Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz are joined by MLB analyst and Baseball Bar-B-Cast host Jake Mintz to discuss how NIL has led to an increase in MLB prospects playing college baseball before joining the big leagues. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV.
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Video Transcript
Are you seeing a change in trend in the path that prospects might take?
Like, of course, Connor Griffin is an out of this world prospect.
It was a no-brainer that he would go directly from high school to the major leagues but are you seeing more players opt to go to college than straight out of high school?
I would say slightly yes, and NIL has to do with that.
Now, NIL in baseball is obviously lower on a raw dollar sense than it is in basketball and in football, just because there are fewer eyeballs on the sport.
But this, the money is not nothing at some of these bigger programs like LSU and Mississippi State, et cetera, et cetera, and I think that because the college programs have gotten good enough at player development now that they can advertise that to a player on top of the experience.
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Now, the most talented high school kids are still gonna go to school.
Or excuse me, the, the most talented high school kids are still gonna go into professional baseball because the money’s good and teams are willing to shell out, you know, three, four, $5 million worth of a bonus.
But if you’re a guy who’s like, hey, late round high school kid, $800,000 bonus or you can go to college and get, you know, 400 grand from a Power Four school, it’s like why wouldn’t you take that?
and we see that at the top of this year’s draft with a kid named Rock Cholowski, who was like a late first round talent coming out of Arizona high school a couple years ago.
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He ends up going to UCLA, and now he’s gonna be the number one pick in the draft in 2026.
It’s a really interesting question, and it is a really interesting dynamic, and I think NIL and the portal is only gonna continue to push more kids towards college baseball.
What MLB really wants at the end of the day is to kinda rip out a level of the minor leagues and use college as effectively a way to develop players where they don’t have to pay for it, if that makes sense.