The 2026 MLB Draft begins tomorrow. Dreams will come true, and the course of baseball history will be altered not just by the talent of the players, but by the collective decisions of hundreds of hard-working people with teams and agencies who have been preparing for this since long before last year’s draft even began. Even though the current CBA negotiations and the owners’ proposal to maim the draft’s current format casts something of a shadow on this year’s event, it’s an exciting time for everyone, myself included. I not only get to learn about this class of players and share opinions about their baseball futures with our readers, I also get to highlight the strategies teams might use to maximize the talent they come away with. The bonus pool system, and the ways that teams, players, and their representatives navigate the “game” of the draft, is one of the things that separates baseball’s selection meeting from those of other sports. It rewards strategy, creativity and the cultivation of information that has nothing to do with hard baseball data. In this post, I’ll talk about the makeup and quality of this year’s class, take you through the pockets of players that pose difficult questions for clubs, and discuss a couple potential draft strategies, as well as which teams might best be able to execute them.
You’ll find the scouting reports and tool grades of 146 players over on The Board. Of that group, the 75 with a 40+ FV or above grade have an ordinal ranking, with the balance grouped by demographic. Brendan and I may still pepper that space with additional players between now and the draft, but they’ll be guys who fall lower on the list. The hard-ranked players are the ones who we’re most excited about. Read the rest of this entry »
With the MLB Draft just a day away, there is more information left in my notebook from the Combine than I have time to dispense. So, in the spirit of my post-draft grab bag from last season, here are some players who caught my eye (or at least my microphone) in Phoenix, whose names you ought to know come Draft Day.
Foremost among these is Jackson Flora, a right-handed pitcher out of UC Santa Barbara. I think he’s the top pitching prospect in the class. Eric Longenhagen and Brendan Gawlowski put him fourth overall on The Board; he’s the only pitcher in the top nine. And not that we care too much what other people think, but that’s very much the consensus position.
This draft has a clear top tier of Roch Cholowsky, the UCLA shortstop and presumptive top pick dating back 12 months, plus Georgia Tech catcher Vahn Lackey and Texas prep shortstop Grady Emerson. The prospect team has Future Value grades of 55 on all three of those players, then Flora with a 50, then the rest of the class starting at a 45+.
In his media scrum on Day 1 of the Combine, Flora said he was meeting with seven teams — the ones holding picks two through eight. If he doesn’t go in the first five or six picks, it’ll be a big deal.
Why? Well, I know I just wrote a big thing about how there’s no such thing as an ideal baseball body, but you can forget all that: It looks like Flora. The California right-hander is a lean 6-foot-5, 205 pounds, with mid-to-upper-90s heat that plays up due to extension and hits 100 on the gun from time to time. For hitters who get too comfortable sitting on the heater, Flora can break out a variety of pitches across the cutter-slider continuum. He also debuted a potential plus changeup during this past season.
“That pitch changed my life, made it a lot easier to get outs, so it was awesome,” Flora said. But that’s not the only improvement he made this year. “I think I was just more of a polished pitcher. Instead of throwing the ball as hard as I could all the time and just spinning it, I think I learned a lot about pitching backwards, how to execute pitches, how to pitch to my strengths and a hitter’s weaknesses… I worked a lot on the mental side of the game and my routine during the week off the field. I think that helped me a lot.”
This season, Flora went 12-0 in 16 starters, with an ERA of 1.06. Now, the run-scoring environment in college baseball has changed a lot over the past 15 years, so if you’re just dropping in for the draft, you might not have a good handle on exactly how good a 1.06 ERA is.
It’s incredibly good. The second-best ERA among qualified pitchers belonged to Oregon reliever Tanner Bradley. The only full-time starter to get within a run of Flora, Oregon State’s Dax Whitney, who only made 11 starts. Flora also held opponents to a .153 batting average, which was fourth in Division I and first among starting pitchers. Paul Skenes had a 1.69 ERA and .164 opponent batting average in his draft year, albeit against tougher competition, in way more innings, and with a much higher strikeout rate. Flora might not be quite that good, but he was basically unhittable.
