October 10, 2024 • 11 mins
Jordan Bischel is the Head Baseball Coach at the University of Cincinnati. His team has a fall ball exhbition with Pitt on Saturday that has free admission. Jordan joined us to talk some baseball and the next Bischel Ball at BucketHeads event on ESPN1530.
Podcasts of The Mo Egger Radio Show are a service of Longnecks Sports Grill.
Listen to the show live weekday afternoons 3:00 - 6:00 on ESPN1530.
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Get more: https://linktr.ee/MoEgger
Follow on X: @MoEgger
Instagram too: @MoEgger
Podcasts of The Mo Egger Radio Show are a service of Longnecks Sports Grill.
Listen to the show live weekday afternoons 3:00 - 6:00 on ESPN1530.
Listen Live: ESPN1530.com/listen
Get more: https://linktr.ee/MoEgger
Follow on X: @MoEgger
Instagram too: @MoEgger
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you need a baseball fix. By the way, weather
is awesome right now. You could watch the UC baseball
team in a fourteen inning exhibition game at home this
Saturday against Pitt. First pitch is going to be at
three o'clock. The admission is free, concessions will be open.
The Bearcats, in the middle of the fall ball season,
(00:21):
just played eighteen innings at IU last Saturday. The head
coach of the Bearcats is Jordan Bischell. By the way,
the second Bischel ball at Buckethead's event, which that's on
my way home. I is October the twenty third, Wednesday,
two weeks from today, so I might stop buying. In fact,
I think I will hope to see you there. That
starts at six o'clock. The head coach of the Bearcats,
(00:44):
Coach Bischell, is with us. It's good to heavy coach.
How are you.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I'm doing well. Appreciate you having me on home.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I appreciate you doing this. Describe explain the concept of
fallball to me. Not so much the workouts and the practices,
but when you play another team they're gonna play eighteen
in against Pitt. Is this a situation where like a
control a controlled scrimmage in the NFL where you talk
to the other coach about pitchers you want to use
or things you want to do, or does it look
(01:10):
like a game you might play in the spring.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, it's gonna look a lot closer to a game. Obviously,
we'll we'll pitch it a little bit differently, maybe mix
our lineups a little bit more. You might see more
liberal substitutions. But it's you know, the guys that are
between the lines. It's it's it's unscripted, just baseball keeping score.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Really.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
It's so interesting because our guys are on campus in
August and then we've got six months before our first
game and you're trying to get a gauge for what
your team looks like when the bullets actually sly. So
it's just a couple of good opportunities in the fall
to see what it looks like against another team.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
What do you try to accomplish on an annual basis,
What do you try to accomplish in the fall that
sets the table for when you get restarted in the spring.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, you know, to some extent it all goes well.
You almost have to feel like you're somewhat ready for
opening day. When you wrap up that fall segment, we
get about six weeks in the fall where we can
go with our guys on a relatively daily basis. There's
some rules in there where we have to have a
day off, but kind of five to six days a
week for six weeks, which if you look at the spring,
(02:16):
we really only get two and a half weeks of
full practice once we get going, and then once we
start playing, you're playing four days a week. You take
a day off seat, your practice time is pretty limited
in the spring, so you really have to have to
make a lot of headway, especially with your new faces,
just understanding what your identity is, what your concepts are,
you're hitting approach, and so it really is a pretty
(02:36):
critical stretch for development.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Well and kind of guide me through the transfer process
as well. Because your season ends in the spring and
hopefully on an annual basis later and later, but it
ends in the spring, and then you know, the academic
year starts in late summer. It's a short window to
get kids to your roster, to bring them in to
talk to them. How does that work?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, kind of mid June too, late July is just
a really active stretch of trying to find the right
fits and get them on board. And the draft plays
into that was being in July and now knowing exactly
who you're going to lose. But really, you know, what
used to be a summer of really hunting quality high
school players, now we kind of have to divide and
conquer where we stay on top of that, but also
(03:19):
spend a lot of time on keeping an eye on
a couple of thousand guys that have gone in and
trying to find the right fits to fit there. And
thankfully we had a pretty successful summer with it.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
You you brought in twelve new transfers among those group
of kids. Where is the biggest impact going to be
made once the game start to be played in the spring.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, on the mound for sure. Our pitching did a
pretty nice job last year, considering we had very little
depth and very little experience, which is not a great combination.
But we brought in, you know, a couple of left handers,
Collan o'c connor and Adam Racketts, who were really quality
rotation guys at the Division IE level at their schools.
