Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to this week's edition of in the Clubhouse with EMD Baseball. I'm Andy Kirakidis, joined with my wonderful co host Keith Glasser. How we doing?
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Great. How are you?
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Good. It's that time of year.
Need to put up or shut up.
Maybe that's the wrong way to put it. But what we're going to talk about today is taking advantage of your opportunities and kind of framing up how this can work from an evaluation standpoint. And I think, you know, there's a couple different pieces to this, and I'll. I'll start us off with the idea that coaches don't always get to see guys multiple times or as many times as they would like, I would say.
Right. And a coach might only be able to come and watch you pitch one time.
And unfortunately, you know, it can work in your benefit as well. If you go and you throw and you're awesome, like, that might be all they need to see. But if you don't have your best day, you know, that might be the only time that coach gets to see you. And coaches are going to operate off of what they seen, not necessarily what they saw on Twitter. You know, it may make them circle back to it, but you got to understand from a coach's perspective that they are only going to take into account, for the most part, the performance you put on the field in front of them.
And the thing that I would add to that, I think it really highlights the need for guys to really prepare themselves to go and perform.
Right. You throw on a Friday.
Great.
What are you doing Saturday through the next Thursday to get yourself to your next start. Right. Making sure that you're putting your best foot forward every time. If you're a position player, you play Friday, Saturday, Sunday, what are you doing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of that next week to continue to perform, to continue to develop, to continue to get yourself in a place where you're playing really good baseball.
It's a tough part of this process.
You know, I was talking to a coach the other day about how you go through this, where you'll see a kid commit to a school that's on the same level as you, and you'll be like, well, I saw that kid a couple weeks ago and he wasn't good enough for us. Like, did I miss something? And sometimes it's just as simple as you go and see a guy pitch and he's 84 to 86 and he's kind of blah.
You move on.
That kid throws two weeks later in front of somebody who may be your competition in the recruiting world.
And he's 86 to 89 and touches a 90, and it's a completely different kid. And that's the funky part about this process that is really hard to put a finger on if you haven't been around in front of the right people. And it can really be that simple one day. Can move the needle a ton for you.
But just kind of wanted to frame that up. And then I know you wanted to talk about the metrics piece, which I think is. Is very much tied to this conversation.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the metric side, along with, you know, kind of what you just mentioned, all showcases now, for the most part are going to have the metrics as part of this. And I think we talk about this quite a bit on here, but I can't hammer these points home more that what you do from a metric standpoint. Need to show up when you play and when the lights are on.
You know, if you're going to be a 6A runner, you got to be pretty quick in game. You know, if you're a 71 runner, then you could probably play up fast. You know, you could probably play a little bit faster than that if you have first quick stab your explosive things of that nature. You know, I, I think the one that, you know, the, the two lowest hanging fruits are, are velocity and exit velocity. Right? Anything kind of surrounding those, you know, and I, I think sometimes what, what jams a lot of people up is when you throw a bullpen and, you know, it's 86.88 and looks good, you know, snap, dragon slider. And then that gets your foot in the door. And then when people show up to watch throw, you're 82, 84, 83, 85, bump some sixes, couple sevens and eight.
That's not like it. The bullpen is a hell of a lot easier because there's no pressure, there's no umpire, there's no game, there's no hitter, there's no fans there. There's. Everything is within your control to kind of let you just blow it out, you know, so those types of things, like, yeah, it's, you know, it's kind of common when you hear a lot of coaches say, like, it's in there, but I've yet to see it come out in game. And there's a stark contrast between seeing it and knowing that it's probably in there, but being able to see it on a consistent basis or at least once or twice in game.
And unfortunately, you know, when coaches show up to see you like that might be the only opportunity that you're going to have to throw in front of them. So you do want to make sure that you're doing your best to be able to, to show up and show out. And it is true. There's a lot of guys that, you know, I passed on. There's a lot of guys that I got when I was coaching that I happen to see them on days where everything lined up and their metrics from bullpens and such match the game and other times where it wasn't even close. And I was like, I don't know, man. I've seen them throw three times and I haven't seen them bump anything higher than an 84.
And then, you know, he shows up throwing for an opponent the following year and he's all of 87, 89. I just never saw it, you know. So like you, you live and die by trusting your eyes. You've seen enough baseball in your life to know that this is, this is where this, this is what I want, this is what I see. And I can only go off of what it is I see in front of me.
And I think the exit velo is, is a big one in from a position player standpoint because, you know, depending on kind of what it looks like, right? Like we've seen a lot of guys who have triple digit exit vos off of a tee where like you wind yourself up like a top and just catch it as hard as you can and hope that you hit it or you're doing the same thing off of a track, man, or a rapsodo. And. But that swing doesn't play in game, you know, and you can kind of tell that they're two distinctly different swings where this one is just trying to hit the baseball as hard as I can because again, it's going to open some eyes.