It’s not surprising that Flora improved quite a bit over his time in college, because UCSB is a pitching factory. Flora is likely to be the third Gauchos pitcher selected in the top five picks since 2015, after Dillon Tate went fourth overall in 2015 and Tyler Bremner was picked second last year. Cardinals right-hander Michael McGreevy was also a first-round pick out of UCSB, and then there’s the school’s crown jewel, Cy Young winner Shane Bieber.
“I think it’s just the culture there, just being able to have a lot of trust in the coaches and the team,” Flora said. “There’s so much respect for Coach Checketts and [assistant coach Dylan] Jones, who helped the pitchers so much. So many guys come through here, maybe I should listen to the coaches, maybe they do know what they’re doing.”
Flora was a late bloomer; he said he grew a foot over his four years of high school, and was throwing 89 to 92 mph during his senior year, but got up to 94 by the time he got to campus. Once there, he started putting on weight and gaining strength as he underwent a regimented weight training program for the first time in his life, and the velo kept ticking up.
Having Bremner as an example helped as well. Flora credited his older teammate with making him internalize how good he’d become.
“He’s telling me: ‘Dude, when you’re out there, you need to understand dudes don’t want to face you,’” Flora said. “He was also good at — and we preach this a lot at school — faceless hitters, and just working on controlling the controllables. When the ball leaves your hand, there’s nothing you can really do unless he hits the ball right back to you.”
Armed with that newfound mental strength, plus triple-digit velocity and a new changeup, Flora is set up to make the leap to the pros with ease.
…
Flora is one of the best prospects in this draft, but the best story in the class belongs to Arizona high school catcher Alain Gomez-Gudino.
Jesús Cano profiled Gomez-Gudino for Baseball America back in March, and the tale of how Gomez-Gudino came to be a draft prospect is worth reading in full. In August 2023, Gomez-Gudino, then 15 years old, left Caracas, Venezuela with his mother, sister, and stepfather. After months of planning in secret, they slipped out of town and crossed the border to Colombia, hoping to leave behind Venezuela’s repressive government and economic turmoil. They carried one bag of clothes and food, plus Gomez-Gudino’s catcher’s mitt.
Over the next 17 days, they made their way north through Central America. At one point, Gomez-Gudino had to reach into a river to save his mother, who’d been pulled under by the current, from drowning. Later, they were captured by uniformed strangers of unknown origin in Mexico, and had to plead with them to keep one of their cellphones so they’d be able to stay in contact with family.
Eventually, they arrived in Mexico City, where they waited another three months to get an interview for political asylum in the United States. It’s far from the most perilous part of the tale, but most high school baseball prospects train incessantly. I was curious how Gomez-Gudino had stayed in practice during the four months he and his family were on the road.
“I brought my catcher’s glove all the way here, and I found a ball next to a park in Mexico City,” Gomez-Gudino explained. “I gave my glove to my stepfather, and I’d warm up a bit. I didn’t play that much, just for two weeks before I came here, on a summer team in Mexico.”
Grant of asylum in hand, Gomez-Gudino’s family settled in Scottsdale. He joined the baseball team at Saguaro High School, and his baseball career took off. The webbing of that catcher’s mitt, which had made the trip all the way from Caracas, finally gave out under the force of a fastball from Cam Caminiti, Gomez-Gudino’s high school batterymate. (When they make a movie of Gomez-Gudino’s life story, they’re going to have to break the fourth wall here to reassure viewers that no, this really happened.)
Caminiti went 24th overall to Atlanta in the 2024 draft, and the scouts who’d swarmed over the young left-hander soon took notice of the switch-hitting sophomore backstop. Invites to showcases followed quickly, as did college offers, and two years later, he’s one of the top high school catchers in the class.
All this happened while Gomez-Gudino was still adjusting to life some 3,200 miles and eight countries from home.
“It’s way different [in the U.S.], because you got to go to school,” Gomez-Gudino said. “In Venezuela, it’s just baseball, baseball, baseball.”
Among the many things Gomez-Gudino lacked when he left Venezuela: Any kind of working command of English.
“I had to learn a lot, because when I came here two years ago, I had literally nothing,” he said. “Just, like, ‘Hi, how are you?’ Now, I’m still practicing. It’s not 100%, but I’m trying to get there.”
Going from zero to graduating high school and giving interviews in English in two years is no small task; Gomez-Gudino said there’s no real secret, he just listened as much as he could and asked questions when he didn’t know a word. Music and Adam Sandler movies filled in the rest of the gaps, he said.
