Ep. 19 | Joe Torres, Chapman University

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Joe Torres, assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Chapman University in Orange, California. Chapman's Panthers play Division III baseball in the SCIAC, with Pete the Panther as the mascot. Torres grew up a high school coach's kid in the San Fernando Valley area, spent a year in San Diego, two years in junior college, and then played at UC Davis in the Big West, and he took his first coaching job at Walters State Community College in East Tennessee before a phone call pulled him back to Southern California.

This is a recruiting conversation as much as a career story. Torres explains why Chapman cannot make a decision on a player until admissions results land in the middle of December, what a 32-man roster does to his math, why a camp is the one place he can guarantee he sees a player, and why the high school coach gets his first phone call. He is also direct about the level: his players face 90 mph arms every weekend, half the SCIAC was ranked in the top 25 at one point last season, and Chapman graduates have gone on to play at Wake Forest, Northwestern, Virginia Tech, and Duke.

The highlights:

• Why Chapman cannot offer early, and what the November 1 and mid-December dates mean for a senior
• What a 32-man roster looks like in practice: they recruit what they lose, about five or six players
• Camps, emails, and why the high school coach knows the things he actually needs to know
• What Division III baseball looks like inside a conference where half the teams have been ranked
• Why the label on the program matters less than the program, and where Chapman players go next
• Telling a player the truth about his position, even when it is not what he wants to hear
• Why he sends high school families to sit in the stands at a college practice
• What separates the parents he recruits from the ones he passes on

A Baseball Household, and a Desk Job That Lasted Three Days

Torres grew up inside the game rather than ahead of it. His dad has been a high school coach going on 30 years at the same place, Crescenta Valley High in the San Fernando Valley area, and stopped playing himself when he got married. There was no daycare in the plan, so Torres went to high school practice from roughly age five to 13, then on to his own little league practice. His mom ran track at Long Beach State and his brother ran cross country and track, so the house was a sports house. He was never the 10-year-old hitting balls out; he was the kid begging his dad to get to Dodger Stadium four hours early for batting practice. He tried football to get a few months away from his dad, and that lasted two days, until his dad became the defensive coordinator.

Junior college is where he says he actually fell in love with the process: no scholarships, nobody making him lift, good coaches to be a sponge around. UC Davis gave him a degree he is convinced he never would have had without baseball, and he admits he told the coach he loved the school while having no idea where Davis was. Then he swore off coaching. He had watched his dad leave for the weight room at six in the morning and get home at eight at night, so he took a desk job instead, and on about day three he finished all of his work, looked up, and it was 11 a.m. with nothing to do until five. He was helping his dad throw BP at night anyway. Not long after, he jumped.

Walters State, the Wally Boys, and the Drive to Orange

At 22, he took a job in a city he had never heard of, in a state he had never visited, for a boss he had talked to twice on the phone: Walters State Community College in Morristown, East Tennessee. He told his mom two days before he left so she only got two days of crying in. The days were long, the weather was cold, the money was not there, and he loved it. The arms that came through that program tell you something about the level — Brent Honeywell and Landon Knack were both pitching for the Dodgers in the NLCS while this episode was recorded, and Ben Joyce is a Wally boy too. His boss, Coach Shelton, taught him what it meant to be a coach, including a line Torres still uses with his own players: never want what is in your neighbor's fridge more than what is in your own.

He finished his master's degree there, and then Scott Laverty called from Chapman. Torres thought it was a prank, told Laverty he would be there in two days, and when Laverty said he was not sure what the job even was yet, Torres told him he could fire him once he arrived. He drove Johnson City to Oklahoma City in a day, Oklahoma City into Orange the next, slept in the back of his car, and changed into a polo and slacks in the parking lot at eight in the morning. His new boss laughed and told him he did not have to dress up — be who you are. That, more than anything else, is why he says he has stayed: baseball is a sport with room for the left-handed pitcher who could not play any other game, or the guy who cannot hold a position but can hit, and Chapman lets its people be themselves.

Baseball as the Connector

The through line for Torres is people. He tells a story about hiking a glacier in Iceland in a Chapman backpack and having a stranger stop him, ask if he was from Chapman, and say he was a San Diego guy who had heard they had a good baseball team. He does not know a single person who lives in Washington, D.C., where this year's ABCA convention is headed, but he knows ten coaches who do. His high school group chat still runs 40 texts a day about fantasy football and engagements and weddings, and it exists because they ate orange slices in a dugout at six years old. Baseball also made him comfortable raising his hand in a class where the other 39 students were headed to medical school, which is its own kind of education.