But we want to see if that swing actually plays in game.
You know, you have to hit a moving baseball in this game. It's. It's sinking, it's running away, it's running in, it's sliding away, it's breaking down.
There's a lot of different things that are happening with that baseball. Like the pitcher is actively trying to get you out.
That, that, that is a large component of this game and you're trying to not get out.
So you need to be able to put yourself in the best position in order to be able to do that. And sometimes I think that we get so caught up in the metric side of things of just trying to swing as hard as we possibly can. And you know, it's on the same plane every time and it's easy to, it's an easy barrel to beat all the time because unless you run into that barrel, he ain't going to do any damage. And you know, the coaches see that and know that. So you could be, you'd have the best exit velo in the world. But if it's on the same plane and you can't handle anything but a fastball in one specific spot, you're going to have a hard time being recruited because it's, it's exposed very quickly and you can't really pull the wool over a lot of these guys eyes because they, they've seen this many times before.
Generally speaking, they want to see more guys who are, who are going to be on the barrel more.
That generally shows that you're going to be more of a better hitter and the exit velo will follow.
You know, and it's the name of the game is getting hits, not swinging and hitting the baseball as hard as you possibly can. Does that help for all the metrics driven people out there that want to hit the ball hard? Absolutely it does. But you can still hit the ball really hard and get out. You can hit the ball soft and be safe, you know. So I think that those types of metric things, they need to show up, but they also need to show up within your game if that makes a semblance of sense. Like you can't change your swing in order to try to hit the baseball a lot harder to pop some exit velos and then have a completely different swing when you get in game because it's, it's not really going to, those things aren't going to match up. You know, I'd rather see a guy who's going to be on the barrel all the time that, you know, I really like his swing. There's not a lot of adjustments I have to make and it's more so just he just has to get a little bit more physical over the course of the next 18 months in order to legitimately challenge for time to play for us. But at least in two plus years he's going to be a guy who can play, you know. So I think that it's, it's. You can do yourself a disservice trying to chase metrics. Especially to your point when you kick this off of guys have a very small window in which they can actually see you play. They want to see that those things match up. They want to See the athleticism, they want to see that these types of things are actually going to play out in game, not just in a showcase, because again, we don't play a showcase game in the college level like you. You actually have to go play the baseball game and the pitcher is trying to get you out. So it's got to all match up.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember having a conversation with a, it was with an ACC coach.
There's a player who athletically was.
Check the boxes, right? Big, good runner, had a bunch of tools that were very desirable sitting there at a game with him. And I know he'd seen him a couple other times and you know, I asked him, I said, well, what do you think?
He said, it's my fourth time seeing him and I'm here again because I'm waiting for him to do something.
I like the tool set, I like the physicality. I think he has stuff that translates to our level, but I just haven't seen him do anything to impact the game.
And these are the type of decisions that coaches are making, right, that you can check a lot of the physical boxes and that's a huge box to check, right? It absolutely is. Like, can you run, can you throw, can you play defense?
But when they go to evaluate you and watch you play in the game, they're looking, are you doing things that impact the game? Are you doing things that help. Help you win? And at a certain point, tools aren't enough and you got to have some of that production. And I think that that ties to exactly what we're talking about to, like, the metrics matter. They 100% do, but you have to bring the results. You can be a little bit below metrics wise, but every time I come and watch you play, I look up at the stat line and it's like, well, he went six, walked one, punched 11. Yeah, he probably doesn't throw quite as hard as I'd like him to throw, but coaches are going to lean towards a dude who's really productive in the game versus the really loud tools guy who doesn't do anything consistently to show you that those tools are actually going to translate in the game.
So just wanted to frame that up. I mean, I don't know if it answers any questions for anybody, but I think it's a little bit of insight into what coaches are looking for and kind of how about how they go about this, this process where, yeah, metrics matter. Anybody who tells you the VLO and running speed and arm speed and stuff, like anybody who tells you that stuff doesn't matter.
They're lying to you. But there's more to it and we got to be able to bring some of those tools into the game. They got to show up. We got to be able to put together good at bats.
You got to be able to go and showcase those velocities in that controlled environment. You got to bring them to the mound. You got to be able to compete. Right? We need to see some results from a coaching perspective to feel confident that not only do the tool are the tools good enough, but they're actually going.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: To show up when when it really matters.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Couldn't agree more.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Anything else?
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Nope.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Well, thank you for listening everybody. Check in next week. We'll have some more tidbits for you. Thanks everybody.
Thank you for listening this week.
[00:12:49] Speaker C: If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and smash that like button for us. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts as well as Spotify people. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram MD Baseball. If you want to find out what me and Keith do to help families and players navigate the recruiting process, go ahead and check us out on emdbaseball.com take a few minutes to check out our new online academy. I promise you'll get some good information out of that. Thanks again for listening. Check in with you next week.