Having been through an ordeal I could scarcely contemplate, and despite being on the older side for a high school senior, Gomez-Gudino seems noticeably youthful. He looks like a kid, an impression that was only reinforced by the fact that he smiles all the time. I found myself getting excited, because he’s committed to my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, whose baseball program is in dire need of talent.
Eric had to let me down gently with the truth: He’s probably too good to make it to campus.
Legit switch-hitting catching prospects are rare, and among Gomez-Gudino’s highlights at the Combine was a batting practice round in which he hit an exit velocity of 104 mph from the right side and 106 mph from the left side. Which isn’t in Caden Bogenpohl’s territory, but it’s not bad for an 18-year-old with some physical development left.
And who plays a premium position. As you might have guessed by how far Gomez-Gudino carried his mitt, this kid loves catching.
“I used to pitch a lot when I was a kid, but when I heard pitchers don’t hit, I [switched] to third base,” Gomez-Gudino said. “But when I saw Salvador Perez play, I just liked how he commanded the game, how he called the game, how he talked to his teammates and everything. I just said I want to be like him, to be the captain on the field, call pitches every play, every game, and be in command there.”
Someone is going to take Gomez-Gudino fairly high, and in about five years we’re going to hear this story on Sunday Night Baseball. It’s good enough to bear repeating.
…
Outside the first round, the draft can get unpredictable and mysterious, but one of the guys I’m willing to stick my neck out on is Lucas Nawrocki, a high school two-way player out of Aledo, Texas.
At just 5-foot-11, Nawrocki is a little short for a pitcher — or a power hitter, for that matter, but he put on a terrific batting practice round: 18 pitches, 10 of them put in play at 105 mph or harder, topping out at 109.7.
On the mound, the velocity isn’t especially impressive, but Nawrocki’s secondary stuff is nuts. He’s got a mid-80s kick change that drops in around 1,000 rpm, with a low-80s slider with top-shelf spin numbers: 3,000 rpm at minimum, up to 3,200 pretty easily. This breaking ball he can either throw like a sweeper and get a plate’s worth of horizontal movement, or drop vertically like a curveball. That latter version is just nasty. I don’t know how anyone hits it.
“It works really well. I can manipulate and shape my slider really easily, with that crossfire action,” he said. “I can get more depth on it whenever I want, or I can get more sweeping action whenever I want, so it’s a really neat thing… Last offseason, I was playing with it. I wanted to try to find a curveball, but then I [realized] I can get the same grip and maybe preset my wrist a little bit differently and get a lot more depth, instead of switching up the grip.”
That combination of high-spin/low-spin is incredibly rare. In the majors, only four pitchers have a breaking ball with an average spin rate of 2,900 or higher, and either a changeup or splitter with an average spin rate of 1,300 or lower: Nolan McLean, Matthew Liberatore, Clay Holmes, and Anthony Nunez.
Plus Adrian Morejon, whose average slider spin rate is 2,899 rpm as I write this now, but it was above the cutoff point two weeks ago when I found this bit of trivia and presented it to Nawrocki. I mentioned Morejon because here’s the center field camera angle for Nawrocki at PG National:
And here’s Morejon from the same angle:
A 5-foot-11 left-handed pitcher can get outs if he can kill spin on his changeup while ramping it up on his breaking ball.
Actually, with that foot position and low arm slot, Morejon was not the first name that came to mind: It was Billy Wagner. And because Nawrocki is from Texas, I thought he might’ve been inspired by watching Wagner pitch for the Astros. Obviously I asked him about it, and realized mid-sentence that by the time Nawrocki was born in December 2007, Wagner had already not been an Astro for more than four years.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about failed former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s subsequent sports ownership endeavors, a claim about Jacob Misiorowski’s pitching improvement, Jackson Chourio (batting lefty) as “a baseball player,” the recent struggles of Paul Skenes and Steven Kwan, Justin Verlander’s retirement, Zack Wheeler’s continued dominance, Andrew McCutchen’s return to the minors, the Orioles’ lack of improvement, the epitome of a Little League home run, Tyler Tolbert’s contribution to one of baseball’s great mysteries, and a 2026 Dodgers first.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the All-Star rosters this week. They’re not bad, but they’re weird, and missing many of the biggest names in the sport. That’s fine. There’s been heavy turnover atop the WAR leaderboards this year, as Ben Clemens pointed out last month, and that’s given us plenty of fresh storylines — many of which will be deservedly celebrated at the annual halftime show next week.
