Ep. 64 | Ben Jenkins, Warstic (Part 2)

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What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Ben Jenkins, founder, CEO, and design director of Warstic, for a second conversation after his first appearance on Episode 34. Jenkins started his own pro career in the Philadelphia Phillies organization and now builds bats used from Texas high school fields to the College World Series. He opens the episode refusing to be called a coach. He would rather be called a dad.

That is most of the first half: what he has learned raising three sons through the game, especially the youngest, who made varsity as the only sophomore in a competitive Texas 6A program. The back half is Warstic — open-bat college programs, why one hitter's ideal bat is wrong for the next one, and how a new model gets built alongside a player instead of launched at him.

The highlights:

  • The mindset borrowed from big leaguers: if it is not working, you just have not figured it out yet
  • Praising the adjustment instead of the result, so motivation comes from the player
  • What happened the week his son looked at his own stats for the first time
  • Waiting to showcase a kid until there is something worth showcasing
  • Redefining success so a parent can enjoy the games, starting with getting off GameChanger
  • Open-bat college programs, and the honest answer to "you're just paying kids to swing it"
  • How a heavier model got designed with an SEC player of the year in the middle of the fall

A Dad First, Not a Coach

Jenkins coached all three of his sons through the younger ages and loved coach pitch, but once the team side took over he decided he would rather be in the cage with them than running a dugout. His youngest got the most of that attention and set his own goal: be better than his dad at both sports.

What he credits is appetite rather than talent. Coaches meet his son and notice right away that he likes to figure things out, which is the Warstic mentality in a person — the ceiling is set by capacity to learn, not by what was handed out at birth. It helps that the kid has grown up around Ian Kinsler, with Justin Upton occasionally in the same backyard, explaining an advanced move that his son then executed on the first try.

"You Just Haven't Figured It Out Yet"

The line Jenkins repeats reached him secondhand from the Kinsler and Michael Young world: if something was not working, Young treated it as information and went looking for another door. Jenkins is deliberate about what he praises. Instead of good job, he will point out that his son had a rough first half, got his body language and attitude back together, and made something happen in his third at bat — so the motivation is internalized rather than borrowed from whoever is watching.

"If you're not doing well at something right now, you just haven't figured it out yet."

He can also list things that went wrong from age eight on that he hated then and is glad about now. In seventh grade, in a state where seventh grade football matters, his son announced he was trying out at quarterback having never played the position, and Jenkins lost the argument for an easier spot. Listed behind a bigger boy, the kid asked for a quarterback coach to work with him in the front yard, and he was the starter by the first real game. Add winning the job again in ninth grade and a broken collarbone that cost three months, and Jenkins calls him war torn at 16.

The Week He Looked at His Stats

The most useful lesson of the past season came from a mistake. As the only sophomore on varsity, his son had beaten out an 18-year-old for the job and was playing well when district play wound down and he checked his own numbers for the first time. He started pressing, went cold for a couple of weeks, and let a genuinely bad strike zone get under his skin until he lost his temper at an umpire. Jenkins' read was that the anger had nothing to do with the umpire, and that the numbers had replaced the ball as the thing he was watching.

It is also why there was no showcase circuit at 12 or 14. Jenkins wanted him to get good behind the scenes and go showcase when a tool would actually raise eyebrows. He played high school ball and nothing else until the summer before his junior year, then went to one camp and drove a ball to the back side at 101 miles an hour. When the kid said he would have had a homer if he had pulled it, Jenkins told him the scouts were more impressed it went the other way.

Getting Off GameChanger

Hawley brings in a line from his own mentor, longtime coach Gary Ward: surrender the outcome. Jenkins' path there was ordinary — with his oldest son he caught himself too focused on results at the same high school where he had played, and not enjoying something that was not going to last.

The fix was redefining success, and the biggest single move was his wife putting away GameChanger, the pitch-by-pitch scoring app. He is emphatic about why: it is not always accurate, and even when it is, it reduces a game to results.

"Literally all you can see is the results. You can't see all the small things he did, the moves he made, the choices he made."

A ball hit 94 miles an hour at the center fielder reads as 0-for-1; a weak infield hit reads better. Watching in person, his wife now knows a good swing from a bad one, and knows that a 3-2 slider recognized and taken off a pitcher throwing 90 is the mature at bat, not the home run. Define quality at bats — executing the plan, swinging at the pitches you want, barreling balls — and the rest is not yours to control. Jenkins points to big leaguer Jake Mangum, who spent eight years in the minors trying to do one really good thing every game. His own job at the park is filming his son's defense at shortstop, which keeps him in the game rather than on his phone and turns anything ugly into something they take to practice.

Rewarding the Work

Hawley offers his own version from an 11U season with his two sons: instead of talking about who went 1-for-4, he paid for work, with initials on a sheet every day and a smartwatch if they earned enough by July 1. Both boys hit the number, ended up in the middle of the order, and had more fun than he had ever seen them have. Jenkins likes the mechanism and would tie it to barrels rather than hits, because the reward moves the focus, and focus is what separates more barrels from fewer. He also thinks normalizing that connection is honest preparation, since a player hoping to go on in the game will eventually be paid on performance — a shock he remembers from pro ball, along with the number on his first check from the Phillies, around 380 dollars.

