Podcast: Prep legend Rhett Wiseman talks problems with baseball

Rhett Wiseman was a member of the 2014 Vanderbilt national championship team. (Getty Images)

The fact that Rhett Wiseman isn’t playing baseball anymore at the age of 28 speaks to the destruction of the pandemic to the sport.

Wiseman, one of the greatest prep school players in New England history, earned Louisville Slugger All-American honors at BB&N in 2012. His college career was equally successful; he won a national championship and played in another College World Series before leaving Vanderbilt after three years in 2015. He got drafted in the third round of the 2015 MLB Draft by the Washington Nationals, who signed him for $554,100.

As a minor leaguer, he earned Carolina League All-Star honors in 2018 and Eastern League All-Star honors in 2019. The pandemic hit in 2020, and Wiseman’s was over by the end of 2021.

On The Base Path Podcast, he talks about the problems with baseball that have stemmed from the pandemic, starting with the end of many promising careers of minor leaguers like him.

“One of the things that I’ve come to learn about minor league baseball and the decisions that are made is that it’s very easy to predict what’s going to happen,” Wiseman said. “All you have to do is think about what is the right thing and common-sense thing to do, and then choose the exact opposite of that.”

Wiseman is currently living in Nashville, Tenn., within a mile of the university that has become a choice school for the most elite New England prospects. He was a part of the Vandy program during the pinnacle of the SEC school’s era under coach Tim Corbin.

Wiseman is not sure a team like that — one that won 200 games over four seasons — could exist in today’s post-pandemic baseball environment, where 3,000-plus athletes a year enter the NCAA Transfer Portal.

“I think it’s shameful that the NCAA would allow that,” Wiseman said. “They have totally bent the knee and catered to the kind of world that we live in now, which is, if you don’t like it, that’s OK. You can leave and find something better. And you’re the best. You don’t ever have to work for anything. That’s the culture that we kind of live in right now, which is sad.”

Listen to the entire podcast to hear more about Wiseman’s baseball career — and his blossoming career as a professional poker player.

The New England Baseball Journal podcast is brought to you by the University of Nebraska High School.

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