Konnor Griffin is the middle child of a Division III college softball coach. His parents’ names both start with K, as do both of his brothers’.
“If my mom’s trying to get a hold of me, she’ll probably say my other two brothers’ names first and then get to mine,” he said. “It’s kind of confusing, but everybody in my family has K as a first initial. It’s different, but it makes us unique.”
Griffin has a broad smile and an equally broad Mississippi accent, and from the neck down he’s pure muscle. He’s just preposterously big: 6-foot-4, 205 pounds, though he’d have no trouble convincing me he was being cheated another inch and 20 or 30 pounds. At his size, there’s the potential for plus-plus power. He can also run — he stole more than 80 bases in his final high school season — and hit the mid-90s throwing off a mound.
He’s 18 years old and just graduated high school. He says he can play shortstop at the next level, but can he cook and do laundry?
“I’m trying to learn that stuff right now,” he says. “I know how to wash clothes. I don’t know how to cook great. I’m still working on that.”
I told Griffin that a crockpot is your best friend.
(If you’ll indulge a brief digression: The crockpot is a magical machine that turns random ingredients into tasty, nutritious meals with zero effort or technique required. It’s a must-have for any young person who can barely cook. When I’m president, the government will issue every high school graduate a crockpot when they move out of their parents’ house for the first time.)
Griffin Burkholder, a speedy high school outfielder from Virginia who could go off the board early on Day Two, says that while he wants to improve his culinary repertoire, he’s discovered an affinity for making pasta.
“You can do a variety of pastas that are pretty easy,” he said. “I make a good mac and cheese, make some good vodka pasta. That kind of stuff’s always good and not too hard to make.”
The high school kids I talked to at the Draft Combine are going through two different experiences at once, one universal, the other highly unusual. The first: Graduating high school, moving out of their parents’ houses for the first time, starting college and/or a career. Every teenager (at least every teenager who won’t become a burden to their future roommates and/or romantic partners) learns how to cook and clean. Every teenager has to figure out who they are and what they want out of life, once given the freedom to make their own decisions.
Where Burkholder, Griffin, and their cohort diverge from that universal experience is here, at the draft. They’ve been preparing for this moment for years, and have been picked over by scouts, coaches, and — yes, reporters — along the way.
“I’ve never experienced, like, really going outside and hanging with the guys,” said PJ Morlando, an outfielder from Summerville, South Carolina, who was projected to go 27th overall in Eric Longenhagen’s first mock draft. “I’ve always been so focused on my consistency, being a baseball player and trying to make sure I’m the best version of myself that I could possibly be. I eat, breathe, sleep — I feel like I was placed here on this earth to play baseball. And that’s what I’m going to do until the game literally tells me to take my cleats off.”
Morlando had been looking forward to his week in Arizona for the Combine for weeks. “I’ve been having dreams about it,” he said. The day we talked he showed up at Chase Field at 7:30 a.m., took more than 20 interviews and meetings, and stayed until after 8 p.m.
He also did something unusual for a player projected to go in the first round: He worked out.
Most of the top draft prospects — at least those who aren’t otherwise busy at the College World Series — come to the Combine for meetings, but in 2023, nobody ranked in our top 30 actually threw a bullpen or took batting practice. Morlando did, and he put on a show. He had seven out of the top 30 exit velocities on the day he hit, in a group that included more than a few college hitters.
“I had the highest average exit velo, I think 107,” he said, obviously pleased with himself. Morlando said working out was not only an opportunity to make one last positive impression on the scouts, but it made sense as the capstone of a final season of high school ball.
“I wanted to reopen some eyes,” he said. “I think I’ve slid on a lot of people’s mock drafts, but really I just did it for my own satisfaction, and to show off all the things I’ve been working on.”
The combination workout/press junket is not unlike the showcases that these kids have gone through dozens of times, but Morlando says that while the atmosphere at the Combine was more laid-back, the stakes are high.
