7 Years On

I haven't looked at, or thought about, this blog in many years. It has been 7 years since I started this blog, and nearly 6 years since my last post. The silence has really been due to nothing new to report, to the one-year-and-done nature of the professional careers of these young men. So many years have gone by that I've decided that it's time to find out how these stories ended. For all these players, who were 21 or 22 when the story started, by age 28 or 29 the baseball part of the story appears to have ended.

One nice thing that's happened: in the last 6 years, everyone has now gotten onto social media, and as college grads with a googlable resume term (UNCW baseball), I've been able to learn what's happened to most of these players.


Brad Holt

The 33rd player taken in the 2008 draft, and one who started with great promise, was never able to revive his career after several injuries. After very good results in Low A and Advanced A ball in 2008 and 2009, where Baseball America named him the #4 prospect in the Mets system, Holt's strikeout rate plummeted and his walk rate soared. At cause were annual battles with biceps tendinitis and a debilitating ankle injury suffered in 2009 that altered his delivery and seems to have permanently deprived him of his 98mph fastball. The Mets eventually released him in 2013.

Holt was still pitching as recently as last year (2014), where at age 27 he threw 3 and 2/3 innings (with shockingly high numbers of walks and strikeouts) for the Long Island Ducks in the independent Atlantic League. I don't know if that ended due to the mediocre performance there, injury, or some other reason. It's a long way from the Atlantic League to the Majors, however still only 28 years old, if his arm, old delivery, and the command that once came with it could be found, it is certainly not too late to wonder if there could be one more chapter to be written.


Nate Hall

Nate Hall played the second longest of any of the UNCW 6, accumulating nearly 1,200 plate appearances in the independent Can-Am and Frontier Leagues. After a highly successful 2010 season where he OPS's .879, Hall's production took a step backward in 2011, where he hit .228 to end his last season in professional baseball.


Mark Carver

Mark Carver, a dominant power hitter at UNCW, took only 129 plate appearances at the Low A level, hit one home run, and was released by the Pirates.

In December of 2010, less than two years after leaving baseball, Carver became a Sales Rep at Smith & Nephew Orthopaedics.


Daniel Hargrave

Daniel Hargrave, a likewise dominant second baseman at UNCW who set the school's all-time runs and total bases marks, took 188 plate appearance in the same Low A league as Carver (the New York Penn League), and was released by the Phillies the following year.

Hargrave returned to UNCW as an assistant baseball coach in 2009.


Jason Appel

Jason Appel played only 12 games in the summer of 2008, batting .368 and playing a perfect center field, before leaving the team.

While it appeared that he had signed to play in 2009 for the Washington (PA) WildThings in the Frontier League, no statistics ever materialized from that signing.

From August 2009 through 2012, Appel worked as an Employment Specialist with Easter Seals, helping people find and keep jobs. Since then, he has worked as an IT Recruiter at Bluewolf, a New York City consulting company.


Jeff Hatcher

Jeff Hatcher, a classy and polished pitcher who always got the most out of his pitching arsenal, was the only one of the UNCW 6 never to don a uniform professionally. He immediately accepted a job offer of Management Trainee right out of school in the summer of 2008 with 1-800-PACK-RAT portable mini-storage facilities in Wallace, North Carolina, and has since been promoted to manage several of these facilities, in Greensboro, Raleigh, and Wilmington.


A UNCW Major Leaguer

As of this writing, Chris Hatcher, who was drafted two years before the players I chose to follow in this blog, works late in games for my favorite sports team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.