The Toronto Blue Jays offered my son first-round money out of high school. The kind of number that changes a family’s life. He turned it down to go to Vanderbilt.

People said we were crazy. The money is real, and the draft is never promised twice.

He won a College World Series, earned the degree, and went 14th overall three years later. The money was still there. By then the education was not optional; it was his.

I do not share that to brag. The pathway was the point. The bat/arm gets an athlete looked at. The classroom decides how long he stays in the game, and who he is when it ends. – Walter Beede