One of the underrated baseball conveniences of being in the Denver area is the fact it is only an eight hour drive or a 90 minute flight to Omaha, Nebraska. June in Omaha every year is all about the College World Series and many baseball fans in Colorado make that journey every year. Jack Moss is no different, as he fondly remembers going to Omaha to watch the best college baseball teams in the country play for a national championship when he was a kid. A season ago it was Moss leading Texas A&M at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha as the Aggies were eventually eliminated in the national semi-final.
Moss played his high school baseball at Cherry Creek High School where he won the 2019-2020 Gatorade Colorado Baseball Player of the Year. Given the fact there was not a season in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Moss mentioned his performance at the prestigious Area Code Games the previous summer as a big part of the reason for winning the award. The press release did confirm this, making mention of the fact he made the Baseball America All-Area Code Games Team and was a 2020 Perfect Game Preseason All-American.
After high school Moss spent his first year in college at Arizona State University but the Sun Devils parted ways with head coach Tracy Smith and most of their coaching staff following his freshman season. Moss decided to enter the transfer portal where he wound up following his hitting coach at Arizona State, Michael Earley, to Texas A&M. He was also told by head coach Jim Schlossnagle that Moss was the first recruit he had, as he had accepted the position at Texas A&M just a week or so earlier.
When speaking of his decision to pick Texas A&M, beyond following Coach Earley, he wanted to be a part of something bigger. “I love the idea of building something and being a part of something that wasn’t already established. I believed in myself to help build a culture, a team, and a chemistry that could win. I want to be able to bring my kids back to College Station one day and look at it and just be like ‘your dad really helped this place and this is why it’s so special to me’”
The move from the Pac-12 to the SEC he didn’t feel was a big change in terms of the talent level outside of the depth, where he did state the SEC is much deeper, but the atmosphere is definitely different. It is not uncommon to play in front of 6,000 fans in a mid-week matchup and the weekends can be more than double that. More than just the large crowd sizes he plays in front of, Texas A&M is also home to one of the most impressive crowd chants in all of sports, not just college baseball, with their “Ball Five” chant.
Joining Moss in the starting lineup at College Station is another Colorado native and Legend High school graduate Hank Bard. Moss absolutely takes pride in the fact he shares the field with another player from Colorado in the best conference in the country. “When I was a kid it was kind of a rarity for anybody (from Colorado) to play power five baseball and perform….Everytime I go play I like to think about kids in colorado who are overlooked because of where they are from and people associate it with not good baseball and being a cold weather state. But these past couple years have shown Colorado has really good baseball and there are more and more really good players coming out of there, going to big schools and performing.”
Moss is majoring in Business Administration but when asked what he plans to do with that major if/when his baseball career comes to an end, he chuckled and admitted “I don’t even know myself…I haven’t really been away from baseball for as long as I can remember…ideally I would like to end up in a front office one day.”
While Moss is a 6’5” first baseman, he does not have big home run numbers but is still one of the better hitters in college baseball. He models his game after a couple of guys that the same could have been said about who grew into plenty of power. As a kid he wanted to hit like Atlanta Braves legend Chipper Jones, but as he got older and reached high school, the player he saw his game in most was MLB star Christian Yelich. Currently, Moss is projected to be drafted during the second day of the MLB Draft coming up in Seattle, Washington over the All-Star Break in early July.
THREE QUARTER SLOT 