College baseball’s Bobby Bragan Award to expand and become a national award
The Bobby Bragan Collegiate Slugger Award presented by SR Bats is going national in 2020.
The Fort Worth-based award announced on Wednesday that it’ll accept nominations from all Division I baseball programs in the country this season. Previously, it had been a regional award limited to players from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
“We are very excited about taking the Bobby Bragan Collegiate Slugger Award national,” said Tracy Taylor, executive director of the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation and the Bobby Bragan Collegiate Slugger Award.
“The acceptance of the award and its criteria of athletic achievement, academics and integrity has been outstanding at every step along the way. It is a tribute to Bobby Bragan and his vision and values that this award continues to grow and make its mark on the college baseball landscape.”
The news has been met with praise throughout the college baseball community. Taylor received positive feedback when he went to the American Baseball Coaches Association annual meeting earlier this month, including from TCU’s Jim Schlossnagle.
“This is exciting news for all of baseball, not just college baseball,” Schlossnagle said. “Bobby Bragan was a very near and dear friend of mine. He advised me on many occasions over the years.
“The award embodies everything that Bobby was about — integrity, passion for the game, and the all around development of the player, on and off the field.”
The award’s 2020 watch list will be announced on Feb. 12, just before the start of the college baseball season.
The award started in 2017 as an honor going to the top college hitter in Texas, with Texas Tech’s Hunter Hargrove and Dallas Baptist’s Devlin Granberg being the first two recipients.
It expanded to become a regional award in 2019, which went to Texas Tech’s Josh Jung, who was also the Texas Rangers’ first-round pick in last year’s MLB Draft.
The 2020 winner will be announced in June and honored at a gala in the fall at the Fort Worth Club.
“We are very excited about the future of the Bobby Bragan Collegiate Slugger Award as we expand to make it a national award this year,” said Paul Rogers, this year’s selection committee chairman and long-time president of the DFW chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR).
“We believe it’s a unique award because the selection committee looks not only at how the top collegiate players perform at the plate, but what they do off the field, in the classroom and in their communities. Our goal is to annually celebrate all that is positive and good about college baseball.”
This story was originally published January 22, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
