Comments on: Latinos and College Baseball

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:23:08 +0000

D1 colleges have a total of 11.7 scholarships per year to offer. D2 schools have 9. NAIA schools have 12. You have to be very, very good to get a full ride. A lot of baseball players fund their education with academic scholarships. Figure that most teams have 25 players. You do the math. The Hope scholarship is the best thing that’s happened to college baseball in Georgia.

By: John

John — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:37 +0000

Scholarships are approximately 12 per team, which is a large detriment here. Also, recruiting budgets are usually quite small, so if you look at the makeup of most of the college teams you will see a small radius of where the players come from unless they were highly touted. Its more financially feasible to go to a junior college or D2/3 school if you aren’t a top prospect, which isn’t represented in the sample and is probably the group of minorities that we are talking about anyway (since a top prospect would sign anyway). Lastly, many of the affluent high school prospects (ie white for this argument) are many times considered unsignable coming out of high school unless mid first round money or better would go to them, since they value a college education because their circumstances allow them to.

By: Dorasaga

Dorasaga — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:49:53 +0000

Hi, JC,

I got your book a while ago.

Had you heard about “buscones”? The hawks who keep young Latino talents away from scouts and education by making kids (and their family) stay the whole time in local baseball institutions and believe that they can sign big and make money by playing baseball?

There seems to be a whole system that works with them, so I don’t blame the Latinos for not learning English.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:18:10 +0000

Um…. Is this completely ignoring that the rise of Latin players in Baseball coincides with an increase in scouting and signing in Latin America. These players are not subject to the Rule4 draft and thus wouldn’t show up in the college draft statistics at all but do show up in the general diversity of Major League Baseball.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:30:55 +0000

The shift to college talent is driven by lots of things. I won’t go into those now, but the reasons that such shift affects minority representtion.

Division 1 schools typically have enough scholarships under the rules for a more or less “full” roster. Football: 85. Basketball: 15. However, bseball is limited to (I believe) 18 and 6 of those can be split into half scholarships. So, half of the normal roster does not even have the basic scholarship (which leaves nothing for “spending money” or having a car or whatever).

This is why the state schools that have programs similar to the Hope scholarship have improved so much in baseball over the last 10 to 15 years. Hope gets tuition out of the way and thus allows better walk ons and allows a half scholarship to almost equal a whole scholarship.

BUT, with minority students being slightly less likely to have the Hope standards and slightly less likely to be able to afford college without scholarships, the half scholarship thing hinders participation.

Probably if D 1 had 22 or so scholarships, you would see a couple of points of increase in college baseball participation in USA grown Latinos and also in USA grown players of African heritage. That would only cost a state school about $50,000 or so a year, private about $150,000. Maybe tournament revenue could be divided and allocated differently to achieve this.