(03:59):
Several other guys who have had some success and have
some upside are pitching depth looks just tremendously different than
last year. And some of that's a couple of freshmen
coming in, but most of it some some quality guys
that have logged a lot of career college inning.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Uh, you're a freshman, You show up on campus and
then fallball begins, and oftentimes, you know, maybe just weeks
after you played, you know, at at at a lower
level high school or on a club team or something
like that. And I've I've watched a lot of high
school baseball my life, and there are times where I go, God,
there are kids here who are going to be making
a significant leap in competition, a significant leap in terms
(04:37):
of venue, a significant leap in terms of expectations. So
what's what's fallball like for a freshman who has just
shown up on campus.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think fast. I think really early fast. Uh, you know,
the speed of everything is faster. Obviously the pitching has
increased velocity, but the times, the first base, the just
the speed of it changes. You know. The great thing
for us is we get, you know, about six months
with these guys before our first game. That counts, so
we have a chance to slow it down for them
(05:04):
a little bit. But September, it's not surprising to see
guys that we think are going to be very good
players kind of look like bad players, quite frankly, and
it's just part of the process of learning. But yeah,
it's a tough adjustment, and the transfer portals probably made
that even tougher because college baseball has gotten older, more veteran.
At this level, there's less eighteen and nineteen year olds
(05:27):
making a big impact. And you see it too with
the strength side of things. I mean, there's just such
a big difference between a twenty two year old body
who's really worked in the way room versus an eighteen
year old, and so it takes some work. But we
also saw last year that through the course of the year,
those guys can really help us as the year goes on.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
What's the most common thing with a freshman, just say,
a position player that you have to work with when
he shows up Handling's failure.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
I think more than anything you know at this if
you're coming to play at this level, you know you're
probably almost undoubtedly the best player on your team, the
chance your best player in your league, maybe the best
player in your state, and all of a sudden you're
surrounding a bunch of guys like you with more experience
than you, and it you're going to fail a heck
of a lot more, and dealing with that and still
(06:10):
trusting in who you are. That takes, especially in baseball,
where there is a lot of failure for anybody. Those
guys probably have never gone over ten in their lives
in a stretch, and they're doing it regularly.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Now. I've watched high school pitchers who are going to play,
you know, high end, high level college baseball toward the
end of their high school careers. They just wipe the
floor with the opposition, and it could be at times
it looks a little bit too easy. So a pitcher
shows up on campus. You talk about learning to fail,
But what's the most common denominator when it comes to
(06:41):
those guys getting used to the college.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
They struggle to get the ball in the strike zone.
You know, high school umpires are going to have pretty
significantly different strike zones than the ones we deal with.
The hitters are so much more disciplined and so much
more comfortable. And if you watch us play, I mean,
we're almost always in the top ten or so in
the country walk. So I think it's even harder for
our pictures to faith our hitters because they just they
(07:05):
just don't expand the breaking ball that everybody was chasing
in high school, they're not. And so you often see
guys who barely walked anybody in high school, all of
a sudden in a three and in scrimmage they're walking
three or four guys and you're scratching your head. But
some of that is those things. And then again it's
the confidence starts to weig in a little bit the ball.
So that's spray a little bit.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
You know, a year ago, you're getting ready for season one.
At you see in season one of the Big Twelve
relative to maybe what we would have talked about twelve
months ago, are things much more calm in that regard?
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, you know, we have a ton of new guys.
You mentioned all the transfers, and we have thirteen freshmen
as well, so over half our rosters knew. But the
guys we brought back had a lot of experience for us,
have some really good leadership qualities. Like it. It may
not be a real big group in terms of quantity,
but it's a great group in terms of their leadership
and experience and that's brought a way, way, way more
(07:57):
settled feel to it, and just our staff for us
a second year and spending time together and you know,
knowing where things are and what's going on, and it's
way way more settled, which obviously helps.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
As I'm talking to you, I'm watching an American League
Division Series game Detroit and Cleveland. You're swamped. I'm sure
there aren't many nights that you get a chance to
sit down and watch a nine in in game. But
like in the playoffs, can you sit back as a
fan or are you thinking along with the managers?
