In the last two years, I have learned a lot that I didn't know about baseball, especially high school and junior college. I recently picked up on the fact that fall events in the junior college circuit exist mainly to give four-year college scouts a chance to look over the prospects.
The last two days, thirty junior college teams each played a couple of matchups in Westfield, Indiana near Indianapolis at Grand Park, touted as the largest youth sports complex in the country. There were over 230 college scouts there, according to reports.
I was struck how sometimes technology changes how we do things and sometimes it doesn't. In the morning at the hotel, I needed a sheet of paper to make a fictional map so I could straighten out some issues in the book I'm working on. Remember when every hotel room had stationery, pens, etc in the desk? Not any more. I had to go down to the check-in and beg a piece of printer paper. The clerk said they took everything like that out of the rooms during Covid, and no one ever asked for it, so they hadn't put it back. Understandable. But at the first game that morning, I noticed every one of the thirty or so scouts watching that game had a notebook, legal pad, or clipboard in addition to their video cameras. No one was taking notes on an ipad or phone. They also seemed to have a uniform: shirt with a college logo, shorts or sweatpants, a baseball cap, and usually mirrored sunglasses.
Another interesting thing was that each game lasted two and a half hours, regardless of innings. The scoreboards weren't used so we never knew what the score was. And every pitcher on the roster gets to pitch at least an inning. Other players are switched in and out more often than usual. After the second game, we hightailed it out of there to begin the six-hour drive back home.
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