"Baseball will beat you down all day, and at the last moment you realize you are having a blast."

What Division III Baseball Actually Looks Like

He did not know what he was walking into either. He came from a junior college that had drafted players every year and sent 11 or 12 guys to Power Five programs, and he assumed Division III would be a different sport. It is not. Chapman players who finish a degree and go to grad school at Power Five schools are not playing a different game when they get there. His guys are in the weight room at 6:30 in the morning and in the pool after it, and nobody in that room is telling them it is only Division III. They face 90 mph arms every weekend, and at one point last season five SCIAC teams were ranked in the top 25 — half the conference. The coaches in it have won somewhere else before, and some have turned down other jobs to stay.

Where Chapman has to be different is the entry point. It is a demanding academic school, so his job is finding players with Division I ability and Division III academics, which is a narrow group that the Division I programs want too, since academic money means not spending athletic scholarship. What he notices at tournaments is that the labels have mostly stopped mattering among coaches. He is at the same events as Division I staffs, and head coaches who have no reason to know his name walk over to ask what he thinks of a player, because the staffs before him built that reputation. Some of the best evaluators he calls are junior college assistants and high school coaches working day jobs.

Develop Players and Tell Them the Truth

Chapman is development based by necessity, and the plan is four years. Torres wants every player he signs to have a chance to get drafted, and he can point at a Chapman third-round pick from a few years ago who is now in Triple-A with the Giants. He also tells a story about a Royals draftee whose first text from spring training was that he was sitting in a meeting with two first-rounders out of Florida — which is the point. There is no tag on a locker in pro ball that says Division III.

The other half of development is honesty, and that starts at the top of the staff. Torres says Laverty lets people be themselves and tells players the truth, and the example he gives is unglamorous: a player arrives as an infielder, there are better infielders, he can hit, so he is going to the outfield, and nobody is going to talk around it. Players who stay four years leave with a Chapman degree that carries weight, and some use a remaining year of eligibility at Wake Forest, Northwestern, Virginia Tech, or Duke, where they contribute. He laughs at the idea that a broadcast would still introduce a player by the level he came from, because he knows North Carolina coach Forbes is not writing scouting reports that way. He also thinks the transfer portal has been good for players: coaches are held to a higher standard, nobody is carrying 50 or 60 players in the fall, and you have to be honest and more selective.

"I would rather hurt your feelings than lie to your face."

Why Chapman Offers Late

Every Chapman student is admitted on his own. Torres cannot move a file to the top of the stack, and he says so plainly. His recruits apply by the November 1 early action deadline, and he will not know who is admitted until the middle of December of their senior year. That makes Chapman very late by current standards, so he has to find players who already know the school and are willing to wait while other programs push. Sometimes it does not work. His pitch in the meantime is to go compare apples to apples, which he is comfortable with, because he thinks he has good apples: TrackMan, Rapsodo, an indoor hitting facility, an athletic weight room, and what he considers the nicest campus in the county.

What he says he really has, though, is the staff. Pitching coach Dave Edwards has been at Chapman since 2002, and Torres will tell anyone who wants to argue that Edwards is the best pitching coach in the country — his description is that he brings arms in and lets them sit in the slow cooker, and that the program has been producing draftable and big-league arms out of Division III for 20 years. The roster stays at 32, which shapes everything else. He graduates about six in a year, so he signs about five or six. Bringing in 27 players would mean seven shortstops standing in a line waiting for a rep, and that is not a program he wants to run.

How to Get on Chapman's Radar

Reach out. Email or social media, either is fine, because nobody has a complete list — there are eight high schools within ten miles of campus and nine baseball seniors at each of them, and that is one county. What helps far more than the first message is telling them where you are going to be. Torres and Eric Deovlet, the outfield coach and his co-recruiting coordinator, split the road all summer. And camp is the one place he can guarantee he is there: Chapman hosts prospect camps and team camps at Hart Park, where the program has played since the 1950s, specifically because they want to show the place off. He is honest that camps make money, and equally honest that no coach in history has watched a good player at his own camp and moved on. He once chased a pitcher's dad through a parking lot before he could drive back to San Francisco and offered a flashlight tour of campus at seven at night. That pitcher is a freshman there now.

