Baseball has a way of separating out the players who love the game vs the players who are great at playing the game, at every level.
The lifers are those that love the game. The inner circle Hall of Famers are almost entirely those who loved Baseball and worked incredibly hard at it.
College Sports can be a meat grinder. It’s also an incredible opportunity to use athletic gifts to open academic doors and postgraduate opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. But it ain’t easy.