Speaker 2 (08:25):
You know, I grew up in Wisconsin. In the first
half of my life, I watched the Brewers not be
so bad. They didn't tend to make the playoffs. I
don't know if that's better or worse, because now they
make it every year. But by the second week here,
they've already been knocked out. So I got a chance
to be a fan a little bit for a couple
of games last week. Unfortunately, we got three little guys
at home. You're usually at sleep by the time the
(08:46):
biggest pitches are thrown. But it is fun to you know,
what's cool about it is in the big leagues, there's
there's some sort of measure of energy conservation. Right, you
got one hundred and sixty two games. You just can't
go all out every single day. And then you see
these guys turn it up in the playoffs where they
don't take a pitch off and that level of intensity.
I think it actually mirrors the college game a little
bit more, where every game feels like it carries a
(09:07):
little bit more value in that part of it's really
fun to watch.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah. No, that's actually the part of the college game
that I think I like the most. Right, Like a
guy hits a homer in college, everybody pours out of
the dugout and acts like it's a bigger deal than
they do in a big league game. The bishell Ball
at Bucketheads event, which is two weeks from tonight. You
had the first one in late September. For folks who
heard about it maybe didn't get a chance to attend.
What's going to happen at Bucketheads?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, you know, it was great. We had trouble, you know,
Bucketheads in the Austin Sports bar and it was packed
wall to wall. A lot of people were in Cincinnati
gear something. They're just enjoying the meal that didn't know
what we had going on, but we had probably well
over one hundred people show off to just get a
feel of us talking about what's going on with the program. Obviously,
(09:52):
we you know, we're in school, academic calendar goes so
many months before we start playing games, but we're just
trying to make people, you know, where what's going on
in our program this time of year. So we had
a couple of players, Ny Taylor and Loudon Brook stop.
We'll have a couple of different guys join us in
a couple of weeks here, but really just a chance
to talk baseball, talk bear Cat baseball. We've had so
(10:12):
much transition in our program with joining the league and
Stackinson did success last year and we've seen more and
more interest. We're just trying to get out in the
community a little bit and let people get to know me.
Our staff are players, and it was great. We had
I think north of twenty alumn there, which was good
to see them, but just a chance for us to
kind of kind of bring Cincinnati Baseball to them instead
(10:33):
of asking them to come to us and talk with
the public a little bit.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
I mentioned that's on my way home, so I'll come
by and say hi. Two weeks from tonight. First things,
first fourteen inning exhibition at UC against Pittsburgh at three
o'clock is first pitch. It costs nothing to get in.
Concessions will be opened. There are other open scrimmages coming
up Alumni Weekend Sunday, the twentieth of October, as well
as scrimmages on the twenty fourth and twenty fifth. I
(11:00):
have your coaches always. Thank you so much all.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I appreciate you having me on MOA. I know there's
a lot going on this time of year, so I
appreciate you squeezing our little bearcat baseball.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
We'll talk baseball anytime. Thank you so much. That's Jordan Bischel,
the baseball coach at the University of Cincinnati.
If you need a baseball fix. By the way, weather
is awesome right now. You could watch the UC baseball
team in a fourteen inning exhibition game at home this
Saturday against Pitt. First pitch is going to be at
three o'clock. The admission is free, concessions will be open.
The Bearcats, in the middle of the fall ball season,
(00:21):
just played eighteen innings at IU last Saturday. The head
coach of the Bearcats is Jordan Bischell. By the way,
the second Bischel ball at Buckethead's event, which that's on
my way home. I is October the twenty third, Wednesday,
two weeks from today, so I might stop buying. In fact,
I think I will hope to see you there. That
starts at six o'clock. The head coach of the Bearcats,
(00:44):
Coach Bischell, is with us. It's good to heavy coach.
How are you.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I'm doing well. Appreciate you having me on home.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I appreciate you doing this. Describe explain the concept of
fallball to me. Not so much the workouts and the practices,
but when you play another team they're gonna play eighteen
in against Pitt. Is this a situation where like a
control a controlled scrimmage in the NFL where you talk
to the other coach about pitchers you want to use
or things you want to do, or does it look
(01:10):
like a game you might play in the spring.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, it's gonna look a lot closer to a game. Obviously,
we'll we'll pitch it a little bit differently, maybe mix
our lineups a little bit more. You might see more
liberal substitutions. But it's you know, the guys that are
between the lines. It's it's it's unscripted, just baseball keeping score.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Really.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
It's so interesting because our guys are on campus in
August and then we've got six months before our first
game and you're trying to get a gauge for what
your team looks like when the bullets actually sly. So
it's just a couple of good opportunities in the fall
to see what it looks like against another team.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
What do you try to accomplish on an annual basis,
What do you try to accomplish in the fall that
sets the table for when you get restarted in the spring.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, you know, to some extent it all goes well.
