Episode Transcript
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[00:01:12] Speaker B: Welcome to this week's edition of in the Clubhouse with EMD Baseball. I'm Andy Kittes, joined by my wonderful co host Keith Glasser. How we doing?
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Great. How are you?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: We're good. It's.
Well, it's that time of year. It's.
It's pulse check time, if you will. If you can't get excited for this, you get there, check your pulse, as we used to say.
But it's November.
Most kids who are serious about becoming college players, serious about being really good high school players, you got about five months, right? Clock is ticking, and what we want to take a couple minutes to talk about here, and I'll kick it over to you in a second, is what are you doing, you know, what are you doing to separate yourself from the crowd?
What are you doing to. To put yourself in a position to make a mark on your high school team?
What are you doing to put yourself in a position to have a great spring season so you can parlay that into a really good summer season so that you can get recruited specifically for those guys who are in the 20, 27 class and you're uncommitted. Like, you got work to do if you're uncommitted Right now, the baseball world is telling you that you got work to do and you got to look yourself in the mirror and figure out, like, am I doing what needs to be done?
So I think that's kind of the. The crux of what we're trying to get across here. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna kick it over to you for, for some opening thoughts.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that the, you know, it's November 3rd.
So for the, the majority of people who are going to be going through the recruiting process, you're, you know, you have four or five months to kind of either a decompress for a little bit away from baseball after the, the summer and the fall seasons have ended, and then, you know, you know, get back after it and figure out where your deficiencies are. Right. So, you know, what do you have to get better at in order for you to up your game for next year? And then obviously, you know, continue to strengthen your strengths over the course of the next five months. Getting in the weight room, obviously a huge deal over the course of the next four or five months, you know, if you get the weight room three, four times, five times a week over the course of the next, you know, November, December, January, February, you're gonna look like a completely different person when you put a uniform at tryouts come March.
And, you know, for the majority of people, again, like, you're probably going to start tryouts in late February, early March, mid to late March games in March and April.
You know, you want to give yourself the best chance of success going into your high school season so that you can build upon that into the summer. And specifically for the 27s, where, you know, next summer is going to be a huge summer for you from a recruiting standpoint, you want to give yourself the best foot forward that you possibly can. And it's not something that happens in January or February.
It's stuff that's going to start to happen now in November, December, January, February, where that gives you four full months of lead up to, you know, build up your arm strength, get better in the cage, get better defensively, you know, get better from a physicality standpoint, getting in the weight room, maybe doing some speed training stuff to get yourself a little bit faster, whatever that might be. But, you know, the time is now to do that, not mid February of next year where it's like, oh, shoot, we have tryouts in like three weeks, so I should probably get in the cage a couple times before we roll it out there, you know, and that's not to say that, you know, we don't have some, some dual sport athletes out there that are doing some other things. But, you know, your, your conditioning, you're lifting, those things are kind of being taken care of while you're playing that sport. You just got to take a little bit more time to, to get better at your baseball side of things. So, you know, I thought it was poignant to at Least have the conversation here at the start of November where, you know, the kind of the fall from a recruiting standpoint obviously wrapped a couple weeks ago as the quiet period started after Jupiter around the 8 to the 13th or 18th of October.
You know, I know there's a handful of other things going on out there with the Halloween havoc tournaments all over the country, but, you know, the reality is like, you know, the baseball season is, is pretty much over for the most part, and it's a good time to kind of evaluate how your summer went, what it is that you need to, you know, clearly work on to get better.
And if you don't know right, you know, ask your coaches, you know, call people like us who do this for a living and say, like, hey, what, how can you help us? And what is it that I need to get better at in order to achieve my goal of playing college baseball and have those tough conversations. Because, you know, if you're going to go into it blind, you're, you're going to kind of struggle with this. But, you know, at the bare minimum, you need to be in the weight room, you need to be hitting, you need to be throwing and building up safely over the course of the next four months so that your summer, next year, you're able to really showcase yourself and your abilities at the highest level that you could possibly be at so that you can, you know, live the dream of being recruited to play college baseball.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Yeah, these, these four or five months are where guys separate themselves. Honestly, I don't want to sound too hyperbolic, but like, it's where dreams are made.
Like, this is the guys who really want to get after it for the next five months in the weight room specifically. And we've talked about this ad nauseam, but like the physical piece of all of this is the biggest separator for kids. It's not skill acquisition.
It's different than other sports and it's a little bit counterintuitive. Right. It's easy to get your swings. It's easy to do that kind of stuff. It's not hard.