Still, this feels like it must matter in some way beyond an exhibition. And so I scoured the rosters, looking for a narrative to drive. One thing I noticed is, of the top 25 batters projected by FanGraphs Depth Charts, 17 did not make an All-Star team. Of those, eight are in competitive races out west.
Indeed, the stars have dimmed in the West. How these players perform after the break could determine the shape of the season still to come. Read the rest of this entry »
Dylan Cease came within three outs of making history on Wednesday. Only one Blue Jays pitcher has successfully thrown a no-hitter: Dave Stieb on September 2, 1990. Many others have come close since then, but none of them has finished the job. You can add Cease’s name to that list. He held the Giants hitless for eight innings before allowing a single to the first batter in the ninth. His final line: 8+ innings, one hit, three walks, and 11 strikeouts.
The game started off with a bang — Kazuma Okamoto’s grand slam in the top of the first inning gave the Blue Jays a 5-0 lead before Cease even took the mound. Once he did, it was evident he had his best stuff going. He retired the first 14 batters in order, at one point striking out five in a row. A walk to Willy Adames with two outs in the fifth broke up the perfect game, and then Cease issued another walk in each of the next two innings. This no-hit bid even had its signature defensive play, when Daulton Varsho tracked down a deep fly ball off the bat of Bryce Eldridge in the eighth inning, slamming into the wall in left-center field after making the catch. Ultimately, Cease’s effort fell short. Heliot Ramos saw two pitches from the right-hander in the ninth inning before lining the third up the middle for a single.
That Cease was in a position to complete the feat was a bit of a surprise in the first place. He had thrown a career-high 115 pitches through eight innings, and with teams doing everything they can to protect their pitchers these days, there were real questions about whether Cease would be allowed to pitch the ninth. After the game, Blue Jays manager John Schneiderexplained his thinking: “I’m a fan of baseball. If a guy has a chance to throw a no-hitter, you let him do it, and I think you make the adjustments after that. Dylan, he’s done it before, and he’s really durable. He’s in the category where you can be pretty aggressive with it. It’s not very often you get to see that, so if I can let a player have that opportunity, I’m going to do it every single time.”
Cease joins a long line of Blue Jays pitchers who have thrown near-no-hitters.
Roy Halladay, Dustin McGowan, Brandon Morrow, and Bowden Francis all had no-hit bids ended in the ninth inning since Stieb’s feat 36 years ago. By game score, Cease’s effort falls in the middle of the pack, less impressive because he didn’t complete nine innings, but better than Francis’ two outings two years ago. Of course, Cease already has a no-hitter to his name, throwing one in 2024 with the Padres. The Blue Jays still have the second-longest no-hitter drought in baseball, ahead of only the Guardians.
As a quick aside, a true no-hitter feels like it could become an increasingly rare feat in the near future. The last no-hitter thrown by a single pitcher was Blake Snell’s back on August 2, 2024, and there were none in 2025. Two combined no-hitters have been completed since Snell’s — one by the Cubs on September 4, 2024 and one most recently by the Astros on May 25, 2026 — but the solo effort now requires both dominance and efficiency. Ballclubs are much more wary of overworking their starting pitchers, so to complete nine innings, they need to keep their pitch counts under control to go the distance. Cease’s durability has been a hallmark throughout his career, and that made Schneider’s decision to let him keep going despite a career-high pitch count justifiable.
Cease’s dominant outing dropped his season ERA to 2.56 and FIP to 2.20, and pushed his WAR up to 3.7, a hair ahead of Cam Schlittler’s mark for the AL lead among qualified pitchers. For most of the first half of the season, the young Yankees starter has been the frontrunner to win the AL Cy Young award. With Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, and Max Fried all dealing with various injuries, the field has been sapped of most of the preseason favorites.