Then he calls the high school coach, every time, and looks at high school stats, because nobody hits .210 in high school and .450 in college. He calls travel coaches too, but the high school coach is the one who knows what a player is like at 10 a.m. in English class, and that matters at a school where a shortstop lifts at 6:30 and then sits through four hours of demanding classes without sleeping through the first lecture. He wants players whose high school coaches love them, because those are the players who will actually try an adjustment instead of explaining how they prefer to do things.

Go Watch College Baseball, and Drop the Ego

For players: go watch college baseball. Chapman practices at night twice a week because players are in lab, the practices are open, and the high school players who show up get talked to. No college coach is hiding anything — Torres says his practice looks a lot like the ones at UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Saddleback College, and Santa Ana College, and there is no secret drill worth protecting. He steals in the other direction too, from Villa Park and Foothill down the street and from RJ at Orange Lutheran, whose complex Chapman shares. He calls one of his first-base footwork drills the RJ drill because that is exactly where it came from.

The coach he actually calls with questions is 60 years old, has been at the same high school for 30 years, and is his dad — which he notes is also who pro scouts and Division I coaches call. He has learned to ask up as well as down. At a Stanford camp, David Esquer walked over and asked him what Chapman does for backhand drills, and the shock of that gave him the nerve to ask a hitting coach how they attacked left-handed changeups, which ended with a phone call to a friend on the Mariners staff. People want to talk about the thing they are obsessed with.

"Once you stop feeling stupid asking questions, the world's your oyster."

Advice for Parents

There is no guidebook for this, and Torres says if he could write it he would be a billionaire. What he asks of parents is honesty and positivity in the same breath. If a son is not one of the best players on his own high school team, that is a development conversation, not an exposure problem. Coaching a kid through the fence to get his right elbow up while he is in the box is not the adjustment he needs. It is his career and his life, so be there, be supportive, and ask questions — Torres says he has yet to get a dumb one from a parent.

"There are no bad kids. There are definitely bad parents."

He says he has written off more players for what their parents did than for anything the player did, and he is quick to add that the overwhelming majority of families in college baseball are excellent. The parents at Chapman are unbelievable, and they were unbelievable when their sons were in high school, which is part of why those sons are there. His practical version of support is going to a Tuesday night practice at a school your son is curious about, and going to the camp at the school he actually wants, because at a camp the coach sees the player and the family and the family sees the coach — including the one running around the field with two fungos.

Torres also puts himself in the example. He graduated high school at about 155 pounds and was not a pro prospect, and at 17 he genuinely wondered why UCLA and LSU were not calling. His dad told him the truth: he was a good player, and here is where a good player goes. Being supportive is not telling a kid where he cannot play; it is helping him find where he can.

"If you can play, somebody will find you."

There may be 500 schools where a player fits or there may be one, and one is all anybody needs. Torres played at the only Big West school that would have had him, calls it the best decision he ever made, and says he arrived a junior college kid and left knowing who he was. His closing note for families is simpler than any of the recruiting mechanics: consume the game. Even when it does not work out, failing at a sport young and getting in the weight room anyway will make a person better, and October is the best time of year to fall in love with it.

Episode Timestamps

Tap any timestamp to jump the player straight to that moment.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 0:46 — Why Chapman is a hard place to complain about
• 2:30 — A baseball household in the San Fernando Valley
• 4:37 — Junior college, UC Davis, and falling in love with the process
• 5:58 — The desk job that lasted three days
• 8:23 — Walters State and the big-league arms down the road
• 9:49 — Driving to Orange and being allowed to be himself
• 12:35 — Baseball as the connector
• 16:02 — What Division III baseball actually looks like
• 19:52 — Labels matter less than the program
• 23:18 — Develop players and tell them the truth
• 27:25 — Why Chapman offers late
• 29:08 — Edwards, honesty, and a small roster
• 31:33 — Camps, emails, and the high school coach
• 36:02 — Go watch college baseball
• 38:24 — His dad is still the coach he calls
• 40:49 — Drop the ego and ask the question
• 44:16 — Advice for parents
• 50:51 — Consume the game

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Joe Torres is an assistant coach and the recruiting coordinator at Chapman University in Orange, California, and he is on X as @coachjoetorres. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.