Ep. 33 | Todd Butler, University of Oklahoma

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Todd Butler, assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at the University of Oklahoma. Butler played shortstop at Oklahoma after two years at McNeese State and still holds the school's single-season stolen base record at 46 out of 50 attempts, some 36 years later. He has coached for more than three decades, including stops at Alabama and Arkansas and head coaching jobs at McNeese State and Wichita State, and he joined the Sooners' staff as the program moved into the Southeastern Conference.

Recorded in mid-December with an empty baseball facility around him, the conversation is mostly about people: how a freshman loses himself trying to please every coach in the building, what Butler is really watching when he stands down the line at a showcase, and what being fired twice in ten months taught him.

The highlights:

• What a college player should do over holiday break, and why the quiet matters as much as the reps
• Why the best players are a little stubborn, and why trying to impress everyone backfires
• The tell that a player is not really listening, no matter how polite he sounds
• The promise Butler made to Alec Bohm's parents, and how it held up
• Why he leaves the team gear at home and sits in the stands with parents
• Recruiting as assembling a complementary roster rather than collecting talent
• Base stealing in an era of earpieces, pitch clocks, and uncalled balk moves
• Six games with his jaw wired shut, and the downhill sprints that made him a college player

The Break That Resets a College Player

December is the one stretch when Oklahoma's players are not being told where to be. A freshman spends the fall reporting to an academic advisor, a strength coach, a nutritionist, a sports psychologist, and a coach for nearly every phase of the game. Players keep working over the break, but Butler values the quiet more: young players at a new school forget who they are, and this is their chance to get back to whatever earned them a scholarship. They return in January noticeably more mature, because they have stopped auditioning.

There is a stubbornness in great players that protects them, he says. A hitter arriving on campus usually believes his dad, or a family friend, was the best hitting coach he ever had, and then spends his first fall trying to impress everyone in the building at once.

"It's not about impressing everyone around you, because you cannot please everyone. Even if you go four for four, dad or a coach is going to want you to go five for four."

His shorthand for the alternative is healthy and happy, plus maturity: stay with what got you here and be the same person every day. It is also why he recruits students. He checks with a recruit's teachers and high school coaches, because an accountable 3.5 student improves far faster than a 2.2 student with similar tools. Oklahoma's incoming group the prior year averaged better than a 3.5 GPA, and he ties that directly to the word complete.

Listening Is the Tell

Butler keeps his instruction short because he believes simple wins. What he listens for in return is whether it is landing.

"If I'm giving a player information and he's saying yes sir, yes sir, yes sir after each sentence, he can't hear me."

An answer that fast means the player is not yet mature enough to let the words sit and then decide what to keep and what to discard. The benefit of getting older as a coach, he says, is patience: by the time a recruit heads back to the airport, he usually knows whether that player is coming. Growing a player fast still takes tough love, and sometimes a visual — he credits co-host Jim Schwanke, a friend of 30 years, for the reminder that in hitting, a picture of a player's position at contact beside a big leaguer's is worth a thousand words.

The Promise He Made About Alec Bohm

Butler recruited Alec Bohm to Wichita State out of a Catholic high school in Omaha. On the visit he told Bohm's parents their son would play third base, hit in the middle of the order as a freshman, never get a bunt sign, and had a chance to be a first round pick if he worked the way they said he would. He had forgotten saying it until the family repeated it back to him a year later.

All of it held: Bohm started at third in the second game of his freshman year, hit in the middle of the lineup for three years, never bunted, and went third overall. What Butler emphasizes is the work — Bohm crossing the field to the cage after class nearly every morning, hitting, eating lunch, and coming back to hit again, with a 3.5 GPA alongside it.

Hiding Down the Line

As a young coach at Alabama, Butler wore Alabama on everything he owned, including his name on the back of a shirt. He wants the opposite now. He leaves the Oklahoma gear at home, stands down the line where nobody is looking for him, and asks a player on the bench to tell him about his own shortstop. Sitting in the stands next to parents at a big summer event produces more usable information than anything else in the park.

The checklist has little to do with tools. Does the player wear his hat correctly and have a belt on. Is he early. Does he stretch and play catch properly, and catch the ball cleanly. Does he have a routine on deck and a presence walking to the plate. Rankings and video help, but he insists on seeing the player in person, including trips home where a future first rounder never got a swing because the other team walked him every time.

"The biggest key in recruiting is assembling the team, where the team complements each other. It's not recruiting, it's assembling."

Analytics feed that work, and Oklahoma leans on staff with big league backgrounds for it. Butler's own use is practical: before the Sooners' first SEC season he wanted the average velocity of every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday starter in the league, plus the closers. He recites the numbers from memory — 92.6 on Fridays, 92.9 on Saturdays, 91.5 on Sundays, 92.1 for closers — and guesses they climb toward 94 in the season ahead. His definition of development is deliberately broad, too: professors, academic advisors, strength staff, sports science, community, and fans all develop the athlete, and so does a league where playing on the road in front of ten thousand people leaves no room to play poorly.

Base Stealing in a Harder Era

Butler taught base running at McNeese State and Alabama, and it shows. His old framework ran on tells: catchers giving visible signs, a pitcher's grip or glove position, feet close together for a slide step versus wide for a big leg lift. If a hitter pulled a fastball foul for a home run, he was running on the next pitch, because off-speed was coming.

