I miss baseball

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The Hot Corner

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While baseball may be slowly crawling toward a return, baseball fans can get a fix of the national pastime with the MLB Draft on Wednesday and Thursday.
This will be an interesting draft for Houston Astros fans. Due to the cheating scandal, we won’t have a pick Wednesday, but general manager James Click comes from the Tampa Bay Rays, an organization that specializes in developing late-round talent. I am optimistic he can make something of this draft, but only time will tell.
I’ve always enjoyed the player development side of baseball. For most of the past decade I’ve watched the MLB Draft each year and I could name nearly every player in the Astros’ minor league system during my high school and college years.
I watched the 2012 draft during which the Astros picked Carlos Correa, a 17-year old Puerto Rican shortstop no one had pegged as the top prospect. Correa has obviously worked out pretty well and I hope he wears the orange and white for a long time.
The draft in which Houston took LSU infielder Alex Bregman and Florida high schooler Kyle Tucker was another fun one, whereas the Brady Aiken draft was not.
My love for this side of baseball led to a college job as a scout for a company called Evolution Metrix.
Essentially, I would go to Texas State University baseball games and compile data and video on players from both Texas State and its opponents.
 I would track pitch speed using a pocket radar and even kept track of statistics such as swinging and watched strikes.
It was an entertaining job and I was living my dream, getting paid to work in baseball. Plus, telling people that I was a baseball scout made me feel pretty cool too.
I knew early on I was not going to make it as a ballplayer myself.
It’s not that I was a bad player, but I knew I wasn’t a college-level player.
I had a solid arm on the mound and I could reach the lower 80’s in high school, but your guess was just as good as mine as to where that pitch was going.
I primarily played third base, but spent some time at second base, short stop and in left field.
While my playing days ended in 2014, my love for the game never diminished. My goal is to reach the big leagues someday as a reporter for a major league club.
Brian McTaggart is the MLB.com beat reporter for the Houston Astros.
He writes every day for MLB.com and is commonly brought onto the MLB Network as the go-to guy for Astros baseball news. That is where I want to be someday, as a reporter for a major league club.
Who knows, maybe I’ll get drafted today. You never know.

Reed Graff is the sports editor for The Snyder News. Comments on this article can be made to sports@thesnydernews.com