In answer to justbaseball's original post, from our VERY limited experience, certainly seems that there are more early commitments and more pressure to commit early at major programs, certainly more than I would have expected reading this board. At least here in North Carolina, and I suspect everywhere else, too, more players have committed in July than I can ever remember. I know from talking to several of them that they were given "take-it-or-leave-it," "good for 48-hours" offers, and one was told just last week that "if you want to play ACC baseball you better take this offer, because in a few weeks there won't be any spots left for the 05 class anywhere in the conference."
I suspect for the top 50 or so players in the country the pressure won't work, because certainly the schools will wait as long as they have to for those guys. But for the next 200 or so, this appears to be the "new" norm. Let's put it this way -- ALL the players we know that have been given this type offer this summer here (an admittedly small group of seven or eight) have accepted and committed to the school (or one of the schools) presenting such an offer. Try telling a 17 year old that he should turn one of them down and wait to see what else is going to come along.
Another new trend that seems to be emerging thanks to the new recruiting windows is the fall on-campus camp, and the new line to border-line recruits, "if you want to be considered for a spot here you need to come to our fall camp."
Please post and let us know if others are seeing the same trends. Maybe (I hope so)) these are isolated incidents and I don't know what I'm talking about.