@cabbagedad posted:Francis, I'll play along again but I totally agree with RJM. I'm not trying to discourage you from posting but you keep coming back and trying to dissect the same numbers from every possible angle. IMO, you should really save yourself a ton of pain and stop. Your son is going to be the player he is going to be, no matter what the other numbers are. He can affect where he will land based on his efforts and skill set development, along with his recruiting plan. Sure, it helps to have some vague idea of how many good players there are out there but does no good to crunch and crunch and crunch...
You've been told over and over, when you go to the better events, there's a ton of really good players. And, yes, there are several tons more not at that event. Yes, when you actually attend a few, reality can start to hit.
There are about 300 D1 baseball programs, 275 D2, 400 D3 and 200 NAIA, 300 JC's. That's roughly 1500 schools, including JC. Most have very good players, most are maybe two-deep with good C's, plus another decent one. Although, I don't know to what extent you can try to break that down by position because, as you know, the college coaches will take hitters and plug them into positions - yes, even catchers, to an extent.
There are almost 500K HS players and a little over 50K college players. So, about 9% move on. Obviously, the best go D1 (always some exception). So, top 600-800 C's? If you think your kid is a top 250 at the position, pretty good bet where he will land. But, if you are trying to calculate if he is #600, 800, 1000, 1500, etc., it is a wasted exercise. Too many other variables. Hit tool, eye test, academic fit, right exposure, references, geography, right time/right place and good fortune and on and on...
You are absolutely right that the average person has no idea the level of difficulty. But then, the waters are muddied when you see some of the outliers... the poor baseball played at some, but not all, of the lower levels. I would guess there are probably 200-300 programs where the quality of baseball is more like decent-to-average HS ball than college ball.
PS - if you really want to keep beating the crap out of yourself, just start roster diving on the sites for all those schools and read player bio's. Pretty much all D1's and most others have them. You can see that that majority of college players are very accomplished and well-decorated HS players. Compare those with the stats. Many all-everything HS players play very little or perform poorly in college. Getting the D1 offer seems like the golden ticket but so often isn't.
Back during the recruitment by 17u programs Diamond Nation invited my son for a visit. They wow’ed him by having the NJ Gatorade Player of the Year player there to great him.
The kid headed off to one of the top ranked SEC programs in the country. He was gone after one year. He was on the bench and no longer needed when his average hit .115. I don’t know what went wrong. But the kid had the tools. He transferred, made All ACC and was drafted in the top ten rounds. You can never be sure why it doesn’t work and where with some players.