The hard part is going to the weight room four or five times a week. The hard part is doing your speed work. The hard part is nutrition. The hard part is making sure you're getting enough sleep. The hard part is also doing well in school.
But we've seen this, I've seen it as a coach where you see a kid in the fall, he's not quite there and you're waiting for him. You know, you want to follow up and Go see him in the spring. I've seen it from our perspective and how we do things now where there's like basically two paths.
There's the kid who gets after it for five months, who puts his head down, who isn't worried about anything but getting better.
And then there's the kid who thinks he's working hard by doing a couple things a couple times a week.
And ultimately what ends up happening is he stays the same but the rest of the people pass him so you actually get worse.
And the guys who put their heads down, and we've seen this routinely. There's a young man who comes to mind that is committed to a legitimate program, high end Division 1 program, who was 83 to 86. This time last year he just threw down in Jupiter and he was 90 to 93. And it's not by accident. And I think that sometimes social media. I'm going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here, Coach Glass, so bear with me for a second.
I think this, sometimes social media only shows the flashes of like the peak performance.
So there's a lot of people who may have seen the video of the kid and I'll leave his name out of it because I haven't talked to him about whether he wanted me to talk about it or not, but may have seen a video of the young man at 90 to 93 and go down and dominate Jupiter. And they go, oh, well, that kid's just awesome. He must be really, really good. What they don't know is that kid took feedback on where he was a year ago and said, what do I need to do? Tell me and I will do it. He went and did it.
And he is where he is now because he worked at it, not because he was just given the ability to throw a ball 93 miles an hour. Like he built that up and he earned every mile an hour along the way.
And the kids who take that path, whether you end up pitching at the highest level of college baseball or you end up putting yourself in a position to be recruitable. You know, I've seen kids who are this time of year, they're 77 miles an hour and they're probably not a college baseball player. If you fast forward a year and they don't get any better and you watch that kid go get after it and he eats well and he works hard.
Next thing you know, he's a recruitable kid next summer and he finds a place to play college baseball.
I've also seen guys who are 82 to 84 this time of year, and they come out next spring and they're 82 to 84. And they're wondering why nobody's calling them.
Because you leave breadcrumbs, right? Coaches who are paying attention, they look at and they're like, well, that kid, he obviously didn't do anything because he didn't get any better.
So what you do the next five months, specifically for the 25.7class and the 28s as well, like, it is going to have a massive impact on whether you're recruitable or not.
And the guys who are willing to put in the time, the sweat and the effort, they will be rewarded. On the backside of this, that's almost a guarantee. The guys who decide to work, they will pass people and they will put themselves in a position to be recruitable.
And that's really where it starts.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's.
I think the crux of what we're trying to drive at is that, like, there's a lot of stuff that has to go on behind the scenes, and how good you get depends on how much time, energy, and effort you want to put into it.
And now the season's over and you are a 2027, or even if you're a 2028. Right. Like, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get actively recruited next year, but figure out what it is that you need to get better at and have those conversations and get in the weight room and get more physical and do those things to be able to get yourself to the point where you're going to put yourself in a position to where people are going to start taking notice of what it is and how good you are at playing this game.
You know, I think that old adage is, Andy, you know, if. If, you know, no one stays the same, you either get better or you get worse.
And. And that's the reality because there's. You know, we've talked about this a ton on this podcast, that with the roster crunch at Division 1 level and the shortening of the Major league draft and all those things, like, the floor has been raised, and there's going to be a lot of people that, you know, used to play college baseball that aren't going to be. Or you're going to be on the outside looking in, you know, and the reality is, when it comes down to a lot of this stuff, like, it's.
You're going to have to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you did enough.
And I, for one, would like to be Someone who could say, I, you know, I did what I needed to do, and if it didn't work out, it didn't work out. But, you know, hate to, you know, not do anything for the next four or five months. And then it comes recruiting season, and it's like I'm way behind the eight ball. I'm still 81 to 83, and no one likes me.
You know, maybe if you use the last four, you know, November, December, January, February to get yourself a little bit better, maybe you're four to six, six to seven. Like, people start taking notice there. So, you know, in short, get your work in over the course of the next four or five months so that when you get back to the high school season, you can set yourself up for success going into the summer so that people start taking notice and you can kind of, you know, start living out the dream of playing college baseball and finding success and having a great career somewhere.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Well said.
I think that concludes today's episode.
Thank you for listening. Tune in next week. We'll talk to you then. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you for listening this week. 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. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram MDBaseball. 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.
