We’re going to ignore the Aaron Judge/Gerrit Cole news that might cause me to suffer from too many ailments to count in favor of something I’m actually looking forward to this upcoming baseball season: the rookies. Noelvi Marte aside (he was just suspended for 80 games for PED use), we have a ton of young players to watch this regular season, not including the Japanese and Korean stars that will surely dominate their Western competition. What’s interesting about this rookie class, though, is that there are still many players who might need to be included that we aren’t sure to include in it just yet. That’s right: I’m talking about last year’s draft class.
Paul Skenes, Dylan Crews, and Wyatt Langford made headlines by going towards the top of the 2023 MLB Draft last July to the Pirates, Nationals, and Rangers, respectively. All three of them have been rumored to be major-league ready as of Spring Training and all three will appear in this week’s Spring Breakout games. Skenes is the ace of this trio and should be a nice complement to Mitch Keller in Pittsburgh’s rotation for the foreseeable future; Dylan Crews will help to lead a young DC lineup to the top of the NL East, a la Bryce Harper; and Langford is joining a Rangers team that just won the World Series, thanks largely in part to someone who didn’t even qualify as a rookie for Texas’s 2023 playoff run in Evan Carter (my AL RoY pick, by the way). But the reason why I bring up these three players in particular and not someone like the Orioles’ Jackson Holliday is that Skenes, Crews, and Langford all made their primetime debuts in Omaha during last year’s College World Series.
Watching LSU and Florida duke it out in a CWS that felt more hyped than those in the past got me thinking of how college baseball is treated in the public zeitgeist in relation to how Major League Baseball teams look at college. Billy Beane, the GM of the Moneyball A's, was a huge proponent of drafting players out of college instead of high school because of the maturity they gain at a higher level of competition. Nowadays, most domestic stars have attended at least one year of college ball. The aforementioned Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole both went to college, Judge to Fresno State and Cole to UCLA (from which he went number one overall to the Pirates). Other stars went to university, too, and in general, it doesn’t feel that weird to see modern stars in that boat. So why isn’t college baseball more popular?
Part of it is the same reason why baseball itself is less popular today: it’s slow to outsiders and there are a lot of games to follow in too many TV markets that aren’t widely available. Still, most 2024 MLB mock drafts have tons of college players going in the early picks, so I feel some sort of responsibility to understand those future draftees while they’re mashing taters before even getting to the Minor Leagues. That’s why I’ve made it a point to start following a little bit of NCAA baseball in 2024.
I haven’t watched as many games as I’ve wanted to, but I’m waiting for the ACC and SEC seasons to really get in the swing of things. Those are the conferences with the best teams and, obviously, the best players. But there’s something to be said for the school where I’m getting my PhD: St. John’s. Their best baseball alumni include John Franco and Frank Viola (how appropriate, I know, given their Mets tenures). The bottom line is that college baseball is still baseball and I feel that when there are big games to be watched at the collegiate level, that we as baseball fans should give those games some viewership because, after all, baseball is America’s pastime, no matter how old or experienced the players are.
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