Showcases, Scout Games, and the New Reality of College Baseball Recruiting

It’s the time of year when players start receiving invitations to scout games, combines, showcases and events from various organizations.

Before deciding which ones are worth your time and money, there are a couple of things I think parents need to understand.

First, these companies are businesses. They have employees to pay, bills to cover and money to make, just like the rest of us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But it does mean parents need to understand what they’re actually paying for and what they’re hoping to accomplish.

More importantly, two things have completely changed the college baseball recruiting landscape. You’re very familiar with one of them. You probably aren’t nearly as familiar with the other.

1. The Transfer Portal

Everyone knows about the transfer portal.

What you may not fully appreciate is how dramatically it has affected high school players.

The reality is that many of the four-year schools most attractive to high school players simply aren’t recruiting high school players the way they used to.

Why take an 18-year-old and hope he develops into the player you need when you can recruit a 20- or 21-year-old out of the portal who has already proven he can perform at the college level?

That doesn’t mean four-year schools no longer recruit high school players. Of course they do.

It does mean there are fewer opportunities, and the path has changed.

Before the portal, four-year coaches could look at a high school player as an investment. They could recruit an 18-year-old knowing that he might not contribute significantly as a freshman or sophomore. If he did, that was gravy. The expectation was that the program would develop him and hopefully have a really good college baseball player by the time he was a junior.

The transfer portal has changed that calculation.

Even coaches who don’t particularly like the portal are being forced to use it if they want to remain competitive—and, frankly, if they want to keep their jobs.

Roster spots have become too valuable.

Every player taking up one of those spots needs to have the potential to move the boat forward.

In many ways, the transfer portal has taken a significant portion of player development out of the hands of four-year programs. Instead of recruiting a high school player and spending two or three years developing him, a program can allow somebody else to do that development and then recruit the finished—or at least much closer to finished—product.

That’s an enormous change.

I’m not presenting that as a completely blanket statement. There are four-year programs with JV or developmental teams that still do an excellent job developing younger players. There are programs and coaches that remain committed to developing high school recruits.

But overall, the game has changed in a major way.

Which brings us to something that I think is having an enormous impact on recruiting but receives far less attention.

2. AWRE

AWRE—pronounced “aware”—is a baseball technology system that uses permanently installed cameras to automatically record games and practices and organize the video by player and play.

College programs can quickly pull up individual at-bats, pitches and defensive plays while connecting that video with performance data and analytics. Essentially, it creates a searchable video-and-data library that coaches can use for player development, scouting, recruiting and game analysis without someone manually filming and sorting everything.

So what does that have to do with high school recruiting?

A lot.

It means four-year schools can gain cheap, fast and extremely reliable information on potential players who are already playing college baseball.

Now guess where systems like AWRE are becoming increasingly common.

Junior colleges.

And guess where they generally aren’t.

High schools.

Put the transfer portal and technology like AWRE together and you can see why the recruiting landscape has changed so dramatically.

A four-year coach can evaluate a junior-college player who is older, physically more developed, has already faced college competition and has an enormous amount of game video and data available almost instantly.

Compare that with trying to project what a 17-year-old high school player might become three years from now.

It isn’t difficult to understand why the JUCO route has become increasingly valuable.

So What Does This Have to Do With Combines and Showcases?

It means you need to understand exactly what you’re trying to accomplish when you attend one.

Could a showcase or scout event help your son get selected for a very high-level high-school-aged team?

Absolutely.

Is that something you’re interested in?

That’s entirely up to you.

I can see both sides of it.

I’m absolutely thrilled that my daughter doesn’t play sports, but there’s also a part of me that’s jealous of the parents of some of our players who basically travel around the country with their sons all summer. That’s a lot of one-on-one time together.

Granted, half of that one-on-one time is probably spent with the kid wearing earbuds and staring at his phone, but you get my point.

If you have the means, your son wants to do it and you value that experience together, have at it. Those can be great experiences and great memories.

But if you don’t have the means—or simply don’t want that experience—then absolutely do not allow yourself to feel pressured into believing you’re hurting your son’s chances of playing college baseball by not doing it.

That’s the distinction I want parents to understand.

These events can provide cool experiences. That doesn’t necessarily make them the most efficient route to college baseball.

Were they more important in the past?

Perhaps.

But the recruiting environment they were built around no longer exists.

One More Thing Parents Need to Understand

I’ve said this for years, and I think it’s more important now than ever:

Showcase tournaments and showcase organizations exist primarily to showcase the organization—not the individual player.

Understanding that one concept could save families an enormous amount of money, frustration and heartache.

And I’m not necessarily accusing these organizations of lying to anyone. In fact, I think some of them haven’t completely recognized how much the recruiting landscape has changed themselves.

But understand the business model.

The organization needs talented players.

It needs good teams.

It needs impressive events.

It needs social-media content.

It needs draft picks and college commitments attached to its name.

Those things allow the organization to showcase itself to the next group of players and parents.

That doesn’t mean your son can’t benefit from participating. He absolutely can.

It simply means the relationship isn’t necessarily what families sometimes believe it is.

Your son doesn’t need to spend his high school career collecting showcase invitations.

He needs to become good enough at baseball that college programs have a reason to want him.

And in today’s recruiting environment, the most efficient path to proving that may look very different than it did even five or ten years ago.

One Important Caveat

There’s one caveat to everything I write about college baseball that I probably don’t say out loud often enough.

I am a baseball development person.

That’s my lane.

I don’t deal in academics. I don’t deal in financial aid packages, scholarships, NIL or the money exchanged between colleges and players. When I give advice about this process, I’m giving it through the lens of the thing I know best: maximizing a player’s baseball career.

That distinction matters.

I am in no way suggesting that a player should sacrifice a tremendous academic opportunity simply because another school might provide a better baseball path. I’m also not suggesting that baseball should automatically be the most important factor in a family’s college decision.

Every player’s situation is different.

Every family’s financial situation is different.

Every kid has different academic goals, career plans and priorities outside of baseball.

So take what I’m saying here and combine it with what you know about yourself or your child.

My responsibility is to make sure the baseball part of that equation is based on the best information I can provide.

Your responsibility is to take that information, combine it with everything else that matters to your family, and make the decision that gives your son the best opportunity to build the future he actually wants—both in baseball and beyond it.