A top baseball prospect’s Southern California scholarship was lost to the pandemic

Espalin also had a pretty good idea of where that career was headed. In the summer after his eighth-grade year, not yet licensed to drive, he accepted a scholarship offer from the University of Southern California. Like other outsize talents in the baseball-rich region, Espalin went through high school already knowing that in the fall of 2020 he would report to a team, a school and a tradition. He couldn’t wait.

He even had the cool nickname, a homage to his grandfather, who served in the tank division under Gen. George S. Patton in World War II. Yep, Tank Espalin, Southern California kid, future USC Trojan, had it all dialed in.

“Yeah,” Espalin said recently. “So, anyway, I had never set foot in Indiana until the day I moved into the dorms in Bloomington.”

It is not the story the infielder thought he would be telling. Then again, this is not the season baseball’s decision-makers figured they would be having.

Months into a global pandemic, the fallout on a single sport may seem relatively unimportant. But in ways large and small, the industry of baseball has been absolutely rocked by several developments, some of which could lead to long-term changes, that invariably thread back to the novel coronavirus. And they actually do explain how Espalin, rated a 10-out-of-10 prospect by scouting service Perfect Game, wound up on the practice field at Indiana University, not USC.

When the coronavirus hit California with full force in March, Espalin was on the field at Orange Lutheran High, a nationally ranked, private-school powerhouse that counts among its alumni New York Yankees pitcher Gerrit Cole. From Espalin’s home in Glendora, the drive was uncomplicated by California standards; you just took the 210 to the 57 and headed south, then caught the 91 for a few minutes. The distance was 30 miles. “It took an hour and a half in each direction,” said Dee Espalin, Tank’s mother.

“Tank is that rare kind of multi-tooled guy who also plays up the middle and has some pop from the left side,” said Eric Borba, Orange Lutheran’s head coach. “It’s just a very, very high ceiling with him. And we were stacked this year — it had a chance to be the best team I’d ever coached.”

It was not to be. Spring high school sports in California were canceled by early April, and players such as Espalin, their senior seasons cut short, had nothing to do but prepare for the road ahead. He and his family thought he had a chance at a fair selection in the MLB draft, but it didn’t weigh heavily on the player’s mind. “He had always wanted to be at USC,” Borba said.

What Espalin didn’t realize was that baseball’s tectonic plates were about to shift. When MLB owners realized that their season, too, would be drastically abbreviated, they began to consider extreme measures to save money. One of them involved shortening the 2020 draft from 40 rounds to just five, which meant hundreds of draft-eligible college players, many of them juniors with athletic scholarships, would be unexpectedly returning to school for another season. (MLB begins drafting players from four-year colleges after their junior years or when they turn 21.)

And that’s where the college math came into play. Division I teams often carry rosters of 30 to 35 players, but under NCAA rules they may have no more than 11.7 scholarships’ worth of money doled out at any given time. It leaves coaches constantly trying to guess what their futures are going to look like, and that includes estimates of which of their own players are likely to be drafted each year and leave school.

At USC in early June, first-year head coach Jason Gill, who inherited his predecessor’s commitments to recruits such as Espalin, watched the scene play out. Three of the Trojans’ incumbent infielders, along with their partial scholarships, had been expected to leave via the normal draft. In the pandemic-abbreviated five-rounder, none did. About a week later, Tank Espalin got a call.

“They said they were four scholarships over the limit, and they couldn’t honor my commitment,” Espalin said. “So I just decommitted. When the covid first hit, we had called them, and they said, ‘You have nothing to worry about.’ But I know things changed a lot after that.”

Through a university spokesman, Gill declined to be interviewed.

It was a scene being played out on college campuses — and in the living rooms of high school commits — across the country. The NCAA granted schools the ability to exceed their scholarship limits in 2021 for spring-sport athletes whose 2020 seasons were shortened, but the association provides no funding. It’s up to each school to decide whether to balloon its budget.

The trickle-down effect has been wicked, with college programs welcoming freshmen who suddenly see packed rosters and limited playing-time opportunities. And there’s the money, of course. Among high school recruits, “We were getting calls from kids who would be coming to us in 2023 and ’24, asking if there was going to be any money for them,” said Pat Bailey, a longtime former coach and recruiter at Oregon State.

“It didn’t have a universal effect,” said Teddy Cahill, who covers the college game for Baseball America. “Some schools allowed seniors to return; others did not. Some teams were able to juggle scholarship money effectively; others were more strapped. Overall, the effect is that college baseball has more talent than usual.”

The day before Espalin found out that his world was changing, his high school coach said he got a call from Gill. The USC coach wanted Borba to know what was happening, in case there was anything he could do to help find Espalin a home so late in the college signing process. As it turned out, there was.

Through time spent together with the Team USA staff, Borba had gotten to know Derek Simmons, an assistant coach at Indiana. The Hoosiers, under second-year coach Jeff Mercer, were becoming a data-driven program, something that appealed to an analytics-minded coach such as Borba — and to Espalin. “I like using a lot of data and video,” Espalin said, “because I’m a visual type of learner.”

The fit was immediate. The Hoosiers needed a middle infielder and had held back some scholarship money in hopes of finding one. Mercer got on a Zoom call with Espalin and his parents that lasted 2½ hours.

“The minute I hung up, I called Derek and said, ‘We have to do everything within our power to make this kid a part of our program,’ ” Mercer said. “You could just tell with Tank that there was a connection. He was terrifically engaged.”

Espalin went through virtual tours of Bloomington and the IU campus, but his mind was already made up.

“They had completely broken down my swing by the time we talked — they had watched all this video,” he said. “As soon as I talked to Coach Mercer, I knew his baseball IQ was off the charts. And it was enough money that my parents could make it work. Everything just really went kind of quick.”

Several other schools called, and Espalin had to weigh an offer from California, where his sister is a catcher on the Bears’ softball team. He also would be away from his family, which includes younger brothers Gunnar and Sergeant. It was all a far cry from USC.

“But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise,” Dee Espalin said. “I’m comfortable entrusting my son to Coach Mercer. And Tank is one of those players who is going to be draft-eligible after his sophomore year [because he will turn 21], so having a chance to compete for playing time right away is really big for him.”

It is, to this point, a happy ending. “But there are a lot of kids who don’t really have one, at least for now,” Mercer said.

Espalin, the Southern California kid, is getting to know his fellow Hoosiers. He was hoping to see more of the campus and the town right away, but he had to wait. In early September, Indiana put all of its baseball players into quarantine, Espalin said, after several members of the team tested positive for the coronavirus. And thus does baseball in 2020, the year that was, slog on.