The modern version is harder, since earpieces and dugout-called pitches have erased most of those tells, though pickoff limits and the pitch clock hand something back. His specific warning is the balk move that rarely gets called: a pitcher buckles his front knee, and a runner watching the feet gets picked off. The fix is a different key — read the shoulder instead.

Spark Plug From Sulphur, Louisiana

Butler was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, lived in Oakdale until he was seven, and moved to Sulphur because the schools had strong athletics. His parents divorced when he was young, his father served in Vietnam, and the stepfather who raised him was a left-handed hitter. He was small, so they called him spark plug.

Two stories carry the rest. As a senior he took a hit to the jaw and played six games with it wired shut, in an offensive lineman's face mask, with wire cutters on the sideline and a surgeon who unwired him Saturday mornings so he could get soup and shakes in. His mother lost her mind; his stepfather told him to play. The other is the crosswalk over Interstate 10 in Sulphur, where his track coach had him run downhill 60-yard sprints three days a week. His times dropped across the board, and he credits that hill with making him a college athlete.

What he is proudest of as a player is the joy — nobody knew your batting average then, so the only pressure was self-imposed. His regret is the weight room: he did not lift until college, when weights were considered bad for baseball players, and he now thinks ten pounds a year is a sound target for a high school player.

Relationships, and the Clock

Relationships, Butler says, are the biggest thing of all. Knowing a family since a player was in eighth or ninth grade lets him demand more once that player is on campus, and gives his voice weight when the player leaves for pro ball. The math frustrates him: the practice week is capped at 20 hours, and for players with a real chance at a career, that is not close to enough time with them. He is also happy to be out-thought by a player — he has to pause before answering a hitting question from All-American catcher Easton Carmichael, and he likes it that way.

"This is not a job to me. This is just what I do."

Fired Twice in Ten Months

Butler is direct about humility because it has been administered to him. Wichita State let him go in 2019, a year after the program had 11 players drafted, second most in the country, but did not reach a regional. He went to Missouri, assembled the program's first top 25 recruiting class in a decade, and ten months later took a call telling him he was out.

He and his family sold their house in two days and moved back to Louisiana, where he became an assistant athletic director at McNeese State, the place that has picked him up as a player, assistant, head coach, and administrator. Oklahoma, the school he always wanted to return to, came after that. He uses his own path on players who insist on a big program: he chose Oklahoma out of McNeese with other options available, and the name on the jersey matters less than playing with joy where you are.

For Parents: Demand More, Call Less

Butler's advice arrives in two parts. First, the parent who says he does not want to be the one who calls the coach should simply not be that parent. Let your son fight his own battles, go to the coach himself, and own his situation. Politics and playing-time excuses, in his view, are a crutch.

Second, keep demanding while still showing love — back in the cage after a bad game, and around people who know what they are doing. He tells the story of his oldest daughter coming home upset with a teacher: unless the teacher had done something genuinely improper, the demand stood and she needed to meet it. The more rough water a young person crosses, the better off they are at the end. On vetting the adults around a player, he offers a test anyone can apply.

"Would I want to do business with this coach? Would I want this coach to come to my house and eat?"

He is sympathetic to how hard this has become, with advisors, school coaches, and summer coaches all calling at once, and his practical caution is workload: he watches arms throw two innings on a Tuesday, two more Saturday, two more the next Wednesday, until a pitcher not yet strong enough for that torque breaks down.

Omaha, and the Advice He Leaves Behind

Butler first reached the College World Series in 1997, when Jim Schwanke was at LSU and beat his team for the national championship. Since then he has finished second, third, third, fourth, and fifth without winning it, and his last trip was in 2012. What he remembers is a morning ritual: coffee before sunrise, headphones in, the ballpark staff letting him walk the warning track alone. When it ends, win or lose, you are back on the road recruiting inside about 48 hours.

This was the first podcast he had ever done, and he says a younger version of him would have been too nervous to talk about himself. What he wants now is to make an impact and get back to Omaha with a third SEC team.

For players and families: have joy in playing every day, be thankful you are healthy, and keep growing toward being complete. You will be noticed, and timing matters. He wanted to be a head coach at the highest level and never got there, which is exactly why he tells young players not to hang their identity on one destination.

"Be where your feet are, and understand it's not always greener on the other side."

If the people around a player care about him as a person and demand something of him, he says, that is the arrangement you want.

Episode Timestamps

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

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 2:44 — What he expects from players over holiday break
• 5:00 — Being too coachable, and the stubbornness of great players
• 7:20 — Recruiting good students, and what complete means
• 9:11 — The player who answers too fast
• 11:06 — The promise he made to Alec Bohm's parents
• 12:28 — Hiding down the line: how he evaluates players
• 14:38 — Recruiting as assembling a team
• 17:36 — The single-season steals record, and teaching base stealing
• 21:04 — Growing up in Sulphur, Louisiana
• 23:00 — Six games with his jaw wired shut
• 26:00 — The weight room he wishes he had used
• 27:58 — What relationships mean to him
• 30:11 — Joy to play, and a job that is not a job
• 32:21 — Humility, and getting fired twice in 10 months
• 37:25 — SEC starter and closer velocities
• 40:41 — Advice for parents: do not be that parent
• 43:27 — How to vet a coach or an organization
• 48:25 — What Omaha is like
• 50:31 — Closing thoughts, and advice for players and families

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Todd Butler is the assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at the University of Oklahoma. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.