You almost have to feel like you're somewhat ready for
opening day. When you wrap up that fall segment, we
get about six weeks in the fall where we can
go with our guys on a relatively daily basis. There's
some rules in there where we have to have a
day off, but kind of five to six days a
week for six weeks, which if you look at the spring,
(02:16):
we really only get two and a half weeks of
full practice once we get going, and then once we
start playing, you're playing four days a week. You take
a day off seat, your practice time is pretty limited
in the spring, so you really have to have to
make a lot of headway, especially with your new faces,
just understanding what your identity is, what your concepts are,
you're hitting approach, and so it really is a pretty
(02:36):
critical stretch for development.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Well and kind of guide me through the transfer process
as well. Because your season ends in the spring and
hopefully on an annual basis later and later, but it
ends in the spring, and then you know, the academic
year starts in late summer. It's a short window to
get kids to your roster, to bring them in to
talk to them. How does that work?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, kind of mid June too, late July is just
a really active stretch of trying to find the right
fits and get them on board. And the draft plays
into that was being in July and now knowing exactly
who you're going to lose. But really, you know, what
used to be a summer of really hunting quality high
school players, now we kind of have to divide and
conquer where we stay on top of that, but also
(03:19):
spend a lot of time on keeping an eye on
a couple of thousand guys that have gone in and
trying to find the right fits to fit there. And
thankfully we had a pretty successful summer with it.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
You you brought in twelve new transfers among those group
of kids. Where is the biggest impact going to be
made once the game start to be played in the spring.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, on the mound for sure. Our pitching did a
pretty nice job last year, considering we had very little
depth and very little experience, which is not a great combination.
But we brought in, you know, a couple of left handers,
Collan o'c connor and Adam Racketts, who were really quality
rotation guys at the Division IE level at their schools.
(03:59):
Several other guys who have had some success and have
some upside are pitching depth looks just tremendously different than
last year. And some of that's a couple of freshmen
coming in, but most of it some some quality guys
that have logged a lot of career college inning.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Uh, you're a freshman, You show up on campus and
then fallball begins, and oftentimes, you know, maybe just weeks
after you played, you know, at at at a lower
level high school or on a club team or something
like that. And I've I've watched a lot of high
school baseball my life, and there are times where I go, God,
there are kids here who are going to be making
a significant leap in competition, a significant leap in terms
(04:37):
of venue, a significant leap in terms of expectations. So
what's what's fallball like for a freshman who has just
shown up on campus.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think fast. I think really early fast. Uh, you know,
the speed of everything is faster. Obviously the pitching has
increased velocity, but the times, the first base, the just
the speed of it changes. You know. The great thing
for us is we get, you know, about six months
with these guys before our first game. That counts, so
we have a chance to slow it down for them
(05:04):
a little bit. But September, it's not surprising to see
guys that we think are going to be very good
players kind of look like bad players, quite frankly, and
it's just part of the process of learning. But yeah,
it's a tough adjustment, and the transfer portals probably made
that even tougher because college baseball has gotten older, more veteran.
At this level, there's less eighteen and nineteen year olds
(05:27):
making a big impact. And you see it too with
the strength side of things. I mean, there's just such
a big difference between a twenty two year old body
who's really worked in the way room versus an eighteen
year old, and so it takes some work. But we
also saw last year that through the course of the year,
those guys can really help us as the year goes on.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
What's the most common thing with a freshman, just say,
a position player that you have to work with when
he shows up Handling's failure.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
I think more than anything you know at this if
you're coming to play at this level, you know you're
probably almost undoubtedly the best player on your team, the
chance your best player in your league, maybe the best
player in your state, and all of a sudden you're
surrounding a bunch of guys like you with more experience
than you, and it you're going to fail a heck
of a lot more, and dealing with that and still
(06:10):
trusting in who you are. That takes, especially in baseball,
where there is a lot of failure for anybody. Those
guys probably have never gone over ten in their lives
in a stretch, and they're doing it regularly.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Now. I've watched high school pitchers who are going to play,
you know, high end, high level college baseball toward the
end of their high school careers. They just wipe the
floor with the opposition, and it could be at times
it looks a little bit too easy. So a pitcher
shows up on campus. You talk about learning to fail,
But what's the most common denominator when it comes to
(06:41):
those guys getting used to the college.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
They struggle to get the ball in the strike zone.
You know, high school umpires are going to have pretty
significantly different strike zones than the ones we deal with.
