesn't matter what level it's at. This, this idea that Division 3 and juco are these fallbacks is really flawed. And you know, people need to wrap their head around the level of competition and what's required to actually compete at that level. And I think that dovetails into what we talked about today around this expectation that I'm going to show up, be awesome and leave. I think it's short sighted and I think it's a rather naive way to think about this process.
• 35:29
  Speaker A: Agreed.
• 35:31
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