Warstic in College Baseball

Almost every Division I program is locked into a bat contract, which is why this spring stood out. A few run open-bat contracts, meaning players swing whatever they want: Mississippi State did it when it won a national championship, and Arkansas, Auburn, Texas Tech, and Texas are on the short list. A well-paid coach has a simple reason to allow it — he wants his hitters hitting. At an open-bat school, Warstic's goal is only to make the bats available.

That distinction matters because of the criticism he gets, which is that Warstic pays kids to swing its bats.

"Do you really think those kids would choose money over what they're going to perform with?"

NIL money at that level is fine, he says, but not life-changing, and a player with a draft slot at stake picks the bat he performs with. The process runs the other way: demo in the fall, wait to hear that someone is genuinely using it all the time, decide whether he represents what the brand wants in front of kids, and only then make it official.

Building a Bat With a Player, Not For One

The clearest example was Arkansas shortstop Wehiwa Aloy, who won SEC player of the year and the Golden Spikes Award. Warstic had worked with him two years when he came back stronger and wanted something heavier than anything in the quiver. There was no such model, so they built test bats in the fall without knowing what they would be called, adjusted until he said it was exactly right, got it approved weeks before the season, and watched him hit singles, doubles, triples, and homers with it all the way to the College World Series.

The process is less engineering than listening. Jenkins calls himself a feel guy: players at that level know what they feel, so you talk about what they have swung and what they liked, and after enough years you can hear what they are describing. Then you refine, sometimes for a long time. It is also why Warstic ignores the industry calendar, which clusters new metal bats in late summer; each model goes when it is ready, a cycle he describes as a circle rather than a line.

The payoff is validation before anything reaches a shelf. That heavier model was in the hands of a few high school players — his son among them — and several college hitters during real seasons, with the genuine possibility it would never be sold at all. It still is not on shelves, because the proving is not finished. What he trusts after that is customer reviews, hundreds per bat, from people using the thing in the real world.

"We live in a world of desperation. People trying to do things fast, forcing things, desperate for it to work."

He would rather play the long game, with the caveat that some windows are real — the recent explosion of 1980s colorways will not last, so Warstic built its best bats in a pink-and-blue scheme while it is open.

A Weapon for Every Kid in the Lineup

What Jenkins most wants parents and players to understand about metal bats is that they are not interchangeable. He offers three hitters as proof: Aloy swings the heavier Mega; an Auburn freshman who won a starting job and made All-SEC swings the one-piece model because he is a line-drive hitter rather than a home run hitter; and a Loyola Marymount slugger who set a home run record this year swings the hybrid. Three feels, three swing weights, three players they fit.

"Seeing kids try to be something they're not is a quick path to not liking the game anymore."

So the roadmap is not just power models for three-hole hitters. Some kids should swing the heaviest, most end-loaded thing they can handle and others need the opposite. Contact bats will never win the review cycle, which is largely about exit velocity, and he is building them anyway. The word he uses is weapon, which prompts Hawley to recall his old coach Benny Castillo telling him it is a weapon in your hand — a line he now passes on to his own sons.

War, and a Rock Hall Induction

The first album Jenkins ever bought was U2's "War," "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was the first song he learned on guitar, and U2 in Fort Worth was his first concert. He noticed only recently that the word war has followed him around for most of his life.

His business partner Jack White was also just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which leaves Jenkins joking about being the guy in the room with neither a Rangers Hall of Fame plaque nor a rock and roll one. "Seven Nation Army" may be the most played song in sports, and he keeps lobbying White to play the Super Bowl so the millions who know the riff finally connect it to its writer. White would rather hear a stranger humming it on a street corner.

"I just know that I did that. That's it."

As for what is next, Jenkins promises new product later in the summer and into the holidays, in no particular order. His own framing is that Warstic is barely out of college — still in its twenties, still working out who it is.

Episode Timestamps

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

  • 0:00 — Introduction
  • 1:47 — Coaching his own sons, and the one who wanted it most
  • 2:55 — Growing up around Ian Kinsler and Justin Upton
  • 4:54 — Warstic's creed: a growth mindset, not a fixed one
  • 7:20 — You just haven't figured it out yet
  • 8:43 — Seventh-grade quarterback, and earning a job nobody gave him
  • 11:17 — The only sophomore on varsity, and the day he checked his stats
  • 13:27 — Waiting to showcase until there is something to show
  • 15:32 — Gary Ward's surrender the outcome
  • 16:55 — Learning to enjoy it with his oldest son
  • 18:07 — Redefining success, and getting off GameChanger
  • 22:30 — Filming his son's defense, and staying in the game
  • 25:23 — Ross's summer work deal with his sons
  • 29:36 — A first pro paycheck from the Phillies
  • 30:40 — Warstic in college baseball
  • 31:54 — Open-bat programs, and why there are so few
  • 34:29 — Answering the idea that Warstic pays kids to swing it
  • 36:39 — Building a heavier bat with an SEC player of the year
  • 40:34 — Three All-SEC hitters, three different bats
  • 42:39 — Inside the design process: listening more than engineering
  • 45:23 — Validating a new bat with real hitters before retail
  • 47:24 — A world of desperation, and playing the long game
  • 49:20 — A weapon for every kid in the lineup
  • 51:36 — First album, first concert: U2's War
  • 52:57 — Jack White, the Rock Hall, and Seven Nation Army
  • 56:32 — What is coming next from Warstic

Ben Jenkins is the founder, CEO, and design director of Warstic, and a former pro player in the Philadelphia Phillies organization. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.