6 Days 'til Aggie Baseball: One-on-One with assistant coach Nolan Cain

It’s that time of year! The Texas Aggie baseball team is set to open up the 2022 season on Friday against Fordham at Olsen Field at Blue Bell Park. We're counting down the days with our 2022 Aggie Baseball Preview Series.

Nolan Cain is Texas A&M's new director of recruiting and assistant coach, and he will be manning the third-base coaches' box for the Aggies this season. Cain spoke to TexAgs about his transition to Aggieland and much more during our 2022 Aggie Baseball Preview Series.

Key notes from Nolan Cain interview

• It has been an amazing place for my family and a great transition. Any time you’re looking at a new job and a new opportunity, when you have a wife and kids, it has to start with that. Once it was announced that I was going to be here, my phone started blowing up, real estate agents and people I know in Texas, whether it was someone that I played with over at LSU that lives here now. Texas is awesome, and it has probably been one of the best things I've ever done for me personally, my family and my career. My wife and kids got here the day before my son’s first day of school. We were in a hotel room, so I dropped him off at school, and we went and signed off on the house. It was a crazy summer. At any point, you're watching a 15-year-old pitch. We were talking to grad transfers in the transfer portal. Also, we were doing some DocuSigning for a house on your phone. It has been a great transition, and it's the people that make the SEC special and these SEC towns. College Station is a place I’ve been to quite a few times, but it has been even more than I imagined.
   
• It starts at the top. Coach Schlossnagle has been a relentless recruiter over his time. You add somebody like Nate Yeskie, who could’ve been the pitching coach for the Yankees, and he comes over from Oregon State where they won a national championship. Mix in Michael Earley, keeping Jason Hutchins and adding Chuck Box, all of us recruit. All of us have our connections throughout the country, so your phone never stops ringing. It's always buzzing, which is exciting. If there's a player out there, and we put it on our ABR group text, one of us knows somebody that knows that kid. It's easier to track them down. The reception from the older guys — the JUCO guys, the guys in the transfer portal — who have been through it and understand the college career or have been around for two years and know about the development, you can take away some of the fluff of facilities in stuff. Those older kids get it. We got a couple of guys because they want to work with Nate Yeskie, and they understand that he has a track record and a history. An offensive player who knows that Michael Earley was at Arizona State and looks at the guys that he had go in the top two to three rounds over the last three or four years is super impressive. All of these kids are connected because of social media now. They know how to ask the questions. It has been awesome.
   
• It’s all fixed in together. We’re around each other all the time, in the office, talking about each individual position player, what they can do, their attributes that differentiate them from somebody else and what role they can be in. I’m down in the cages all the time with Earley, watching 16 or 17 hitters, and we take guys off to the side to work on something. We're really synced up, and our offices are right next to each other as well. Coach Schlossnagle is going to run the show on the offensive side, and he’s super excited about doing that. He’ll call the signs and the offense, but we’ll all have input in meetings before a weekend series about how we're going to attack these guys. It'll all go together, and then we’ll pump it out into a game and run our offense.
   
• That's the thing that has been amazing: Out of the 11 guys that we brought in for this season, we hit on all of them, make-up-wise. They're all in. Huge leadership qualities. Intangibles. Experience. Things that we needed to infuse into this program.
   
• With somebody like Troy Claunch, and Schlossnagle says all the time that he has learned more from great players than they've learned from me. Being the catching coach and picking Claunch's brain about some of the things he's done in games and some of the things that have worked for him, some of the things that haven't, he has become the head of that catching group. Claunch has taken Chanden Scamardo under his wing, and Chanden has made a big jump in his catching. He has to continue to get better, and we all know about the bat. That's impressive from him. Troy Claunch’s overall demeanor is being that quarterback, being in the bullpen and communicating with those pitchers. He already has the relationship with Yeskie, which is huge as well.
   
• Dylan Rock was a kid that was the first kid I think Schlossnagle and I talked about the minute I got the job because he just torched us when we played them last year. He can really hit. He’s a great kid and has great make-up as well.
   
• I think you're going to see an offensive group that's going to be very veteran. We're not going to have to rely on too many young guys. Those young guys will get their opportunities and work their way in there. Troy Claunch will probably do the bulk of the catching. Jack Moss, who came in from Arizona State, Kole Kaler, who came in from Hawaii, and so on and so forth. That's an exciting thing to know going into this season is that we’re going to be veteran offensively and defensively.
   
• The returning players have given us a huge reception and huge buy-in. There wasn't much of a sell job from any of us to get them on board, other than maybe one or two. Everybody is in. It has been awesome. Our pitchers decided to come back on Dec. 28 on their own. The position players were all back by Jan. 4. They did that on their own.
   
• Kalae Harrison can really defend. If you can't defend at shortstop in this league, it's going to be really tough. I don't think people realize how difficult this league is. Kalae ended up hitting like .230 as a freshman, but in this league, first-rounders hit .260 on average as freshmen. You have your outliers, but he can really defend. He pretty much started every game. When I was at LSU, Jordan Thompson pretty much started every game at shortstop as a freshman last year. It wears on you, and it wears on your body. Kalae has been through that grind once already, and to have him to mix with Kaler in the middle of the field, it's really exciting defensively.
   
• If you take Taylor Smith, Trevor Werner and Logan Britt, those are three of the most tooled-up players as I've been around, and I've been around this league. Now I think a lot of it is getting these guys into strong routines. That mental toughness and that mental routine of not controlling your performance until you learn to control yourself is something that Schlossnagle tells these guys every day.
   
• As far as tools go, Britt is super exciting. It's a 70 arm from the outfield. He can run. He looks the part. It’s mad juice. The most exciting thing I saw from him this fall was a backside homer. A backside double. He's using the entire field.
   
• When you look at Smith, he had that nick-up with his knee, but he'll be ready to catch pretty early into the year. Maybe not the first weekend of the year, but he has an extremely strong arm. He's a pretty good receiver. We didn't get to work too much on the blocking because he got nicked up early in the fall. It's mad juice. The same thing with him is using the entire field and the things Earley has been working on with them. It's not impressive to see guys hit balls over the scoreboard in batting practice. What is impressive is seeing guys hit a 2-iron off the right-center field gap. I asked Taylor if his approach was to hit 15 doubles into the opposite field gap, how many balls do you think he would hit out of the park? He had never thought of it that way, and that's part of what this is: Changing these guys' mindsets and figuring out what's going to work for them daily.
   
• I look back at the experience I had as a player at LSU. In 2009, we won the national championship. The lineup to start the year is never what it is at the end of the year, and I remember that year we had really struggled turning double plays. We ultimately moved Ryan Schimpf, a big leaguer, from second base to left field. We played Austin Nola at shortstop, who is a big-league catcher now. He didn't start one game at shortstop. Mainieri also moved DJ LeMahieu to second base, and now LeMahieu is a gold-glove winner, all-star. That move changed our season, and the reason you feel comfortable making moves like that is because guys like Austin Stracener are showing up every day and working. He's taking every rep that he's getting, whether to be BP or early defensive work, done and, he's working.
   
• The thing that we're all involved in and believe in is that we believe in practicing game-like. Everything that we do is to make it a game. That's the way that we're running the offense, defense, infield, outfield, the whole thing. You're expediting their experience because when he goes out there to shortstop during BP and is taking live off-the-bat and doesn't field one, he's going to feel that because we're going to get into him. This is your game. Take this as your game right now. You never know when your name is going to be called.