While Schlittler still holds the advantage in the more traditional categories like wins and ERA, Cease leads the AL in strikeouts, FIP (among starters), and WAR — and that’s despite pitching two fewer games than Schlittler. A minor hamstring injury in late May sent Cease to the IL for just the second time in his major league career. Joe Ryan and Parker Messick are also making solid cases, and the traditionalists are bound to love Sonny Gray’s win count and low ERA. Still, it feels like, barring any big surprises, the Cy Young race will come down to Schlittler or Cease.
Getting a Cy Young-caliber season out of Cease immediately after signing him to a massive seven-year, $210 million contract is a triumph for the Blue Jays. One of the preeminent strikeout artists over the last five years, he’s pushed his strikeout rate up to 36.9% this year, a career high. His walk rate is also up slightly — he’s never had great command at any point in his career — but it’s higher than it’s been since 2020. Still, all those additional strikeouts have helped him navigate whatever traffic those free passes put on the basepaths.
While Cease technically has a six-pitch repertoire, he’s mostly known for his riding fastball and hard slider. Those two pitches made up more than 80% of his pitch mix over the previous five seasons. This year, he’s throwing those two pitches about two-thirds of the time. To make up the difference, he’s committed to throwing his changeup a lot more often to keep left-handed batters at bay. He had thrown a form of his changeup back when he debuted with the White Sox in 2019, but it quickly fell out of favor. He had used it almost like a trick pitch over the last few seasons, never throwing it more than 100 times in any given season since 2021.
He found a new changeup grip this offseason and decided to re-incorporate it into his arsenal to give him a reliable third pitch to keep batters off his fastball-slider combo.
The revamped changeup has worked wonderfully so far. He’s thrown it almost exclusively to lefties, but they simply can’t hit it. The pitch has a 60% whiff rate, the highest of any pitch thrown at least 100 times this season. If batters do make contact, it’s usually weakly hit in the air; opposing batters have only managed a .185 batting average and a .215 wOBA against it.
When you think of effective changeups, you might picture Devin Williams’s airbender, dropping and fading away from opposite-handed batters. Or perhaps Edward Cabrera’s power changeup, modeled after Félix Hernández’s cambio. Based on Harry Pavlidis’ research into what makes a changeup effective, we know that a large velocity differential is beneficial for inducing swings and misses. But he also found that changeups that have a wide separation in movement profiles from the pitcher’s fastball can also be effective, particularly at generating groundball contact. Cease’s changeup is unlike any other in baseball.
The velocity differential between his fastball and his changeup is the second highest in the majors, but the pitch’s movement profile is what makes it stand out. It doesn’t fall off the table like you might expect, and it doesn’t fade away from lefty batters either. It’s a straight change. I calculated z-scores for those three characteristics — velocity differential, induced vertical break, and horizontal movement — and summed them as a rough approximation of how unique a pitcher’s changeup is compared to league average. Cease’s has the highest combined score by far.
By this crude method, Cease’s changeup is the most unique offspeed pitch in baseball. It moves a lot like a fastball, except it comes in 14 miles per hour slower. No wonder opposing batters can’t touch it.
This odd movement profile is tied to Cease’s release. He’s a natural supinator — when he releases the ball, his hand is behind it, imparting more backspin on the pitch. Supinators have a very difficult time throwing pitches with the arm-side movement that you would expect a traditional changeup to have. Cease’s change possesses a significant amount of backspin — that’s the reason why it doesn’t tumble as much as you’d think — and its spin profile closely mirrors that of his fastball. Because his offspeed looks a lot like his fastball out of the hand, the effectiveness of his heater has improved, as well. His four-seamer is running a 30.7% whiff rate, a career high for that pitch.
While he may not have made history on Wednesday, Cease is in the middle of what is shaping up to be a career year. He was just named to his first All-Star roster, and he’s pitched his way into the AL Cy Young race. In his first season in Toronto, he’s made the right adjustments to thrive.
Tuesday night’s outing wasn’t anything to write home about — four hits and five runs allowed over 5 2/3 innings in a 6-3 Washington Nationals loss to the Houston Astros — but Andrew Alvarez is having a good season. Across 12 appearances, including six as a starter, the 27-year-old southpaw from Los Alamitos, California has tossed 47 frames with a 3.64 ERA, a 2.97 FIP, and a 25.4% strikeout rate. Pitching in his first full big league season, he has been one of the few bright spots on a staff that is statistically among the worst in the majors.