“This is where they get to see if you’re just a showcase guy or if you’re a true player,” he said. “That’s why all these meetings are so important. They get to break you down and try to get to know you.”
But it’s not like teams don’t already know these kids inside and out.
Griffin said the thing that surprised him most about the draft process was the extent to which scouts had examined his entire life, both on and off the field. “I played basketball growing up, and they reached out to my old basketball coach, just to give an example,” he said. “They’re making sure you’re acting right in school, out of school. They want all the information. They try to find red flags. If you can just limit how many red flags they can find, that’s better.”
In order to boost his draft stock, the Mississippi native also did something most high schoolers would never even dream of considering: He reclassified, which is sports jargon for graduating high school a year early.
“I was an older kid for the ’25 class, so I was at the top of the class, but I wanted to push myself more. I wanted to compete against older guys,” he said. Griffin said he was challenged more after going up a grade, which helped him grow not just athletically but personally. But he also had to cram three years of high school into two. He said he’d racked up some high school credits while taking honors classes at a public middle school before he transferred to the private Jackson Prep.
“When I started to reclass, I was ahead just a little bit, but I still had to take 10th and 11th grade classes my junior year, and then 11th and 12th grade classes my senior year,” he said. “So for two years, it was a lot of work. But it was good. It showed that I’m mature. I can handle that workload and still get my stuff done on the field.”
Plus, instead of going into the draft as a 19-year-old high school senior, he’s now one of the younger high school prospects. Griffin is in the running to be the first high school player picked; one of the other candidates for that distinction is Bryce Rainer, a shortstop from Harvard-Westlake School in California. Harvard-Westlake is most famous in baseball circles for briefly fielding a rotation of Lucas Giolito, Max Fried, and Jack Flaherty, but it’s also a popular prep school for the children of the rich and famous in Los Angeles.
“I think I’m lucky to go to a school where there’s a lot of fame, a lot of attention,” Rainer said. “There’s lots of celebrities. So if I’m being honest with you, I honestly had — I can’t say normal, because it’s not normal — the regular high school experience for the most part.”
That’s saying something, because Rainer’s athletic fame has a long tail. As a freshman, he threw a complete game to get Harvard-Westlake into a sectional final, a feat that earned him headlines in the Los Angeles Times at the age of 15. None of the high schoolers I talked to at the Combine seemed to embrace social media and celebrity the way previous top picks like Druw Jones and Max Clark have — each had a different level of enthusiasm for the celebrity aspect of professional baseball, and each was wary, in his own way, of the attention they’re about to receive.
But of the three potential first-rounders, Rainer seemed the most jaded about fame, perhaps because of the unusual academic environment he came up through.
“I haven’t really tried to build too much of a platform. I’ve got a decent following on Instagram, but I’ve got, like three posts, so it’s not like I’m on it too much,” he said. (Rainer has 14,500 followers. Morlando has 23,400, Griffin 32,400. Clark has 416,000.) “I have TikTok and Snapchat and all that, but I don’t really like it too much. The baseball side of it will take care of things, and if people want to follow me for that, awesome. But I’m not gonna try to be someone who I’m not. I’m just not that type of man.”
Nevertheless, a five-figure Instagram follower count on three posts is a lot of attention, a level of notoriety apparently accessible only to baseball players and especially cute kittens. As much as these high school prospects lean on their families, coaches, and friends for support, it helps to have someone around who can not only empathize but understand firsthand what they’re going through.
Griffin says he’s leaned on his father, who’s been on the other side of the recruiting process for his job. Rainer and Morlando both came to the Combine with teammates from their high school. Rainer’s Harvard-Westlake teammate, Duncan Marsten, is a right-handed pitcher who could go on Day Two. Morlando played at Summerville High School with Carson Messina, also a right-handed pitcher, who’s going through the draft process. Messina’s older brother, Cole, is an All-America catcher at the University of South Carolina, and should go off the board in the first few rounds himself.
“It’s really cool to have that, Morlando said. “Me and Carson played on the same summer ball teams too, so our whole summer ball team’s here participating in this event. I guess you could say this is another place where all of our paths cross.”
