Welcome to the Rurowire Prospect Podcast.

I'm your host James Anderson.

And joining me on super short notice is Jeff Ponce of Baseball America.

Usually I book my guests a week, maybe even two or three weeks in advance, especially around draft time.

Everyone's super busy this time of year.

Sure.

But I had a first where I booked a guest, Mason McCrae, was going to come on and talk college hitters with me.

And in between when I booked him and when the pod was supposed to air, he got hired by the Cubs.

So that's a first for me.

And I only found out by I was going to DM him the questions I was going to ask him.

And I went to his Twitter page.

And then I saw his announcement about the Cubs from like five days ago.

And I mean, I'm not on Twitter all the time, but pretty bad algorithm to not have me see that at all from someone I'm following.

It has like a thousand likes or whatever.

But Jeff was someone who I am good enough friends with where I felt I could ask him on short notice and he

stepped up. So really appreciate you to join me, man. How are you doing?

No sweat. And I'll make sure that I do justice to Mason's beliefs and the type of college

hitters will talk about because Mason and I are close friends. We talk all throughout the day, especially during the college baseball season.

I have a group text with Mason and two of our other mutual friends that kind of talk about crazy ideas and share information and, you know, talk about the college game.

Maybe that's going to slow down a little bit now because Mason is, uh, employed by a team who got a lot of good friends that work for the Cubs, um, in terms of the cross checkers area folks, a lot of people that I've known from the Cape over the last couple years that were interns, younger folks that got hired by the Cubs organization. So they've been beefing up their

scouting and analytics and player development. And I think you can tell just by the

sheer number of hires, but also the quality of hires. So, you know, shots to Mr. McCrae on,

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