Velocity isn’t his carrying tool. At 92.3 mph, Alvarez’s fastball ranks in just the 18th percentile for velocity. What the 2021 12th-round pick out of Cal Poly brings to the table is a five-pitch arsenal that leans heavily on a somewhat atypical breaking ball combination. In terms of usage, his mix has been 29.8% four-seamers, 28.7% curveballs, 24.7% gyro sliders, 13.9% sinkers, and 2.9% changeups.
The left-hander’s self-identity as a pitcher pretty much mirrors his profile.
“The Nationals have certainly helped me grow my game and understand who I am,” Alvarez told me prior to a recent game. “I’m not someone who is going to overpower you with stuff, but rather keep you off balance, get some weak contact and a little bit of chase here and there, a little bit of swing-and-miss. For me, it’s more about moving the ball around, changing speeds and locations, and [getting] a lot of groundballs”
Alvarez’s 57.1% groundball rate is tied for sixth highest among hurlers with at least 40 frames on the season. Moreover, his chase rate (57th percentile) and whiff rate (65th percentile) are both comfortably above league average.
And again, Alvarez’s breaking ball combination is atypical, as well as his primary attack plan against most hitters. Read the rest of this entry »
The emergence of Statcast (and similar types of tracking data) over the last decade-plus has revolutionized many parts of baseball analysis. A big category that didn’t really exist prior was the notion of “expected” stats. Up until then, numbers were all tallies of results, and proto-expected metrics, like Bill James’ Component ERA, were derived from the classical array of stats. But tracking data opened up new opportunities in this area, allowing us to more closely look at home runs and strikeouts, and see the underlying processes and skills that made those results. While the past is always the past, expected stats are useful when talking about the future.
As someone who made the odd decision to work with baseball projections for half his life, I have a vested interest in finding the best use of this kind of information when predicting the future. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an x, as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a z instead. zStats do have some correlation with xStats, but not a perfect one, as ZiPS uses things like spray data, sprint speed, and plate discipline metrics in its estimates.
It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a player “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one. Call this the Rule of Isaac Paredes, in honor of a player who constantly stymies zHR. In some ways, we’re projecting how cruel regression toward the mean will be.
More information on accuracy and construction can be found here.
Every July, we release our annual Trade Value Series highlighting the top 50 players in baseball, taking contract status and performance into account. For the past five years, I’ve been in charge of that exercise, with liberal amounts of help from the rest of the FanGraphs staff and some contacts on the team side. Last year, we added a new evaluator: You.
Today, we’re excited to announce the return of our crowdsourced trade value tool, which can be found here. Let’s review how it works, just in case you didn’t spend last year’s All-Star break furiously clicking through it when you should have been working. The tool, created by Keaton Arneson, and developed by Keaton and Sean Dolinar, aggregates simple “Which of these two players do you prefer?” questions to create a composite ranking. Using the tool is simple. When you pull it up, you’ll be presented with two players and asked to choose which one you think has a higher value in trade:
Ah, but what does “higher value” mean? Sometimes the simplest questions are the toughest. Having a higher value in trade isn’t the same as being better, or being younger, or having a more team-friendly contract. It might be some combination of those things, of course, and of other factors as well. In the real world, players have differing levels of value to teams based on a host of considerations, from how well they plug a hole left by a recently injured star to where the team finds itself in the playoff race. A promising prospect might mean more to a rebuilding club, just as a proven difference maker might move the needle for a team with October ambitions. We can’t tell you how to weigh these factors, which is part of the fun of constructing a trade value list in the first place. What we can do is provide some data that we consider useful in making such determinations and let you decide how to apply it. Read the rest of this entry »
In my experience, there isn’t such a thing as a standard ballplayer personality. Sure, there are a few givens: competitiveness, capacity for hard work, and self-confidence. If you don’t have those, you’ll be going pro in something other than sports.
But beyond that? There are brash ballplayers, shy ballplayers, smart ones, dumb ones, nervous and twitchy ones, and guys who are so preternaturally relaxed they look like they’re going to fall asleep mid-sentence.
Coleman Borthwick is a people person. Borthwick is a two-way high school player from Florida (in the panhandle, about halfway between Destin and Panama City, which should be a helpful reference for those of you who partied a lot in college), and he’s a people person. Read the rest of this entry »
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