Tobias Baseball Training Camp and Lassiter chosen by the NY Yankees…..

I spent last evening at the TOBIAS Baseball Training Camp which operates from the Southeast Guilford baseball comlpex on Southeast Guilford School Road.

Last night I took the hunch that the camp would be in session and when I arrived Josh Tobias and his dad Andrew Tobias were hitting in the cage at SEG. This was supposed to a light workout night but Josh was not taking it easy as he went through the strenuous and continuous drills.

Andrew Tobais has been pushing his son Josh hard over the past several years and it is paying off. Josh just completed his freshman year at Southeast Guilford and he was named to the Mid-Piedmont 3-A All-Conference baseball team. Josh the freshman, joined five SEG seniors on the the all-conference squad. Justin Venable, Cam Cockman, Austin Moyer, Jeff Medley, and Pat Nisbett were also selected and Moyer was named the Conference-Player-of-the-Year after Cockman won the award last season.(2007)

Josh Tobias won the Top Defensive Player award for the SEG Falcons at last Friday night’s awards banquet. Tobias and Venable were two of the top hitters per average in the state this past season while playing for the Falcons.

Tobias is currently playing for the Eastern Randolph Post 81 American Legion team headed up by a man we highlighted here last year at GREENSBOROSports.com, Grady Lawson. Post 81 will be playing at Troy/Montgomery County on Saturday, at Kernersville next Tuesday, and then they’ll be back home at ER again next Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday versus Rowan County, Burlington, and Surry County.

We spent about two and half hours working last night at the TOBIAS Training Camp with hitting in the cage, handling slow toss ground balls, batting practice off the Tee, batting practice with LIVE pitching, and then fielding hard-hit ground balls to close out the night. I got the biggest part of my workout in while I was shagging those balls in the outfield. Josh must have hit 500-750 of them out there to me and many of them did not go to me and that’s what kept me running.

One right after the other those balls just coming and if you can keep up it turns out to be a major workout. There is no way to keep up, but I did try a few back-hand catches of the grounders and that is tougher than it looks. The Grasshoppers and JT make those catches look easy, but I found it to be much harder than it appears.

I hope to return to the TOBIAS Baseball Training Camp a few more times this summer and I’ll say I was very impressed with the workouts that Josh and Andrew are putting in. I was also very impressed with Josh’s bat speed and his bat strength and they do use weighted gloves during certain drills while hitting in the cage. There’s an open invitation for anyone who wants to the attend the camp, just look for the baseball van parked beside the ball field at Southeast Guilford.

The word on Garrison Lassiter, another young man that we profiled here at GREENSBOROSports.com back in 2007:
When Garrison Lassiter dropped all the way to the 27th round in last weekend’s Major League Baseball Draft before being selected by the New York Yankees, many were shocked.

Lassiter had emerged as one of the top young shortstop prospects in the draft after playing on the USA Junior National team last summer and impressing scouts throughout this spring at West Forsyth.

Twenty-seventh round? Some figured Lassiter to be taken by no later than the fourth or fifth round.

But baseball’s draft is far more complex than its NFL and NBA counterparts. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, especially concerning players drafted straight out of high school.

Teams must weigh the risks of drafting a player straight out of high school only to see him enroll in college instead, in what would result in a wasted pick. Players must decide whether they are ready to bypass college, sign immediately and head straight to the minor leagues, or go to college and not be eligible for the draft again for three more years.

That’s apparently what has happened in this case. So shortly — after he returns from playing in the North-South All-Star Game in Myrtle Beach on Friday — Lassiter will have to make the decision of a lifetime. Should he sign a lucrative contract with the Yankees, or turn down the money and play college ball at North Carolina, where he has already signed a letter of intent?

Lassiter’s father, Cliff, talked about the situation while Garrison was enjoying a week of beach time, away from the fishbowl that he has been in much of the spring under the watchful eyes of scouts.

Other teams balked at the dollar figure that Lassiter established that would prompt him to skip college. The Yankees didn’t, but played the hunch that everyone else would consider Lassiter a “signability issue,” and waited until the late rounds to take him so that they could draft others.

“We put a number out there that we stuck by as a family,” Cliff Lassiter said.(Word is they are talking a minimum of one million dollars for the signing bonus)…..
*****Lassiter info from John Delong at the Winston-Salem Journal and journalnow.com*****

2 thoughts on “Tobias Baseball Training Camp and Lassiter chosen by the NY Yankees…..

  1. Andy can you give us any updates on the PP Team? Haven’t seen or heard anything about them this week………wins or losses? Do you have a schedule for them this weekend, I would to love to finally get out and see them play if they are in town.

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