The hitters are so much more disciplined and so much
more comfortable. And if you watch us play, I mean,
we're almost always in the top ten or so in
the country walk. So I think it's even harder for
our pictures to faith our hitters because they just they
(07:05):
just don't expand the breaking ball that everybody was chasing
in high school, they're not. And so you often see
guys who barely walked anybody in high school, all of
a sudden in a three and in scrimmage they're walking
three or four guys and you're scratching your head. But
some of that is those things. And then again it's
the confidence starts to weig in a little bit the ball.
So that's spray a little bit.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
You know, a year ago, you're getting ready for season one.
At you see in season one of the Big Twelve
relative to maybe what we would have talked about twelve
months ago, are things much more calm in that regard?
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, you know, we have a ton of new guys.
You mentioned all the transfers, and we have thirteen freshmen
as well, so over half our rosters knew. But the
guys we brought back had a lot of experience for us,
have some really good leadership qualities. Like it. It may
not be a real big group in terms of quantity,
but it's a great group in terms of their leadership
and experience and that's brought a way, way, way more
(07:57):
settled feel to it, and just our staff for us
a second year and spending time together and you know,
knowing where things are and what's going on, and it's
way way more settled, which obviously helps.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
As I'm talking to you, I'm watching an American League
Division Series game Detroit and Cleveland. You're swamped. I'm sure
there aren't many nights that you get a chance to
sit down and watch a nine in in game. But
like in the playoffs, can you sit back as a
fan or are you thinking along with the managers?
Speaker 2 (08:25):
You know, I grew up in Wisconsin. In the first
half of my life, I watched the Brewers not be
so bad. They didn't tend to make the playoffs. I
don't know if that's better or worse, because now they
make it every year. But by the second week here,
they've already been knocked out. So I got a chance
to be a fan a little bit for a couple
of games last week. Unfortunately, we got three little guys
at home. You're usually at sleep by the time the
(08:46):
biggest pitches are thrown. But it is fun to you know,
what's cool about it is in the big leagues, there's
there's some sort of measure of energy conservation. Right, you
got one hundred and sixty two games. You just can't
go all out every single day. And then you see
these guys turn it up in the playoffs where they
don't take a pitch off and that level of intensity.
I think it actually mirrors the college game a little
bit more, where every game feels like it carries a
(09:07):
little bit more value in that part of it's really
fun to watch.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah. No, that's actually the part of the college game
that I think I like the most. Right, Like a
guy hits a homer in college, everybody pours out of
the dugout and acts like it's a bigger deal than
they do in a big league game. The bishell Ball
at Bucketheads event, which is two weeks from tonight. You
had the first one in late September. For folks who
heard about it maybe didn't get a chance to attend.
What's going to happen at Bucketheads?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, you know, it was great. We had trouble, you know,
Bucketheads in the Austin Sports bar and it was packed
wall to wall. A lot of people were in Cincinnati
gear something. They're just enjoying the meal that didn't know
what we had going on, but we had probably well
over one hundred people show off to just get a
feel of us talking about what's going on with the program. Obviously,
(09:52):
we you know, we're in school, academic calendar goes so
many months before we start playing games, but we're just
trying to make people, you know, where what's going on
in our program this time of year. So we had
a couple of players, Ny Taylor and Loudon Brook stop.
We'll have a couple of different guys join us in
a couple of weeks here, but really just a chance
to talk baseball, talk bear Cat baseball. We've had so
(10:12):
much transition in our program with joining the league and
Stackinson did success last year and we've seen more and
more interest. We're just trying to get out in the
community a little bit and let people get to know me.
Our staff are players, and it was great. We had
I think north of twenty alumn there, which was good
to see them, but just a chance for us to
kind of kind of bring Cincinnati Baseball to them instead
(10:33):
of asking them to come to us and talk with
the public a little bit.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
I mentioned that's on my way home, so I'll come
by and say hi. Two weeks from tonight. First things,
first fourteen inning exhibition at UC against Pittsburgh at three
o'clock is first pitch. It costs nothing to get in.
Concessions will be opened. There are other open scrimmages coming
up Alumni Weekend Sunday, the twentieth of October, as well
as scrimmages on the twenty fourth and twenty fifth. I
(11:00):
have your coaches always. Thank you so much all.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I appreciate you having me on MOA. I know there's
a lot going on this time of year, so I
appreciate you squeezing our little bearcat baseball.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
We'll talk baseball anytime. Thank you so much. That's Jordan Bischel,
the baseball coach at the University of Cincinnati.
Mo Egger News
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.