College Podcast: How MLB Draft Impacts College Baseball In 2022

On this episode of the Baseball America College Podcast, presented by Rapsodo, Teddy Cahill and Joe Healy recap the 2021 draft results from a college perspective and spin it forward to think about how those results might affect the college game in 2022. After draft talk, they also discuss recent happenings on the coaching carousel, most notably Arizona hiring program legend and former D-backs manager Chip Hale.

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Among the topics discussed at length in this episode are: 

• The college players taken early in the draft, including top overall pick Henry Davis from Louisville and Vanderbilt’s duo of Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker.
• The MLB draft providing first-round picks, as it often does, from schools like Sam Houston State, Miami (OH) and Eastern Illinois, which is a differentiator from drafts in other major sports. 
• The winners of the MLB draft from a college perspective in Arkansas, Duke, Georgia, Oregon State and UCLA. Arkansas, Georgia and Oregon State all got several high-profile recruits through the draft while also holding on to a number of draft-eligible current players. Duke was able to secure the services of shortstop Alex Mooney, the No. 66 prospect in the country, and UCLA is going to lead the country in the number of Top 100 prospects it gets to campus. 
• The losers of the MLB draft from a college perspective in Arizona State, Connecticut, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech. All four lost recruits and players off of the current roster alike, although ASU is an example of a team that could mitigate its losses. It had four pitchers in Erik Tolman, Justin Fall, Cooper Benson and Tyler Thornton all drafted late. If the Sun Devils get at least a couple of those guys back, they will be in much better shape than they would otherwise be, but given that the team just went through a coaching change, that’s no guarantee. 
• Arizona’s hiring of Chip Hale, which continues a trend in this college baseball coaching cycle of programs bringing on coaches with extensive professional playing and coaching experience, but little or no college coaching experience. Hale, like Jose Cruz, Jr. at Rice and Willie Bloomquist at Arizona State, is also a famous alum of the program he now coaches. In the case of those three, plus Lance Berkman at Houston Baptist and Frank Catalanotto at Hofstra, it will be interesting to see how these tenures play out and if this becomes a longer-term trend in the sport.