“Honestly, just with everything, it’s cool to be able to talk to someone who’s in the same position I’m in,” Rainer said. “There definitely have been times where you can’t really bring up the same issues with some of your friends as you can with Duncan, so it’s been very nice.”
One of the unique challenges of being a high school prospect is deciding not just where to go to college, but whether to go to college. Griffin is committed to LSU and Rainer to Texas, though both of them are expected to go off the board so early it’s unlikely that either one will make it to freshman orientation. Morlando is probably, but not definitely, in the same boat as a late-first-round prospect. If he drops, he could end up playing with Carson Messina again, at the University of South Carolina. (Being a South Carolina alum myself, I gave Morlando an enthusiastic sales pitch, but I don’t think I moved the needle at all.) Burkholder has a spot waiting at West Virginia if the draft doesn’t work out, while Marsten is committed to Wake Forest.
Morlando said he’s tried to introduce himself to the college players he’s met through the draft process and pump them for useful information. Burkholder has sought advice from West Virginia’s outgoing star, JJ Wetherholt. Griffin has a hilariously sunny outlook on this difficult decision.
“It’s been fun. It shows all the hard work that I put in,” he said. “It’s all paying off. I can either go to LSU and play SEC ball, or go to professional ball. I have two great options ahead of me.”
And it’s true; either Griffin’s going to be a millionaire in the next few weeks, or — in an absolute worst-case scenario — he’s going to play for one of the best college teams in the country and likely challenge for a national championship before re-entering the draft in three years.
The top of the draft has gotten much more college-heavy since the pandemic. The combination of fewer rounds, NIL money, and the autonomy afforded by the transfer portal has made college baseball a much more attractive option for top high school prospects. The influx of data in the college game has raised the standard of play and of player development. But Morlando thinks the transfer portal actually makes college a less attractive option for top high school prospects.
“That’s taken away from a lot of the guys who were freshmen who had a chance to start. They’re getting senior transfers in,” Morlando said. “So it’s tough for a guy like me. I’m gonna work my tail off no matter what, but it’s going to be tough for us to decide on pro or college.”
Even with all of this scrutiny and the tough decisions ahead, one of the biggest markers of the passage of time for these high school players has been the fact that they’re now seeing younger players look up to them.
“I love that. I do lessons with kids back in my hometown. I also work some prep baseball camps that they run at my high school. I just try to give back, because a lot of people helped me become the player I am today,” Griffin said. “I remember when I was a younger kid, trying to learn from the players I looked up to, so now, knowing that I can give back, it’s a cool feeling. I just try to give them as much knowledge as I can.”
Morlando mentioned his experience at the Perfect Game national showcase, where he said he’d tried to do the bare minimum of off-field media engagements, but he ended up talking to younger kids for two hours about his experience on the showcase circuit and the national team, and tried to pass on lessons he’d learned along the way.
“It was awesome, because I got to teach the younger generation,” he said. “I really hope they can take that into their lives, or when they’re here one day I hope they can be a bit more relaxed and enjoy it.”
“I know how important those guys were to me when I was coming up, and motivating me to be my best and work as hard as they work to get into that spot,” Burkholder said, mentioning Wetherholt and University of North Carolina outfielder Casey Cook as players he’d looked up to. “If I can motivate kids to work hard and try to reach their goals like I did, and also if I can motivate them to be great people off the field too, treating people with respect… I’m really trying to pass that along, and it’s been a great feeling to be that person for younger kids, just as the older kids were for me.”
Being on the other side of the teaching relationship, or the mentor-student relationship, allows these players to see their entire developmental paths laid out. (“It also makes you feel really old,” Morlando said.”)
The next step is a big one, but it’s only a step.
“The draft is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but my end goal isn’t the draft,” Rainer said. “Like, my life is going to change. Obviously life-changing money, moving out, and it is completely different. I am myself. I’m going to try to be the same person.”
