I won’t pretend to know all of the details other than to say BLA is a very legitimate business. I’ve known them for a while and don’t consider them a predatory lender/investor. They take a lot of risk in what they do.
Tatis can now afford the best legal representation imaginable and is choosing to fight this battle in public, probably in hopes of a settlement. I imagine BLA expected this to happen on the deals that really hit big and the two parts will settle on something.
There will definitely be a stylistic change, yes. In terms of his tenure here I would refer to McMullen’s hitting approach as a pretty old school mentality, mainly focused on attacking fastballs with line drive swings and being hyper aggressive in the box rather than the more modern approach of waiting for your pitch, high walk and strikeout rate, and emphasis on launch angles. I think that’s where Law’s derision for us often came from, we produced a lot of really good ball players over the years but his argument has always been that we didn’t do as good of a job preparing them for the majors as we could have. A common refrain from him is that every player who plays under McMullen has an immediate adjustment to make in the batter’s box when they go pro, whether it be in their stance, their pitch selection, their swing or all of the above. And to some extent he is right (though I do think over the years he unfairly singled us out based on reputation more than other factors regarding our development).
That approach really didn’t change too much over the course of 22 years. We more just changed the personnel and type of position player we recruited starting around the 2020 class, it went from bringing high school prospects who were more finished products that maybe didn’t have the highest ceilings from a physical perspective to transitioning to getting more guys that were athletic and projectable, but potentially had a bigger learning curve. I think you’ll continue to see us pursue the latter going forward under Pollard, probably to an even larger extreme with our recruiting classes. Pollard likes big, physically imposing dudes in the middle of his order that can hit the ball out of the park and will take a chance on developing a plus athlete whose skills are still raw if he believes it could lead to a top end player for him down the road.
Edit: And I don’t want this to come across as sour grapes or anything towards McMullen from a coaching perspective. Even though he’s no longer a coach here and there is valid criticism to be had about his approach to hitting and player development, I still consider him to be not only one of the best hitting coaches in the country, but one of the best in the history of college baseball.
When he signed the deal, all of my baseball pods were kind of dumbfounded by it.
But if I remember the details of these, I’m not sure I would call them loans. BLA gives a minor leaguer a lump sum payment. If the minor leaguer never makes the majors, then they never have to pay a cent. If they do, then BLA gets a cut of all future baseball related earnings. Could be less, or a lot lot more than the original lump sum. The player trades upside for an immediate sure thing. Whether that is predatory I guess depends on how informed the decision was.
Interesting, thanks. Was wondering about that downside part.
Yeah, not sure it’s predatory with the “no downside” part, but it does feel a little funny.
It almost has like an insurance element to it, except the payment is guaranteed and the premium is contingent.
Yeah, it’s not a loan, it’s more like an early stage equity investment, so the investor bears a lot of risk of getting 0 return, but only has to hit big once to make up for 20 flameouts.
Venture capital/private equity concepts applied to human beings.
https://x.com/gregmadia/status/1937573750389559530?s=46
Another had-to-FOIA contract
Seems like a good deal honestly.
Glad we’ve committed to a decent assistant salary pool too.
I’d argue Vc/PE invests in humans, too. At least for the time being…
Nice 50 % raise over what he made at Duke.
I think this is going to work out just fine.
He got a raise and we’re still paying less than what we did for O’Connor. Seems like a win-win.
William Kirk to MSU.
Slots him a little below Manieri at South Carolina? feels about right for having to take him away from a conference rival.
Sounds like Tennessee’s assistant pool was about $1.5m this past year and people think its the highest in the sport. I have a feeling Oak just got as much or more than that, do we know yet?
I would expect $750k for assistants to be pretty competitive in the ACC. Cursory research said the highest paid assistant in the sport only makes $450k, so I would think you can have a pretty solid staff.
Everything I’ve seen looking into it just really emphasizes how much money the SEC schools have to throw around though.
https://x.com/sakowski_uva/status/1937582934745079994?s=46&t=RKSbFQVXOPXfAATN1iCjRg
Seems like we might be having another commit on the way soon.
6’4, 205 lbs. rising Junior out of Denver, CO. LHP who posted a 2.78 ERA in 13 appearances and 5 starts this past season, had 58 K’s in 35.2 IP and only gave up 14 walks. Cal Lutheran is a DIII school so not the best competition, but according to his twitter he has a low 90’s fastball.
So, they bet on the player to succeed and the player bets he will fail.
I mean we’ve seen the opposite before where guys take out insurance against catastrophic injuries:
I’m hearing there are other transfers coming - working with admissions, $, seeing what all is out there and the interest. No D-2 or D-3 kids yet which Oak had a propensity to do often with much success.
Oak’s JUCO hauls, at least on the mound, were questionable. But his D2 / D3 guys weren’t too bad…Lanzendorfer and Ference were big hits. Wes Arrington was okay even if a bit over relied on due to injury. Trey Wells was an adequate backup to Ference. Alex Markus (D3 before W&M) came on at the end of the season. Chris Baker was a free D3 guy (walk on) and did no harm as a reserve OF. Kyle Petri several years ago was a miss from those ranks. Blake Barker was a miss based on how Oak hyped him up out of the gate.
The JUCO guys…Colucci, Richie, Mason Dillow, Joe Miceli all recent JUCO busts. You have to go back to Marc Lebreux, Blake Bales, and Paul Kosanovich to find JUCO adds that brought anything to the table.
Edit: And Arroyo too…was a minus as a pitcher even though he gave us some needed midweek innings at the end.
As I’m tryping that out, I hope Jake Weatherspoon breaks the JUCO curse. At least he’s not a pitcher. And Mac’s track record of picking out catcher transfers was pretty sterling.
Forgot to add, Pollard has shown a good deal of success mining the D2 and D3 ranks while at Duke.
Would prefer not have to go that route too often, but I think there’s good history for both us and Duke.
It’ll be interesting to see how many more transfers we take that aren’t UVA players removing their name from the portal or Duke players coming along with Pollard. We’re running pretty low on available spots, that is unless we see a good chunk of our recruiting class get drafted (which I’m hoping doesn’t happen).